Mammal-watching Trip across Central and Western Mongolia (2019 Aug 4-30)
Trip report posted on my website here and PDF version available there or directly here.
This four-week road-trip covered 5,300 km across Central and Western Mongolia (excluding the southern Gobi). Key sites visited were Hustai NP, Boon Tsagaan Nuur, Sharga, Gobi B SPA, Jargalant Uul, Tavan Bogd NP, Khurgas Nuur area and the Khangai Mountains. The focus was on mammals and we identified 44 species, with another two heard (Lynx and Wolf). Some of the bats seen and recorded have yet to be identified. Rodents were surprisingly scarce on some nights and we only had two mustelids. Small-mammal highlights included Steppe Zokor, Zaisan Mole Vole, Grey Marmot, Five-toed Pygmy Jerboa and Thick-tailed Pygmy Jerboa.
Paul Carter (trip with Kevin Bryan, Ian Thompson, Sjef Ollers and Anja Palmans)
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CharlesHood
An enviable list and an outstanding report: this document sets the standard for how to write a trip report! (Attention, Phil Telfer.)
For field guides, the second edition of the English-Mongolian language field guide to mammals is sometimes available from a German distributor. I had no luck in getting my order filled but others have gotten it that way. In August 2019, on my trip with Wise Birding we never found a copy for sale anywhere in-country. (Indeed, it is hard to see in all of North America. Through a search using inter-library loan databases, I found only one copy in all the university libraries across the USA… Stanford owns a copy of the first edition.)
For the second edition, it seems that the Mongolian ID info disagrees with the English-language translations, and at least for some of the jerboas, the plates seem to be reversed. If somebody is planning a big trip and if you own the Handbook of Mammals of World, it might be a long but useful project to create a new document based on photocopied or scanned plates and take that with you.
I wonder how many individual species have collectively been reported on this website? Whatever the number is, this great report certain extends the total “mammal watching dot com” list.
Charles Hood