Mongolia – some Camels

 

The landscape shortly before the encounter with the camels

While in Mongolia I had the chance to see quite a lot of camels in the wilderness. Did I see the wild Bactrian camel? Of course not; the Great Gobi A Strictly Protected Area still had been 500 km away from my route. But I had been interested as I had read the book on these cames by John Hare [2]. Hare writes about his expedition: 1993 to Mongolia, 1995, 1996, 1997 to China. He saw some wild Bactrian camels after great efforts. Interestingly, Nikolai Michailowitsch Prschewalski (or Przewalski or Przhewalsky / Николай Михайлович Пржевальский) first described this cameloped; some people doubt that it had been the wild Bactrian camel (Camelus ferus), but think he'd seen the offspring of the Bactrian camel (Camelus bactrianus), which had gone astray / run away – to my dismay these camels are called feral Bactrian camels, which comes close to the Latin taxonomic term. I've been at the Przhewalski Museum near the the city of Karakol in Kyrgyzstan [3], but failed to write about it so far. Przhewalski was buried on the Issyk-Kul lakeside. But we'll meet him again, when it comes to Przewalski's horse.

I guess quite a lot of people think of camels as depicted on the wrapping of a brand of cigarettes, but that's a dromedary.  We look at the Bactrian camel or Mongolian camel (Camelus bactrianus) [4], which isn't the domesticated form of the wild Bactrian camel; it is possible to differentiate them via DNA testing. The Bactrian camel can stand cold, drought, and high altitudes.

If look at the herd in the wilderness you may overlook the marks of the herders as these animals roam for quite a long tine on there own. The herders might adjust there route every now and then and they do so … on motorbikes, and yes, sometimes more romatically on horseback. The nomads don't move their gers (you might call it yurts, but there's a difference, we'll come back to this issue) with the herds, but twice a year from summer to winter pastures.

Links and Annotations:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Gobi_A_Strictly_Protected_Area
[2] John Hare: Auf den Spuren der letzten wilden Kamele. Eine Expedition ins verbotene China. Vorwort von Jane Goodall. Malik National Geographic, München 2002. ISBN-10: 3492401910.
[3] https://www.nomadsland.kg/en/before-you-go/kyrgyzstan/history/przewalski-museum
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bactrian_camel; and you might also want to check the entry on camels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camel or the wild Bactrian camel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Bactrian_camel

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