An apology to Uzma (Wednesday, April 13, 2005)
Mongolian storks Chingiz and Tuya stopped during their return journey in the same area: the moorlands near Zoige at Tibetan table. Unfortunately, the monitoring of their return journey lies in she shadow of Altynai's death.
Wherever I go I praise WWF-Pakistan. The cooperation of our Pakistani friends is really exemplary. Uzma Khan (which I have to apologize to as I branded her as a man last time) has already visited the places of Altynai's last locations. Here is a brief of her e-mail:
"We went looking for Altynai on Friday April 8 2005. The last coordinates of the black stork were about 21 km away from Kot Addu, where we were also joined the Punjab Wildlife Department staff from the Muzaffarabad office. We walked about a kilometre to reach the spot and spread out from there to look for any sign of the bird or the transmitter, we searched an area of about 10-15 acres. We did not find any sign of the bird or the transmitter, just close to the GPS point, you had sent, there was a burrow seemed like that of a fox or jackal, the local community person even put his hand inside, but it seemed to have been abandoned and there was a spider web inside. The nearest community was another 700 metres away and comprised of just two houses. We went there as a group of three people and inquired, unfortunately they had not seen the bird, they are very small scale farmers and said that they do not have any weapons and are not into hunting."
In no time, Salman Ashraf sent this message: "I guess the only way left is to search through aerial sortie using VHF yagi antenna. Based on my conversation with Richard, I talked with the local GPS and radio frequency based vehicle tracking company but they are using UHF frequency to locate their stolen vehicles."
Even if it does not look well at the moment, I believe we will hear about Altynai's destiny some more. The next attempt to find her transmitter will be at the end of next week, this time at the presence of Ondrej Abonyi who is leaving for Pakistan on Tuesday.