Week 4 was somewhat less good than the previous 3… I just haven’t been all that well, but I’m ok again now.

I am destined not to get to Victoria Falls - this time I got to the stage of the taxi being on it’s way when I started feeling sick and headachey so decided to stay at home and sleep! That turned out to be a good decision when I got steadily worse and ended up not working on Monday either, and just stayed in and read books all day! Tuesday I was back at work though and getting on with life again. Again my week has mainly been elephant research, driving around the park looking for them, and studying dung piles to see how fast they decay. This will be used to produce an equation to estimate elephant numbers based on dung transect surveys in the future. The most fun part of elephants this week was probably yesterday when I spotted them myself for one of the first times! Normally our driver sees them (literally a couple of trunk 40 m away in the thicket and he’ll spot it!) and I spend 3 minutes just trying to work out where he’s looking, and for that reason it was ages before he even believed me they were there! Particularly since we were driving at about 60 kmph at the time… But there they were - adult male, adult female, and a juvenile. It’ll be ages again (if ever!) before I spot another before David, but IT HAPPENED!

OMG! A person!

I had Conservation Education on Wednesday afternoon as usual which was both great fun, and very effective this week! We were continuing last week’s topic of intensive farming and the issues with it, and the focus was to be on tobacco farming. Dabs walked in at the start of the lesson and announced that we’d scrapped the original lesson plan, and we were going to talk about the extremely serious deal that had just been signed to build a huge tobacco farm on the outskirts of Livingstone, between the airport and Wasawenge, very close to the National Park. At first the general comments were along the lines of this being good as it would bring in jobs and improve the economy, but as the discussion continued it got steadily more and more sinister, until I swear they thought Livingstone was going to be completely destroyed! I’ve certainly never seen anyone look so relieved as when we told them it wasn’t really happening… but it’s always possible, and could be a threat in the future. I really struggled to keep a straight face at times though!

Spent one morning on Carbon Monitoring Research in Dambwa Forest which should have been fine, but we were one person short so didn't have enough hands for the work, which made it super slow so we did''t finish. Far more annoying though were the mopani bees - small insects which don't sting or bite, but drink bodily fluids so are determined to get into your ears, eyes, nose, mouth and even pants! And there were THOUSANDS of them! There were times when I really couldn't see anything because they were so thick in front of my face... Not to mention that the Dambwa Forest has barely any trees (deforestation, hence the monitoring programme) so you're stood out in the African sun for hours at a time, unable to open your bottle or mouth to have a drink without filling your mouth with bees! Ugh - they were unpleasant... and only going to get worse as the season continues and it's already hitting 38 degrees celsius in the shade! Having said that, it was a good excuse to go and get ice cream afterwards! 

Washing the rape leaves for lunch at culture day

Human climbing frame!

Friday was definitely the best day of the week though. We started off with a snare sweep in the national park, walking through the brush and collecting up all the litter and snares we could find. Only 6 this time, which suggests we were in an ok area - normally they’d expect to find closer to 60! We got back late from that, and then the truck died (as it does just about every time it’s used!) meaning that we were very late for the mid-morning/afternoon session! We drove right out into the rural farmland areas, to a tiny settlement where we had a culture day. This meant learning how to be a Zambian woman: wearing a wraparound skirt (good thing I still had my trousers on underneath because it fell down a couple of times!), doing the cooking, keeping an eye on the children, and serving the men their lunch (which must be done kneeling), while the men sat around, chatted and drank beer! We made beef stew, nshima (a corn based meal which you boil to produce something with the consistency of mashed potato), and shredded rape leaves which are chopped into these tiny pieces by hand with a knife - none of us could manage that to the quality they wanted! When not cooking, I basically became a human climbing frame for the many small children running around, who were extremely cute, but clearly spoke no English so I had some somewhat one-sided conversations with them! They would literally appear and just start climbing you until they were on your hip and then just hold on! The baby crawled into my lap at one point while I was failing to chop the rape leaves, which gave an excellent excuse to let someone more skilled take over for a bit! The kids also adored my camera, which got thoroughly abused with every button pushed at once by some kid or another! Haven’t yet noticed any problems with it since…! After lunch (which thanks to being late arriving we didn’t start until gone 3pm!) we had a quick dance session, which was good fun though I don’t think I could ever shake and shimmy the way they manage to! The truck died again on the way home so we were very late back to camp that night… and last night too for the same reason…!

So that’s it - week 4 was still a really great week, with the culture day being fantastic, but could have been even better had my stomach behaved throughout… I was going to get ill at some point, I’m just impressed I lasted this long!

Male bushbuck are so beautiful!

Don't tread on me!

