Well considering what the date will be next Sunday, I doubt I'll be writing an update then so I'd better say it now: MERRY CHRISTMAS! I cannot believe it's Christmas already - even with decorations, Christmas songs, and an advent calendar on the go, my head will not click that this is December. Christmas is not supposed to be shorts and t-shirt weather! Doesn't mean I'm not looking forward to it though...! We'll be heading up to the boss' house for dinner, games and secret santa I think, so should be a good time. I am going to be naughty and suggest the ALERT website as a good online store for last minute Christmas presents! Considering the current financial situation, every purchase will be much appreciated by both us and the lions! (http://www.cafepress.com/lionalert)

I've had another good week, though very frustrating with the current car situation. We have 4 cars on the project,  but our research vehicle (Doris) is totally dead - the starter is gone entirely, and that's after you already had to hot wire then push start it to get it going! With the single cab also out of action, we have no way of going out on Elephant Research drives. This means more Dambwa time, more Elephant ID time, and a lot less time in the National Park! Can't really complain though - firstly I'd rather be in the office than in a vehicle we can't trust to start when elephants get too close (we've already had to get out and push start Doris once when there were elephants only about 30 m away!) - and secondly it means more lion time! Elephant IDs are also very useful - we are still on the sightings from 14th August so it will be a long time before we catch up! Or rather, we won't catch up before I have to go to the Zimbabwe side of the falls and leave the researcher to do it alone... The current aim  is to simply reach the elephant sightings that I was actually in Zambia for, before I have to leave! I still don't know which elephant was the first I ever saw - I have to get the chance to do that ID!

Having said that, we have managed a couple of Research sessions. The first was an unscheduled one on Tuesday, when one of our drivers came in and told us there was an injured elephant up the road. We went to look, and found a young pubescent female elephant with an extremely swollen front right leg. Upon closer inspection, we determined it was the young one we found with Breeding Herd 7 a few weeks back, that had a snare tight around that leg. The good news is that the Wildlife Authority were able to successfully dart her and remove the wire. The bad news is that she is now a young elephant by herself, and that the wound appears to be infected.... I hope we're able to keep an eye on her... We also did research on Saturday afternoon, but not an especially exciting session - having had no vehicle earlier than Saturday, and being extremely time pressured to do the entire session during our lunch break in order to get the car back to Dambwa, we were on high speed dung decay survey only! We ignored the couple of bushbuck that we saw despite the fact that our survey is still going, and we just drove form dung to dung taking measurements and leaving again! However, we successfully got through all the ones we were aiming to do, so a job well done.

I don't think that's a road...

We had our last session of Conservation Education at Maunga School on Wednesday afternoon. Unfortunately, again the car situation made it somewhat less successful - we are supposed to leave the office at 11:30 and start at 14:00, but thanks to the lack of cars, we were't able to head out until nearly 14:30, and then the rains meant that we had to go the long way around, rather than simply fording the Sinde River... We didn't arrive until almost 15:30 so only managed a 40 minute session with 2 of our planned 5 games. However, the 8 students we had really engaged and seemed to enjoy it, while also learning some new words so it was still worth it. Coming back was great fun as we decided to attempt a shortcut... and got the 1 working car stuck in sand... in a place with no phone signal... when we were already late...! Thankfully, with a lot of work on our driver's part, we managed to get out without having to walk a mile to somewhere where we could use the phone! Did make us very late home though, and once we were out we were driving at breakneck speed down winding dirt roads with a lot of sharp overhanging trees in an open vehicle! Let's just say that dodging is something you get very used to when driving around here!

Teaching the kids to play Hangman

Snare sweep on Friday morning was not especially successful, but very eventful. We only found 4 snares, and of those 3 were very old. However, while there may have been no snares to look out for, there were certainly animals! We always have an armed wildlife officer with us when doing snare sweeps - it would be too dangerous without - and let's just say that this week I was very glad of him, even if he still never had to actually use his AK-47! The first thing we had to avoid was a group of buffalo up ahead of us, so we turned east and moved to a slightly different patch of land. We saw another buffalo later on but that one ran away, so we only had to make a slight alteration with that one. The second sighting was very sad - it was a young one with a snare around its front leg, and the leg was completely limp and just flopping around uselessly as it ran away on the other 3 legs. Very sad... However, the cool part was about halfway through when the handler walking next to me suddenly stopped, and quickly told me to pass the "nobody move" message down the line! By now I'm very used to looking through the thick undergrowth for animals, but I certainly had no idea there was a White Rhino only about 40 m ahead of us! The rhinos are totally free to move around the park as they choose, but the Wildlife Authority feed and water them in the Northern Section where you cannot go without an Officer, in order to protect them more easily from poachers. Being nowhere near the Northern Section, it was a huge surprise to see one down there! That individual is now fully protected again in the Southern Section, and will hopefully rejoin his friends soon.

