This just in from Tom and his team in Mongolia: “Aztai” is the first snow leopard to wear a GPS collar as part of our long-term ecological study. If you would like to hear it from Orjan’s perspective (Orjan is a Swedish PhD student who bought a one-way ticket to Mongolia), click HERE.
In the early morning of 19 August a young adult male snow leopard was fitted with a GPS collar in Mongolia’s South Gobi Province as part of a new long-term ecological study of the rare and endangered species.
The snow leopard, which the research team named Aztai (meaning “Lucky” in Mongolian) is 36.5 kg (80 lb). In less than an hour the collar was attached, and the handsome cat retreated silently back into the mountains. Aztai hails from the Gobi Desert, which supports one of the richest populations of snow leopards in Mongolia, a country which itself boasts the second highest number of the rare cats anywhere in their vast Asian range.
The collar is designed to collect highly accurate locations for the cat every nine hours using a GPS unit embedded in the collar, and then immediately relay the data to researchers via the Globalstar satellite phone system. This is the first time such technology has been utilized in the study of these endangered cats. The collar is programmed to operate for 13 months before it automatically opens and falls off. Researchers will then retrieve the collar and download any data that was not successfully uplinked via satellite phone.