Another week gone, and something of a milestone week: I'm halfway through my time in Zambia! WHAT?!! I can't believe how fast the time just disappears here.

Juvenile elephant from the Thursday sighting

This has been elephant ID week for me. Of course I've had a few other things to do, but basically just lots and lots of IDs! Monday I did nothing but sit in front of the computer comparing elephants, which at first I thought would be fine, but it turned out that the other research intern was doing Dambwa Research and then Feeding and Cleaning, so he wasn't helping me, and our researcher had the day off, so I was somewhat lonely! It doesn't help that the photos for some of the sightings that we're trying to do are just awful. Some of the pictures from 11th August I wouldn't even be sure if they were elephants or rocks if I didn't know! AAHH!!! I mainly just do the easy ones, then look for the more difficult ones and note down who I think they might be but don't say for sure until there's someone to discuss it with. I've also had a few sessions where I wasn't lonely so that improved the week, and allowed us to actually finish more of the sightings, rather than having me start but not complete them, due to there always being a few that I'm not 100% on! The part of IDs that I'm now really looking forward to, is the hard drive of elephant photos that we've got from 2010-2012. Now that it's arrived, I've had a quick flick through some of them and spotted several elephants that I recognise, including Harry, Colin, Sierra, Alaska, and several others. I think it will be really interesting to see which elephants are returning year after year, and what proportion of them are only ever seen once.

M14, Fred (Photo from the 6 on Friday)

I've had one session of trees this week (was supposed to be 2 but I asked to have the Thursday town time with the volunteers so that I could post Christmas cards!) which was a particularly good morning. A decent number of trees so we weren't done super-early and so didn't have to wait around and get bored, but equally not so many that we weren't able to finish the plot. We laughed so much on trees this week, especially when the volunteer with us just randomly climbed one of the trees, and the researcher challenged the other intern (who is a martial arts instructor!) to a wrestling match and then lost fairly spectacularly! Good fun, and that means there are now only 2 plots left to do and we're done with trees for the year, so then we can start doing insects.

Our researcher meeting the kids at Conservation Education

Building a Team lesson

The major bit of good news this week is that Conservation Education is back on. We are at a different school, who have a lower level of English and are a bit younger anyway, so the programme is more aimed at improving their reading skills, but using conservation and nature words. I was doing an activity based on the forest, so we had 27 words, ranging from "tree", "wood" and "bark", to words like "afforestation" and "biodiversity". We had each one written down on a slip of paper, and we played a game where I would say a word, and they would have to grab it. We went through all the words explaining their meaning, and then we played the game again, this time giving the definition and they had to work out the word and then grab it. About three quarters of the kids were very interested, and seemed to really engage, picking up what the words meant and enjoying learning how to use them. Unfortunately the rest of them were more interested in winning the game rather than what the words meant, so would just grab random words and hold them up to me, asking if they were right, and if I said no they just dropped it and grabbed another until eventually one of them guessed correctly. If I'd had time, I would have asked them to read out the word that they grabbed and define it, so they could still learn what the words were, but with the length of time available that simply wouldn't have worked. I'm still trying to come up with another way to prevent that happening again, or come up with a way of helping them learn despite that... As well as Conservation Education, I've also done another week of Kids Club, this time at Natebe Primary School. We always start with just playing games with the kids. I had the volleyball kit out again, and was teaching some of them how to play. Some of them picked it up really fast and were actually quite good! I certainly wasn't expecting to be encouraging them to move on from Catch-Push volleying to properly volleying in their first session! Similarly I was able to have the second group playing a mini-game of 4s, with a basic "setter takes the second ball" structure. When it got to the lesson (somewhat later than planned as the teacher was enjoying playing volleyball too much and she wanted to keep going!), we were doing the same as last week, which meant I was able to lead a different section of the "Team Player" lesson. All of the Kids Club lessons are structured around "STRIPE" - the set of skills required to be a well-rounded person and employee in later life. STRIPE stands for "Self-manager, Team player, Reflective, Innovative, Participator, Enquirer". This time my activity was "Building a Team", in which we imagined that there was a new classroom block being built at the school, and we were discussing who we would need on our team to build it (architect, builder, roofer, carpenter, suppliers etc.), and what would then happen if the team did not communicate with one another. As usual, it worked better for some groups than others. The oldest boys were the best, coming up with everything and discussing problems among themselves as well as with me. There was only one group who just said nothing the entire time, even when I directly asked them things, and thanks to timing, I again had to just give them the answers rather than waiting for them to open up and start talking.

