Yet another week flown by! I'm going to be done here before I know it!

Fantastic Sunrise from the park

Climbing out after a dip

F37, Donna

Tough guys? Big wusses!

This week has mainly been elephant research and identification. The fun (and scary!) part if the added level of responsibility I've received now that the head researcher for elephants has gone away for a fortnight. I've spent a couple of mornings driving around on Elephant Research with just the driver, and elephant research I've just been left to get on with - I guess that makes me temporary head researcher! Elephant IDs have become far too confusing though... The first couple of weeks it was just going through the files and photos and identifying the elephants in the pictures, but the last couple of weeks I haven't had a single session where I haven't found mistakes from previous ID sessions (not mine I have to add!). I spent one session this week trying to separate the 3, really quite obviously different, elephants who were all listed as the same one in the photo library! Always quite scary making any kind of radical change like that when you have no one to confirm it... The elephants drives we've been going around the local villages and looking for any signs of elephants, as well as asking locals how frequently they see them and which way they go etc. It was really interesting, and I really enjoyed that. However, it was nothing on the last couple of afternoons of elephant research where we were back in the park and driving around. Friday, we had a group of 18 elephants on either side of the road that were being totally calm and relaxed, with no care at all for us, until another car pulled up a bit too close... That freaked one of the big males and, clearly in a bad mood, he came WAY too close for comfort to our car, but thanks to the other car being in the way and apparently not bothering to move, we had no way of getting out! Thankfully he decided to just lose enough for some awesome photos and nothing more...! The rest of the afternoon we didn't really see all that many elephants, but they were all either solitary or in pairs, which makes recording fun because you're trying to work out a distance for one group, while also trying to keep an eye on the other 2 groups behind you so you can get to them next! Then yesterday afternoon got really interesting - there was a herd of 10 males that began to head out of the park but just as they were heading out something (and we were really close but still have no idea what it was!) totally freaked out the leading elephant, and the whole herd went charging back into the park, running and trumpeting for over half a kilometre! This was annoying at the time, but if they hadn't we'd have followed them out and we'd have missed what we saw instead... Once we were back in the park, we drove around for a while and saw very little, before eventually spotting a single elephant way over in the distance. Driving closer, we began to spot a few individuals, to create a fairly spread out herd of somewhere between 10 or 20. Again, had we not seen them, I wouldn't have spotted the other 3... That 3 then turned out to be "minimum 12", so we drove around slightly further to get a good look at them... and they turned out to be a minimum of 60! They crossed the road in front of us so fast that we can't be sure of the exact size of the herd, but once they then joined the other herd of 11+, there must have been nearly 90! Quite common in July and August, but haven't seen anything that size since I arrived! Totally incredible sight! They began to walk up towards the road, so we drove up there, and for a few moments they walked towards us in this great long line side-by-side and it was like watching an army coming through the trees! We lost them before they reached the road because it got dark... but SO worth being late for dinner! (I apologise to my English teachers for my major overuse of exclamation marks in that paragraph… and dot dot dots… and just in general with both of them to be honest!)

No this isn't cropped!
WAY too close for comfort!

Male bushbuck

I unfortunately missed out on Conservation Education and Dambwa Lion Research this week, thanks to the delightful thing that is immigration.... But I now have my Temporary Employment Permit sorted, meaning that I can officially work here for another 3 months! Took forever though... Ugh...  I also spent one morning listening to a talk by Dr Jackie Abell, the Head of Research across all of the ALERT projects. She told us all about the problems with lion conservation and how their different projects work, and then we watched a video that her friend had made of the Ngamo Pride at Antelope Park in Zimbabwe which made us all cry it was so cute! Adorable!

My big problem this week is that my laptop is playing up and refusing to move any photos onto my hard drive, but the memory is full so I can't put any more on and my camera memory card is full! AAH! Fingers crossed I can get stuff sorted.....