Week 3 has been the best so far! Monday was just incredible, and the rest of the week hasn't been bad either! I've been on Elephant research virtually all week again, and have seen some amazing things this week. We've identified a new breeding herd, having seen them in the same place 3 times, and they have a TINY calf that can only be about 3 or 4 months old! It's so cute! Still at the stage where he's not really in control of his trunk.... "What is this thing on my face?!" But even without that guy there, Monday was still by far he most wonderful afternoon I've had since I arrived. We found a herd of 11 elephants almost as soon as we left camp and, since they seemed to be going to keep moving for a bit, we decided to follow them and try to complete the movement corridor we've been building up. Not only did we manage that, it was just a magical afternoon following them along like that... They headed through the open areas so we got fantastic views of them from both sides (which also is extremely useful for making ID cards!) and it was.... wow.... no other words! At one point we were on this section of road that we knew they were about to cross, so we turned off the engine and just waited... and it was at that point that the birds all stopped singing... In complete silence (bar the odd cricket and fly), we watched these elephants emerge from the undergrowth, and walk in single file across only about 20 metres in front of us, with the evening sun shining behind them... The first time in my life that I've truly experienced the feeling of being utterly tiny, and totally awed by nature and life... Pure majesty, and a moment I will never forget.

Having a sunset drink

Talking of majesty, I had my first experience of the semi-wild pride in the Dambwa release site on Wednesday. There are 12 lions in the 440 acre (I think...?!) enclosure, and they lay in the same spot and slept the entire time! Doing what lions do best.... We did an activity budget survey of them (1 hour, record what they're doing every 2 minutes), and they never moved! They were given a scavenge the day before which they had clearly found because all of them had these huge round bellies where they had thoroughly stuffed themselves! Zulu, the pride male, was so fat he couldn't even be bothered to stand up, so simply opened his legs and peed from lying down, onto the lion next to him! Lovely Zulu....

Leya's cubs, LE2, LE3 and LE1

Conservation Education on Wednesday was the advantages and disadvantages of sustainable vs intensive farming, and we had a debate with them. The kids got really involved, and the final decision was that sustainable farming was best (thank goodness!) so really successful! All I can say is that next time boys, try not to get quite so dominated by the girls!
  

Conservation Education Debate

Week 2 over already! I can already tell it's going to be one of those year's that seems to go super fast, but thinking back to arriving already seems like over a month ago! So strange...

Week 2 has been amazing - even better than week 1! Last Sunday was wonderfully relaxing, spending the morning just sorting photos and doing not a lot before going to the David Livingstone Hotel down the road where we spent the afternoon just relaxing by the pool and drinking Rock Shandy overlooking the river, while a pied kingfisher was showing off his skills right in front of us! 

Mummy, why are those people watching us?

Monday I was on lions again, spending the morning on meat prep then data collection. Meat prep definitely my least favourite part of the job so far... Large bits of donkey that need weighing and sorting, and it just smells terrible... But the lions certainly appreciate the job you do! They get dinner! We fed them and cleaned out their enclosures in the afternoon. Got a great series of photos showing the big male and a female battling over a piece of meat so much they didn't see another female come up behind them and steal it! Data collection was somewhat lazier. We spend 30 minutes at a time recording what the lions are doing every 10 seconds... We literally sat in the sun for an hour and watched lions sleeping! It's so hot they just lie in the shade and sleep during the day. Thursday was the next time I saw the lions. There were 3 of them in a quarantine enclosure having been moved from Zimbabwe, and they were being moved up to join the rest of the Dambwa lions. This gave me a pretty unique opportunity to watch lions being darted with sedative, measured, and moved around. Unfortunately for timing reasons this was as far as I got. I didn't have time to see them brought around. But... ELEPHANTS! Spent most of my working time this week chasing elephants, taking photos, monitoring dung, and clearing litter out of the park. The elephant research is fantastic, I just love it. We spent the Thursday mid morning session watching a family group of 4 (mummy, male pubescent, female juvenile and calf) from only about 15 metres away, and they just wandered around and ignored us. The pubescent male found a metal ring and spent about 5 minutes playing with it, enjoying the noise it made. Basically an elephant's guitar! Very cute, but of course we were constantly worried he would try to eat it (he didn't). We then saw the same group in the afternoon, and again the pubescent was just adorable. He spotted us in the Research Vehicle and came again quite close, then started playing Peekaboo with us from behind a tree! Totally gorgeous! The community work this week was again just Conservation Education for me. This week we were teaching the students about flower pollination and plant dispersal. I really enjoyed it, so hopefully the students did too!

Madoda

Playing Peekaboo with elephants!

My other exciting news though was from Friday afternoon. Luzia (a volunteer from German-speaking Switzerland) and I went with 2 of the ALERT staff to see the white rhinos of Mosi-Oa-Tunya! They were incredible to see. You get off the jeep and walk right up to within 15m of them! Got some good photos, though they were lying down and sleeping a lot of the time! There are only 11 white rhinos in Zambia, and 9 of them are here. We saw 5 so a wonderful afternoon. Continued from there on a game drive around the park. The same roads I've been driving every day looking for elephants, but first time we've been going slowly, and stopping for things other than elephants! The giraffes were incredible - in one place we sat and could see 7! Probably saw about 30 that day... Amazing... Also saw saddle billed stork, sacred ibis, black ibis, white-fronted bee eaters, a tortoise, a monitor lizard, puku, kudu, impala (of course - they're everywhere!), buffalo, warthogs, bushbuck, waterbuck, and a tiny little crocodile! It really was a truly fantastic afternoon.

White rhinos!