Volleyball at Kids Club

Volunteer Removing a Snare on Snare Sweep

M72, Duke (Photo from the 6 on Friday)

F37, Donna (Duke's mother)

And now to talk about Friday which was easily my best day of the week! Started off with Snare Sweep where we got 52 snares! Not a record for ALERT, but easily a record for me. There were some big ones too, and they were all made of solid steel wire this week so were much stronger than usual. The handlers reckon they were aiming for elephants and buffalo, rather than the usual small antelopes like impala, bushbuck and common duikers. Even with wire cutters we struggled with some of them. Getting back to the office, I had a fun ID session with the researcher, laughing at the terrible photos, but getting through a decent number, before heading out to see if we could find any elephants in the park on research. I jokingly said before we left "52 snares this morning, 52 elephants this afternoon?" and was laughed at and told "No way!"... Forget 52, try 85+! First and third ones were single males across the river, so we didn't get a good look or photo of either. The second group was a herd of 12 who wandered around the plains and came for a drink at the water hole. They never got very close, but we were able to spend about 30-40 minutes watching them. That left us with not a huge amount of time left, as one of the vehicles was dead (again!) so we had to get back to the office for 5pm. This meant we were already pushed for time when I spotted a herd of 6 up ahead. We waited for 5 minutes for them to cross the road, before they did indeed cross as we hoped, rather than playing their favourite game of "walk to a point that we're almost in view but not quite, then turn and walk the other way again"! This was an especially fun sighting, because as they crossed I was able to identify all but one of them straight away, despite the fact that I've only seen one of them before in the flesh, the rest only from ID photos. Even the researcher didn't recognise as many as I did! Winning! We saw some of this group the day before, but not all of them. So now that we were REALLY in a hurry, we were driving back very fast, actually hoping not to see any more, when we went flying past a group of 50+ at the side of the main road! We obviously couldn't just skip them out so had to head back (cringing at the thought of grovelling to the others when we got back that we were late!) and collect the data as fast as we could. They were fairly buried in the trees still so couldn't really get decent photos anyway, just a pain that we didn't have more time to wait for them... Getting back to the office, we jumped in the truck to come home, but told people to keep an eye out because we would be driving past the big group again. Good thing too because otherwise we wouldn't have spotted the final group of 15+ that we missed when heading back to the office! WOW! Not bad for 2.5 hours work! 

The herd of 12 being watched by a giraffe!

That wasn't the only exciting drive home this week either. Yesterday was also interesting, as the rains seem to have finally arrived, and our truck broke down halfway back! It would be the one day I didn't bother to bring my coat wouldn't it....?! The rain started during our afternoon ID session and there was a lot of thunder and lightning, and the rain was ridiculously heavy. Having said that, give me a few more weeks and I'll probably consider yesterday to have been some light drizzle! It was still raining when we went to leave though much lighter, so it was only mildly freezing and unpleasant to sit in an open vehicle...! It was about half way back that the truck's clutch just totally died. Thankfully, we were right by Park Gate 2, so we we only had to push the car about 50 m to get it off the road... By the time the other truck arrived, we were all soaked through, and I was actually really cold! Came back to the first hot shower I've had in about 2 and a half months yesterday! The rain continued all night, leaving our lodge ridiculously muddy. My wellies have now had their African christening - it's weird how I've gone for 3 months going outside and walking across the camp to go to the loo or get a drink and it's never felt weird, but as soon as I put on my wellies it feels like British camping!

Drinking giraffe

Warthog family!

So that's been my week, and yet again I apologise for my total inability to write concisely!

F1 (Marianne) at the office

12 weeks down! Week 12 has been another very enjoyable week, with much more variety than usual (warning - lost post coming up!). Whereas normally I do basically all elephants and not much else, this week I’ve only had 1 full day with my trunked friends! I’ve been out a couple of times on the truck though, and both times saw more than 10 elephants across the river so that was nice. The first one we saw was particularly satisfying because I was able to ID him in the field (M18, Benzu). I also had one spot that was so much fun because neither the researcher nor driver believed me that there was even an elephant there! Literally all that could be seen were his front feet and a tiny bit of trunk, and he standing in a very dark bit so even that was heavily shadowed! On top of that, we’d just decided we needed to get to Maramba quickly, so we were driving at maybe 25 mph, so I literally got this tiny snapshot view through a small gap in the trees! I enjoyed that elehant… Other than that it was mainly IDs, on which we are now up to 6^th August... Going to be doing these for a long time yet! I’ve got a full day of them by myself tomorrow which is probably just about my worst nightmare of the jobs they can give me! I hate doing them alone - so many of them need discussing because the photos are never clear, and it’s just quite dull and lonely! Hopefully I still have some grip on reality by Monday evening…

Kovu enjoying his elephant poo!

