Hi everyone, and welcome to my blog for my year in Zambia and Zimbabwe, working with the African Lion and Environmental Research Trust (ALERT).

Flying in to Livingstone airport was wonderful - I got my first glimpse of Victoria Falls, and I saw for the first time in person just how beautiful the African Plains are. The Zambezi river is just stunning, winding through the landscape and providing life to so many people, animals and plants. I am heading out to go and see the Falls themselves this afternoon, so am very excited to see them for the first time, even if they're relatively unimpressive at the moment due to very little water in the river! The camp ‘Serenity’ where I am staying for the first 6 months is lovely - the staff are wonderful, the food is fantastic, and who can complain about living somewhere that you get elephants raiding your bins rather than foxes?! My only issue so far is, of course, the mosquitos… they’re totally relentless, and will only get worse once we enter the wet season. First night I slept under the mosquito net was fairly horrible. I had no idea how stuffy it would be! However, even by now I’m getting used to it, and it’s not so bad.

I've arrived!

Then there’s the work. The lion walking doesn’t come until later on when I’m in Zimbabwe, but there’s still plenty to do here! I started off my first day by building toys for the lions at Dambwa - behaviour enrichment for studying their play behaviour, and for making their enclosures more interesting. With 3 other volunteers, I built a not-especially-good crocodile out of leaves, grass, sticks, and the all important elephant dung! We headed up to Dambwa with our constructions (unfortunately the T-rex got broken en route!), and positioned them in the enclosures. Big Daddy Kovu adored the crocodile - licking it, eating it, rolling all over it, and burying his face in the elephant poo! Delightful! The females were a little more refined, and decided to stay in the shade rather than coming out to play. We also did an Activity Budget survey, which meant recording what the lions were doing every 10 seconds for 30 minutes to be analysed by Alex - a research intern from Chicago. The rest of my lion experience so far has included cleaning out their enclosures, and feeding them (which is not for delicate stomachs!).

PHOTOBOMB!

Besides the lions, ALERT also study the wild habitats surrounding Dambwa, in the Mosi-Oa-Tunya National Park. So far this has mainly been elephants, with a focus on hyenas once I head into Zimbabwe in February. According to the IUCN, there are 31 elephants in Mosi-Oa-Tunya. Since ALERT started their study in February, they have produced ID cards for over 200, with up to 90 being seen at once in a single herd. My elephant research experience started off with a very intense crash-course in all the things I would need to record and do for every elephant sighting, and for the dung decay survey. The latter is for estimation of the number of elephants around based on the amount of dung in the park. To do this, first ALERT need to know the defecation rate, and the rate of dung decay. Elephant Research so far has been fantastic. I start work at 6:15am and don't finish until 6:30pm (though we have a very long lunch break every day), spending the whole day driving around the national park and beyond looking for elephants. This certainly means we see a lot of other stuff too! I absolutely adore my home in Devon, but Mosi-Oa-Tunya is something else again. I've never been anywhere so beautiful as the park overlooking the Zambezi river in the evening, with a cloud of spray rising in the distance from the falls, and a herd of impala just grazing 20 feet away. This place is just beyond incredible and I cannot wait to get out and explore more.

Mummy and Baby

As well as conservation and ecology, there is community work. I have done one session of Conservation Education at one of the schools in Livingstone. Since it is outside of school term time, this was a stand alone lesson that we came up with the day before, about life cycles and why they are important to the ecosystem. We started off with an explanation of how they work, and then used humans as an example of a placental mammal. My biggest issue really was remembering how to explain it in non-university language - somehow I think saying that the “outer layer of the blastocyst differentiates to a trophoblast which develops to form the majority of the placenta” would not have gone down well…! They then split into 2 groups, one researching butterflies, the other snakes, to make a poster which they then presented to the other. We asked them to focus on the life cycle, the role of parental care in offspring development, what the specific dangers were to the organism at each stage of the life cycle, and the role that the organism plays in the ecosystem. The unanimous decision at the start was that snakes do not do anything useful for anyone, and that they should all be killed on sight, but by the end we had convinced some that they help to keep the rat populations under control, provide food for predators, and have significant commercial value too. I have also spent a morning measuring trees, and counting the number of trees that have been chopped down by the local community in the Dambwa Forest. Zambia has the highest rate of deforestation per capita in the world, losing 250 000 to 300 000 hectares of forest per year. The most chopped down wood seemed to be Zambezi Teak, which is used for construction and charcoal. It was somewhat amusing, but also frustrating to discover that someone had built a charcoal kiln in the middle of the road, and we nearly rolled the jeep trying to go around! Each one of these kilns can take up to 100 trees, so even just the 5 allowed per 40 square kilometres can do a huge amount of damage. Hopefully, the research being done in the Dambwa Forest should help the community to care for their woodland better, and to protect it enough that the forest remains where it is.

Impala on Toka Leya flay in the evening sun

My species count for the first week:

·      Zebra

·      Impala

·      Baboon

·      Buffalo

·      Waterbuck

·      Warthogs

·      Elephant

·      Giraffe

·      Bushbuck

·      Kudu

·      Hippo

·      Duiker

·      Puku

·      Sable Antelope

·      Wildebeest

·      Crocodile

·      Pied kingfisher

·      Giant kingfisher

·      Cattle Egrets

·      Southern Red-billed hornbill (and other hornbills)

·      Vultures of many types

·      Yellow billed stork

·      Marabou Stork

·      Wire tailed swallow

·      Barbet

·      Go-away bird (heard but not seen)

·      African Hoopoe

·      And a lot more stuff I haven’t yet managed to identify!

So in summary? Life is awesome!