Ikh Nart - Mars on Earth

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After Hustai National Park my plan was to go to the Ikh Nartiin Chuulu Nature Reserve east of Ulan Baatar. It has one of the highest populations of Pallas' cats so there's as good a chance there of seeing one as anywhere. It is also the Mongolian stronghold for argali. There are argali at Hustai as well, but when I was there I was told there were only six or seven of them in the park so I didn't try looking (apparently there are no ibex at Hustai either, despite it being on their checklist and website). There are two camps at Ikh Nart, one catering pretty much solely to Mongolians and Chinese, and the other run by Nomadic Journeys and catering mainly to Western tourists. Obviously the latter is the more expensive, but from what I had read it was in a better location for argali and other large mammals so I thought I'd at least go to the Nomadic Journeys office and find out if I could strike a deal. I couldn't, but three full days was US$350 including all meals and transport (seven hours by train and an hour by van to get there) and so I took it because it wasn't too bad. I asked if it was cheaper if I took all my own food, like at Hustai, but they said they didn't do that. Ikh Nart is on the interface of the Gobi steppe and the Gobi desert, so there's a good mix of mammals there. It also has a wide temperature range, from +43 degrees Celsius in summer down to minus 40 degrees Celsius in winter. It is now summer....

Opposite the Nomadic Journeys office is the Ulan Baatar Natural History Museum. I was looking forward to seeing this because Mongolia is famous for its dinosaur deposits and there are some good displays here. Also the palaeontologist most famous for work in Mongolia is Roy Chapman Andrews, and allegedly it was he on whom George Lucas modelled Indiana Jones! I, of course, am allegedly modelled on Indiana Jones so it makes a nice circle. Unfortunately the museum has been closed indefinitely because the building is structurally unsound.

I also took a walk to the Selbe River in the south of town. On the city map it looks like a nice windy river lined with trees, so I thought it would be good for some birding. In fact it is more like a weedy canal in the bad part of town. The only birds I saw were tree sparrows, a magpie and great cormorants.

The next morning I took the 9.30 train to a little mining town called Shivee Gobi. Really there's just a platform where the train stops, the town itself being maybe ten kilometres away. It would be a bit of a walk if you hadn't arranged a pick-up at the platform and were just hoping to catch a ride from someone in town. Catching the train with me was a local guy called Tsolmon who spoke good English. At first I thought he was another visitor, but it turned out he was a guide from the company sent along to accompany me. That turned out to be fortunate because nobody else at the camp spoke English! On the drive from Shivee Gobi to the camp we saw a couple of argali (a type of wild sheep) on the road, so that was easy. We also passed the remains of a car spread across the ground. The driver said something in Mongolian to Tsolmon and he translated for me, saying that if I was out walking in that area to be careful because there are landmines! That wasn't in the brochure!! Apparently the Russians came through here in the 1970s and mined the whole area, and the landmines are still there. I doubt there are any in the reserve itself, but I've still never been anywhere where when I'm spotlighting at night I need to worry about stepping on a landmine! Certainly not something I had associated with Mongolia!

The landscape is very different to Hustai, although still open steppe country. Around Shivee Gobi the grassland is as flat as a chessboard, and only as you get nearer to the reserve does it start to become a bit more undulating, with numerous rock outcrops. It never really becomes properly hilly like at Hustai, and the outcrops are quite different. At Hustai they are scattered individual piles, looking like someone has just dumped piles of rocks here and there. At Ikh Nart there are outcrops everywhere, and they are more moulded, as if a giant rock-heating blowtorch has been run over top to melt the rocks together. They don't have all the deep cavities and tunnels through the piles like at Hustai, just clefts and nooks. It is very disorientating walking through them because you only need to walk for ten minutes and you can't tell where you've come from. During the day I used my shadow to tell direction, and at night the stars, so I never got lost (a regular boy scout, I am). It took me a while to figure out what the landscape reminded me of, but it is pictures I've seen of the American Badlands (another famous dinosaur area). It was also very reminiscent of Mars, if you tinted it all red, but it would have to be H.G. Wells' Mars because of all the grass and scraggly vegetation.

It's a bit hard to write about the camp because the area is great, the staff were very friendly and tried to be helpful, but the whole organisation is shambolic, starting at the central office itself in Ulan Baatar. It's hard to describe the issues because they are so varied and numerous, but for a tourist outfit for which you're paying quite a bit of money you do expect something more, well, organised. A lot of the problems are rather minor and could be ignored but there are so many minor problems that they all add up to leave visitors very disgruntled. A couple of other guests there left under an extremely black cloud. Good points: very good food, and unlike Hustai the van to be driven around the park was free (if you recall the transport within Hustai was US$1 per kilometre).

