Satellite collar of snow leopard recovered

Daily Times

By Manzoor Ali Shah
 

PESHAWAR: Researchers have found a satellite collar, which dropped off the neck of a snow leopard in Chitral district in January this year, Daily Times learnt on Tuesday.

The search for the Global Positioning System (GPS) collar was on since then.

Researchers told Daily Times that the GPS which had records of the movements of the snow leopard and its ecology across the Pak-Afghan border was lying inside a narrow crack of a deep crevice in the mountainous region of Shali Gol area, some 15 kilometres from Chitral town, on Monday.

The researchers led by Jaffaruddin, a wildlife biologist, employed a ground tracking system through VHF (very high frequency) receiver to detect signals coming from VHF Beacon Transmitter.

He said that when they were at about one square kilometre from the collar site, the high altitude cliffs, rough terrain and narrow and deep gorges of Hindu Kush acted as parabolic mirror and beamed the signal to an opposite side valley.

“It was a challenge as we were already experiencing the problem of permanent errors in the data received from the satellite. After experiments we used an FM radio transmitter to intercept the collar’s signals at the distance of about 15-30 square feet from the collar and this worked and we were able to locate the exact position of the collar,” he said.

The next phase is to download and decode the data stored in the data log memory of the collar, as it will provide researchers with an unprecedented amount of precise data on snow leopard movements and habitat use, he said.

“It was a really tough and painstaking assignment as this was the first ever such attempt,” he said.

The female snow leopard was collared with a GPS-fitted device in November 2006 in the Chitral Gol National Park, in order to learn more about the cat, which is considered one of the most elusive animals on the planet.

The snow leopard was named as Bayad Kohsar or In the Memory of Mountains, to honour the death of the conservationists perished in a helicopter crash in September 2006 in Nepal, while they were returning from a ceremony to hand over the Kanchenjunga conservation area from the government to the local community.

The snow leopard collaring project is a joint attempt of Snow Leopard Trust (SLT), the NWFP Wildlife Department and World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Pakistan to peek into the life of this elusive cat and the project plans to collar five more cats in the Chitral district.