Instant action (Khan-uul, Thursday, July 8, 2004)
We trapped and marked with a "backpack" the first Mongolian Black stork approximately 50 km from Ulaan Baatar this afternoon. We do not know its sex yet; it will probably be a male and in that case we would name him Chinggiz.
The trapping of the first stork here in Mongolia was strikingly quick, about twenty hours after we all fully equipped arrived her to the steppe near Tuul river. The stork nest, that Gomboo found already before our arrival, is around 12 meters high at the cliff. We had to solve a number of problems - how to get to the nest, how to fasten the trapping device, how to start it etc. Moreover, we worried about the watchfulness of local steppe storks. But we made it finally; at noon of local time, "our" first Mongolian stork was already flying away with transmitter on its back.
Now we are going to monitor him for a while - there is no doubt it will be interesting to find out where and what the storks here in the steppe hunt. Then again we are going to verify other nesting places; we want to mark two Black storks in all here in Mongolia.