I hadn't seen any pikas at Hustai so I guess I was just in the wrong area. At Ikh Nart, as soon as I arrived at the camp I saw about a dozen in the outcrops directly around the gers. They were so common that where-ever you were if you pointed your binoculars at any outcrop there would be a 99.9% chance of having at least one pika in the view. Really neat animals, like a giant mouse but with enormous out-of-proportion ears. Although they look like rodents they are actually lagomorphs, related to rabbits and hares, and now having seen them in real life I was surprised how rabbit-like the face is, even if the ears are round instead of pointy. They usually are seen just sitting on sentry-duty on tops of rocks, but they also go scurrying around on the grass, collecting mouthfuls of it to take back to their burrows. They pack it all in there and whenever there's any hint of sun they drag it all out to dry into hay, and that is what they eat during the winter. The pikas I didn't see at Hustai are Daurian pikas; the ones at Ikh Nart are called Pallas' pika.

Back in the heyday of natural history, intrepid men went off on solo trips to far-flung parts of the world for months or years at a time, basically going to discover new animals and plants. The earlier ones were usually missionaries or military men, but the later ones were often under the hire of museums and private collectors. I've mentioned Colonel Przewalski already, and later I may mention the missionary Armand David, but one of the proper scientists was the German zoologist Peter Simon Pallas who lived and studied in Russia in the late 1700s. Pallas undertook many scientific expeditions and discovered a number of new animals, plants and even minerals (Pallasite is named after him). As I've said, I was looking for Pallas' cat, but while at Ikh Nart I saw Pallas' pika, Pallas' leaf-warbler, and Pallas' sandgrouse.

When I arrived at the camp, there were already three other people there, a French guy living in the UK and two Belgian journalists. I don't think Ikh Nart gets many more than that at a time. It isn't exactly on the tourist circuit for Mongolia. The weather was warm and completely still. After dark I went out spot-lighting wearing a t-shirt, whereas at Hustai I had been wearing four layers, a scarf and gloves at night! I quickly found some five-toed jerboas bouncing around the camp area, but the night was cut short by approaching clouds and lightning on the horizon so I thought it prudent to return to my ger. The mammal list for Ikh Nart which I'd prepared before leaving New Zealand was from an extensive survey published in 2006. The only species of five-toed jerboa (Allactaga) they found during trapping was the Mongolian five-toed jerboa A. sibirica, but in a booklet I bought at Hustai there is also listed the Gobi jerboa Allactaga bullata. I think the survey would have found those, unless they are just really rare there, so I have a suspicion that someone made the assumption that because the reserve is on the Gobi the Allactaga they saw must be Gobi jerboas and that's how it got on the list. But I don't know for sure, and I also don't know how (or even if it is possible) to tell the two species apart by torch-light, so I have left them in my notes as just “Allactaga sp.”

The next morning the others were going driving for animals, so I went along. Mammaling and birding don't go together very well. Driving along the dirt road there were heaps of larks going every which way (most or all would have been horned larks which were very very common; I'm used to calling these shore larks but that seems like a silly name when you're in such an arid landscape so I have decided to change to horned lark). There were some smaller birds sighted briefly as well, but nothing could be identified. However there were a few big birds as well (lots of cinereous vultures for example) and we saw groups of argali twice and Siberian ibex once. All the big animals here are extremely wary. As soon as they see the van they disappear – not just over to the other side of the outcrop, but over the outcrop and then as fast as they can towards the horizon, getting as much distance as possible between them and us. I managed a few shots of argali but never got a photo of ibex. I think that behaviour has to be due to poaching, for which Ikh Nart has a serious problem. The nearby mining town I reckon plays a big part in this. The other major problem here is predation by domestic dogs. Apparently packs of dogs roam the reserve hunting the wild animals. Because Ikh Nart is a Nature Reserve and not a National Park there are no restrictions on livestock (the dogs are kept to protect the gers and herds from wolves, and almost everything I've read about Mongolia makes mention of the ferocity of the dogs). I was constantly seeing herds of horses, cows, sheep and goats. The latter two in particular obviously compete directly with the argali and ibex. I was never comfortable out here at night because of the dogs. I never actually saw or heard any but it was always on my mind that if I met a pack at night in open country an hour from the camp....well, it might not end well for me!

In the afternoon the others were going to the research camp in the middle of the reserve. I was interested in finding out if anyone there was doing anything with Pallas' cats but it turned out that it was the sort of research where they do general surveys using Earthwatch volunteers. Because there was a little group of us the volunteers assumed we were a “tour group” and looked down their superior saving-the-planet noses at us. The woman in charge was little better. Now I know “tourists” don't generally contain the brightest of people so I can understand dumbing things down, but it should be obvious when the person you're talking to actually does know a thing or two, and that's when you should stop treating them as if they are borderline retarded! So not the greatest of impressions there. They did have a long-eared hedgehog in a trap which they had caught the night before, attached a transmitter to, and were going to release that night. I mentioned that they really shouldn't be giving it a saucer of milk because hedgehogs can't digest cow's milk and it just makes them sick, but they didn't seem to worry (after all, what does a tourist know!). Later I was told that most of the hedgehogs they tag die not long after release.

