briar rose

bigcatwildcat:

Devekh Is Off the Air

We have lost contact with the GPS collar worn by Devekh, the male snow leopard we had been tracking in Mongolia’s South Gobi – most likely due to the collar’s battery running out of steam. For the first time in several years, we’re therefore not currently tracking any cats.

Dr. Koustubh Sharma, our Senior Regional Ecologist who leads the collaring project in Mongolia, has summarized the most important insights we’ve been able to gain about Devekh in the last years:

We photographed Devekh for the first time in the summer of 2009 as a nervous male scuttling through scraping sites.

He was subsequently collared in 2010 but the old collar did not function well and we soon lost contact with him.

Devekh was collared again in the spring of 2013, by when he had grown significantly in size and also confidence. In 2013, he became our most photographed cat during the annual summer camera trapping.

continue reading