By CLYDE E. GOULDEN
Clyde GouldenNamdag and Ganbaatar during two weeks of moving their more than 400 sheep and goats from valley to valley trying to find good pasture grass. Their goal is to make sure the animals are fat and strong before winter, so if their summer pasture lacks good grass, they will move to wherever they can find it. During this nomadic period, called otor, the herders sleep in small tents and carry dry yogurt cheese and smoked meat with them.
Clyde E. Goulden is the director of the Institute of Mongolian Biodiversity and Ecological Studies at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.
Monday, July 25
Dorj Tagarav is a very respectable-looking gentleman of 91. He’s clean-shaven, dressed in his traditional deel and sitting in a tent near the Naadam horse training ground of Hatgal, Mongolia. One would never suspect what he has been through; he is a veteran of Mongolia’s war with Japan in 1939 on the Khalk River. But nothing has affected him more than losing his entire herd of cows and sheep in March during an unexpected knee-high snowstorm followed by nighttime temperatures dropping to minus 44 degrees Fahrenheit, the kind of weather locally known as a dzud. He lost two or three animals a day for 15 to 20 days, until all of his almost 50 sheep and cows were gone. After the weather warmed to thaw the ice-covered ground, he dug graves to bury the animals. Now he lives with his daughter, and both are without animals but for a few surviving horses.

Dzuds normally occur in northern Mongolia every ten years on average, but Dorj claims they are more frequent now. Despite his ability to predict when bad weather might occur and prepare for it, this year he had no warning. This may not sound like what we think to be “global warming,” but it suggests unstable weather patterns: Despite the worldwide increase in temperatures that has occurred, regional differences are bound to exist. Virtually all of the herders we have interviewed this year believe the weather has become more unpredictable. Their ability to predict it by observing the behavior of their animals or of wildlife and the growth of the summer grass is no longer useful. The very same sentiment was voiced when we interviewed Tumursuk, the former director of Hovsgol National Park and one of the very best observers I know of the environment. He repeated what almost every herder has told us: The patterns of the seasons, the rains, the winds and even the snows are changing in unpredictable ways.
How will the herders adjust to the changes in weather? Most of them say they will try to cut more hadlan, winter hay. Some say they will have to move their herds more often to ungrazed pastures or go to otor, continuously moving to find better pastures. Most say they will be more selective of their animals, keeping the strong animals and selling the weak before the winter, but very few want to reduce the size of their herds because they fear nothing will be left when a dzud occurs. Others are lost in their concern about the rains and wonder why the soils are so dry and pasture plants no longer grow well. This certainly occurs in part because of overgrazing, but even herders in areas where there are few animals complain about the poor growth of the grass. The rains have changed from gentle “shivree” rains to very intense cold “adar” rains and “the water runs away,” barely penetrating the soil, or on flatter grounds, the rainwater quickly evaporates.
One of the reasons I wanted to do the herder interviews was to document the kinds of changes that could occur elsewhere, including in the United States. How will we adapt to the changes if our average annual temperatures increase by as much as four degrees Fahrenheit and the weather becomes more unpredictable?
(Source: www.feeds.nytimes.com )