Once again, spot-lighting at night didn't last long. It had been windy all day – the sort of chilling wind like at Hustai – and I was tired and frankly couldn't get any motivation so I packed it in after just a couple of hours having seen only five-toed jerboas and Mongolian three-toed jerboas (the latter one was a new species for me, and they were common around the camp).

Apart for the argali and ibex, the other large animals I wanted to try and see at Ikh Nart were the two species of Mongolian gazelles and the Asiatic wild ass. They all occur seasonally in the reserve so I wasn't sure if I would see them or not. The driver reckoned he knew where the gazelles would be, but apparently I wouldn't see the asses because “they run too fast” which I took to mean that they disappear before you you even know they are there. On the second morning the French guy and I went gazelle hunting. Of gazelles we saw not a sign, but we did find a Siberian pit-viper (Agkistrodon halys) which I guess counts for something. Better animal-watching results were at a small “lake” we were taken to. I'm not sure the French guy was that enamoured about looking at waders but I was (sort of). The lake was about a hundred square metres, more of a shrinking pool than anything, but I added quite a few birds to my Mongolian list. It was quite good the pond was so small actually because I could skirt right around it and therefore managed to identify almost every single wader on there (which for me is an achievement!). In the middle were a few common greenshanks and about ten common redshanks, a wood sandpiper, about a dozen curlew sandpipers, and a few little weeny ones which must have been some kind of stint (they were the only ones I couldn't see well enough to ID). Around the edges with the grey and white wagtails were a flock of nothern lapwings, a ruddy turnstone, some little ringed plovers and (best of all) a common snipe. I've always wanted to see a snipe and I was amazed how much smaller it was than I had been expecting (of course that is a common reaction when seeing animals for the first time). A really cool bird is the snipe.

The night was perfect – warm and windless – but of Pallas' cats not a sign. I had been inspired (or perhaps frustrated) because I had read in the log-book that a birder had seen a Pallas' cat just one month before I was there. I gave it a good shot, but lots of jerboas, a couple of Tolai hares and the eye-shine from a distant fox was the lot for the night. After I had spotted the fox it started calling. I liked the sound of wolves at Hustai but the fox call is just dead creepy when out alone at night!

The other three guests and Tsolmon had all left that evening to get the train back to Ulan Baatar (it leaves at midnight!), so the next day I was alone in the camp apart for the driver and the cook. I was told it had snowed in the city that day. Did I mention that Ulan Baatar is the coldest capital city in the world? And did I mention that it is currently summer? Because I was alone now, and I'd already seen the argali and ibex and failed at gazelle, I used this day to just go walking for birds. The previous days the birding had been rather incidental, although I had added some new ones to the trip list (like horned lark, rock sparrow, olive-backed pipit, upland buzzard and saker falcon). I'd seen a few kestrels too but never close enough to tell if they were lesser or common kestrels. I had some of the same problems I had at Hustai (open country meant the birds weren't often close enough for me to tell what they were!) but I did discover that the wheatears were mostly desert wheatears! I had seen a northern wheatear on my first day and after that had assumed all the ones I was seeing in passing were the same species, but today on foot I actually got to look at them properly. Funny thing but I never saw any pied wheatears which are supposed to be one of the commonest birds there. Three times flocks of twenty to thirty Pallas' sandgrouse flew past (really noisy in flight!). A female Siberian rubythroat had me musing over why I never seem to see male birds (you know, the pretty ones!) but I did see a male later in the day so that was good. A puzzler was the thrushy sort of bird which was one of the most skulking things I've seen in a while, but I got it in the end as an eye-browed thrush (or rather two eye-browed thrushes because I saw another one later as well). Lots of toad-headed agamas too, mostly babies, but the adults are beautiful. I even found some fresh Pallas' cat droppings! I searched the surrounding outcrops but there were few crevices for it to be hidden in and it wasn't in any of the ones I could find.

Early morning had been calm but by mid-morning the strong wind had returned (but a warm wind this time, not cold) and the birds all seemed to vanish. I went back to camp about 3pm and thought I'd have a little lie down. Next thing I know there's a knock on the door and it's the driver saying it is dinner time! He had brought two more people from the train, who would be the last guests for the season because the camp was closing up on the 15 September (a few days hence). Unfortunately for them, I was leaving that night for the midnight train and so there was nobody else there who spoke English. They weren't very impressed! Before I left I gave them a quick run-down on how things worked and hoped they coped!!

So no Pallas' cat. I've only got a few more days in Mongolia, but there is still some slim hope for the next country I'll be in. I did see the eye-shine from one (probably) at Hustai which is actually more than I had expected!

In case you haven't noticed I have got some photos uploaded to this and the previous entries. Enjoy.

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Photos

Argali (Ovis ammon) running
how they are normally seen...