The plants begin to consume your mind, you walk with your eyes constantly scanning the ground for the tracks of who may have been here before you. There’s this feeling when you began to understand an ecosystem. It is almost as is you start to move through these spaces as if you are one with it, rather than above it.
Conservation is one language. To speak it is to approach the natural landscape through a valuable scientific lens. But we cannot account for the words our language misses. The cultural and historical connections, the footers at the end of the page. This highlights the importance of incorporating traditional ecological knowledge, such as Nyman’s, into conservation efforts. The more knowledge that can be compiled, the more likely we will be to truly conserve these landscapes in their entirety, not just in the language we understand.
I am very excited to be working on my research project here in the Darhad Valley, which looks at the recent decline of Daurian Pika through traditional ecological knowledge. Mongolia has been an amazing learning and cultural experience thus far, and I hope you enjoy reading about our many Pika days in the field!
The next day we went out to retrieve four camera traps, it was going to be a long day for us all. We packed our daypacks and set off toward the Mongash River, which is still frozen enough to walk on safely. We decided that since we had extra cameras, there was an interest in setting a camera up to watch the ice of the river melt on a timelapse setting to retrieve in a few weeks when the ice breaks and melts. The cameras all went smoothly, and we captured boar, elk, moose, and other smaller mammals.
By Sophia Adami-Sampson of Bowdoin College My name is Sophia Adami-Sampson and I am a completing my degree in Biology from Bowdoin College with the Round River program in Mongolia. Before our journey to base camp in the Darhad Valley,…