Cleaning out the pools

                  I’ve had 2 days of lions this week which was good, but I have to admit part of me is glad I’m not here as a lions intern/volunteer - the breakfast and lunch breaks are just so long with nothing to do, there’s a lot of waiting around. If I’m having lunch at the office then I’ll just skip my break and do IDs or something, but that’s not possible at Boma. I can enjoy the relaxed nature of lions for a few days, but I think I’d get fed up if I was doing it all the time. The actual lion work though is great! I’ve done Behavioural Enrichment (making toys for the lions out of sticks, leaves, grass and elephant dung) again for the first time since my very first morning here on 22^nd August! We actually made the same animal (crocodile) and gave it to the same group of lions (Kovu, Nembwe, Namwala, Kasama and Nkoya) as last time! They actually mostly ignored the actual toys we made them, but we also emptied 2 sacks of fresh elephant dung into their enclosure and they went mad for that! Rolling in it, playing, scent marking, licking and eating it, and even fighting over who got the best spot for lying in it! The other research was 3 activity budgets, 1 of which was on the same 5 enclosure lions, and the other 2 of which were on the Dambwa Pride. As usual the Dambwa lions spent most of their time just sleeping. It’s just too hot for them to be active at the moment. Kovu and his girls were a bit more active, and spent most of their of time trying to work out how to get through the fence to Toka and Bemba, who had just been fed! Final lion activity was a couple of sessions of Enclosure Maintenance. 1 of these was cleaning another pool for the lions (this time I did fall over, but thankfully didn’t hurt myself!), and refilling it with fresh water. The other was more of Enclosure Destruction! There were 3 lions kept at the office in quarantine, who were moved up to the Dambwa enclosures a few weeks ago, and now their enclosure at the office needed taking down. We spent 3 hours just unwinding wires and between about 15 of us managed to get the first side down… Another long job coming up!

King Kovu...

Rolling in the elephant dung!

                  Thursday was trees as usual. It was a little different this week as the plot was in a sort of gully, full of very spiky trees (ouch!) and there was only 4 of us instead of the usual five, so I was measuring the circumference of each tree, while also holding the other tape measure up the trunk - it’s harder than it sounds! We were very pleased and actually quite proud that we managed all 243 trees in the one morning between only 4 of us. There was one scary moment when we thought we could hear a fire coming towards us through the forest, but then the noise stopped and we never saw smoke so we don’t know what the noise was!

                  Friday was again not a normal day because I went to culture day again, so I had another go at making and eating nshima with boiled rape and beef stew. I actually it much more than last time but I don’t know if that was the flavours they used or me. We did some dancing again which is always amusing - they do a lot of hip and butt shaking here! I honestly couldn’t wiggle my bum like that even if I wanted to! The Australian girls who were there for the first time certainly didn’t look entirely comfortable! We spent most of the time we weren’t cooking playing with the children again, and talking to their kitten.

Doing some Zambian dancing

Teaching the "Watermelon" song at Kids Club!

                  Saturday I went to Kids Club in the morning which was good fun, particularly having never been before. I finally got to play volleyball for the first time since I got here - to be honest I was quite pleased I could still vaguely set and dig! I brought a net, 5 balls and a pump out with me, and will leave them here for use at Kids Club. I was coaching them the basic skills and they certainly enjoyed it, even if they didn’t like me telling them not to kick the ball! We played for about an hour then headed into the classrooms for a lesson on being a good team player. We started with a word search, looking for words like communicate, together, share, help and so on. A lot of the words they didn’t know and we had to explain them, but it was very difficult in that often you would use one of the other words from the search to explain that one, and then 5 minutes later find out they didn’t know that one either! We finished with an activity about communication to demonstrate how everyone in the team needs the same information in order for the goal to be reached. We gave them all a card with an animal on it (pig, cow, chicken, donkey, elephant, or lion) and they had to make the noise of that animal. First of all we gave them all the same card face up so they all made each noise together. I then mixed the animals together, put the cards down facedown on the table so they each picked one but no one else knew what they had. They then again all made the noise together, and of course when I asked “what did this person have?” none of them could answer. I then steadily increased the number of them all with the same card so the team steadily worked better and better, until they were all making the same noise. I was particularly impressed with their lion impressions - they genuinely sounded like a pride of happily grumbling lions! The second group definitely understood the point of the exercise, and I think the third group did too, but the first group definitely did not get it… Ah well - I did my best and they still enjoyed making noises!

