SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING & MATHEMATICS
CHASING THE GOBI GHOST
BiologistDan O’Neillbecame the first publicly LGBTQ+ television presenter to host a wildlife series with his 2023 seriesGiants. Here, he describes the adrenaline rush of tracking snow leopards through the Gobi Desert for his latest series
Photography Dan O’Neill and Off the Fence
Bleak, unthinkably vast, yet undeniably beautiful, Mongolia’s Gobi Desert is the kind of place that forces you to confront the fact that you are, potentially, totally insignificant. It is a fact that is both unnerving and oddly comforting. The Gobi Desert holds a rare kind of wonder: it acts as a reflection. It compels you to look back at yourself and question your role on this incredible planet, to consider what it is to be human, and how we are — or are not — upholding and adding value to something incredibly remarkable.
It was here, during the spring field season of 2024, in one of Earth’s harshest environments, that our team studied a famously camouflaged and impossibly elusive predator: the snow leopard. The rugged mountains and endless steppe landscapes — not dissimilar to the surface of Mars or, to offer a more relatable comparison, the set of the film Dune — are home to the largest population of these vulnerable big cats outside China. Our mission: to fit them with GPS tracking collars. This data would contribute to the longest-running ecological study of snow leopards in history.