                  So that’s been my week! Apologies for the stupidly long post, I never have been good at concise…

Another very good week in my life here! Almost scared - at some point I’m going to have to come down off of this high!

Male bushbuck

Cute little family...

The best high - the elephants are back! Having not seen them on this side of the river for over 3 weeks, they’ve finally reappeared. Friday was the first good one - a mixed herd consisting of 2 adult females, a calf, a juvenile, 2 pubescent females, and an adult male. They were really close to the road and totally calm with us watching them. We saw them again on Saturday afternoon, this time without the adult male. They were REALLY close today! One of them literally within about 8 m! We got a fantastic view of them, plus some good photos. The morning was the more exciting part though - we headed out of the office, and were just about to head up towards Simoonga, when our driver realised he didn’t know if we had enough fuel to get back again (of course the petrol gauge doesn’t work!), so we headed back to the office and refilled. Good thing we did or we wouldn’t have found our herd of 37! They were a very frustrating group - they kept changing direction so we’d drive around to get ahead of them, only to spot them in the distance heading the other way… such a pain! We eventually decided they were going to head west, and from there the only way they could get out was through the gap in the fence where the railway line goes through. We sat for a while, and almost gave up thinking that they must have turned again, when they appeared coming towards us. They certainly weren’t happy with us being there, so we reversed slightly, and while they seemed nervous they did continue through. The first few were particularly uncomfortable, but that was quite useful because they all gave us full jazz ears! Makes IDs so much easier when you can see both ears and their tusk configuration simultaneously. It was a particularly fun sighting for me, because I recognised several of the elephants which is always a very good feeling. I'm starting to get a new favourite elephant - Colin (M43) was my previous favourite, but I think Harry (M151) may be going to take over! Both of them have very obvious ears, but Harry's is practically half missing! He has 3 huge notches in his right ear, one of which is also a very distinctive M shape. As a general rule the males are far ore recognisable than the females. Maybe because they are more boisterous as pubescents, and because they will fight perhaps, the males often have much more obvious and recognisable ears than the females. The calves are more of a pain. We've had a lot of calves to try and ID this week, which sounds cute but to be honest is really just annoying! How are you supposed to tell apart 2 elephants which are about the same age and size, neither is obviously male or female, and neither have any marks on their ears or tusks?! The really young ones don't even have tusks! AAAHHH!!!

Ssh! I'm pretending to be a buffalo!

The 37 on the railway line

Giraffe

Female bushbuck

The rest of my week has consisted of studying bushbuck and buffalo while out on elephant drives, studying elephant dung, a day of trees and a day of lions. Trees was good this week - the group that had been out the previous day hadn't finished their plot, so we started with that, finished quickly, and headed and managed to complete a second plot too! Good teamwork required for that... and easy plots definitely helped! The mupani bees were back out in force though, so we have now christened the newly chopped up mosquito nets that we've started taking with us for protection! Dambwa Research was another great day. I really do love the lions - they're so majestic, and equally lazy! We did an activity budget on the Dambwa Pride, and I was watching Zulu, the big pride male. He really is a magnificent animal, but considering he was having quite an active morning when he put his head up twice in the hour, it can't be said that he's especially exciting to do an activity budget on! The second session I was given the Socialising Survey to do, that is used to determine if the lions are interacting like a wild pride, and monitor the relationships between individuals. Are they interacting like a wild pride? None of them moved so I have no idea! None of them greeted each other! Not to worry though - previous surveys show that the lions have extremely healthy relationships with one another, so the work is showing great promise for the future lion conservation. The afternoon we did enclosure cleaning and feeding which I love doing! Watching the lions race for the meat and then fight each other for whatever they decide makes this piece the best one is great - funny but also scary seeing how powerful they are. We had a pair this week who had a good 5 minute stand-off, both of them refusing to let go of the hunk of meat, despite the much bigger bit just sitting less than 10 m away! Enclosure cleaning means picking up of bones from previous feeds, removing dung, and this week, also cleaning out their water pools. The water has to be completely removed by the bucket, replaced, the pool scrubbed, and then the water thrown out again. That happens at least 3 times before the pool is eventually refilled. It's slippery too! I managed to remain upright, but I think I was a special case - normally everyone falls over at some point I think!

Sekulu of the Seven

The Dambwa Pride

So as usual, another great week, made even better by the elephants making a return, and having a really great new group of volunteers too!

FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT!!!