Zulu

And finally, lions! I've had a great lion week... Monday was Dambwa Research which we actually did from outside the release site because the lions were all lined up along the fence by Main Gate, and there was very little point going in when there was a better view from outside! Having said that, for the first time when I've been on research the lions decided it was time to move! They got up and walked along the fence, apparently stalking an impala, but being so lazy about it the impala saw them from so far away he didn't even bother to run! They lay down again further along, forcing us to move the car, only for them to move back again 20 minutes later! In the mid morning session they were not quite so active, but Zulu came very close to the car, giving us a fantastic sight of the big man himself! Zulu is a big lion, and he's very tall, plus both the females (Rusha and Leya) who had cubs are big too, so the sub-adults are all going to be big lions when they're fully grown! Certainly RS2 is going to be even bigger than Zulu, so that should hopefully help him when he's released. Saturday was also a Dambwa Research day (again we had no cars free so we couldn't make it to Kids Club) and again this was a particularly good session! For the first 45 minutes of the hour-long activity budget they did nothing but sleep, then suddenly Zulu puts his head up and starts grunting. We didn't need to be told twice when the Lion Researcher told us "Everybody get your cameras out"! I was surprised to see they didn't bother to stand up, but rather lay down and the whole pride began to roar together, which of course also set off the lions in the enclosures too! They roared for about 2 minutes, then suddenly the action started and they all got up, started greeting each other, playing, and in Kwandi's case telling off Zulu for trying to mount her! Then with 3 of the girls leading the way (Zulu closely following Kwandi still!) they all moved and headed off into the release site. As it turned out when we went back after breakfast, they didn't get very far... But still, there was some movement and they all paraded their way past the car which was awesome to see! Not however, as awesome as Thursday afternoon... I'd already spent the morning helping out first with enclosure lion research, watching the reactions of different lions to having lemon rubbed all through their enclosures, and then with Dambwa research, observing the grooming behaviour of the pride. The afternoon meant it was time for a scavenge. The Dambwa pride do not have a fixed feeding schedule, as ALERT are trying to mimic the natural "feast and famine" pattern that they would have in the wild. Having not had anything for a while, the lions were quite thin. More importantly, the 2 dominant lions (Zulu and Rusha) were looking thinner than would be expected, so rather than the normal "drop the meat and leave" that they do on a scavenge, this time we stayed to watch to see if maybe there was more fighting (especially from RS2 being the second biggest lion after Zulu) than normal or something else had changed in the group. Watching the scavenge was amazing. We actually had to go and find them as they were taking a long time to find it and we didn't want to waste the meat on the vultures. It's incredible how quickly a vulture can pick clean a piece of meat! When they arrived, they were running, and Zulu instantly went for the best pieces and chased the others off before collecting his chosen chunks into a big pile. They quickly dragged pieces off into the bushes, leaving our truck totally surrounded by lions. They make an incredible noise as they eat too. When they were done, they would come looking for more pieces, coming really close to the truck! Only 2 of the lions seemed to notice how much the truck still smelled like blood and meat... and how the weird 2 legged animals that were on said truck were totally unprotected! But it was ok - a sharp "HEY!" and they backed off again! Such an incredible afternoon!

Bisa checking out the lemon smell

White backed vulture coming in for the Scavenge

Zulu arriving at the Scavenge

RS3 with her Bat Ears!

RS2 fully focused

LE3

Zulu tucking in to his mountainous feast!

Let me just sharpen my claws....

LE3 handsome boy again!

RS2 <3

So that's been my week again, and I'll post again in 2 weeks time! Merry Christmas everyone! I apologise for my terrible skills with photo positioning.... again....

Wow! What a week!

Nile Crocodile

I have to start by talking about my adventure on Tuesday and Wednesday this week. I’ve been wanting to go to Chobe National Park in Botswana for a while, and I finally went this week with one of the volunteers. Chobe is just stunning. The landscape is so beautiful, and extremely different to Mosi-Oa-Tunya. There is a wide variety of different ecosystems, allowing you to move between different places and find very different species. There is plains, river, forest, grassland, scrubland and sandy desert-like areas. The landscape is just fantastic, and the wildlife certainly matches! Our total species count for the 2 days: lions, zebra, giraffe, elephants, hippos (one of which got very grumpy at us), crocodiles, monitor lizards, impala, steenbok, jackals (they were super cute!), waterbuck, sable antelope, kudu, puku, cape buffalo, leopard tortoise (unfortunately we didn’t find any actual leopards…), striped mongoose, slender mongoose, squirrel, vervet monkey, baboon, sand snake (found because it slithered into my shoe while I was wearing it), dung beetles (and a million other insects that I don’t know what they were), African hoopoe, African fish eagle, African sacred ibis, goliath heron, little egret, cattle egret, Western great egret, African spoonbill, malachite kingfisher, pied kingfisher, white backed vulture, lappet-faced vulture, cormorant, African darter, kori bustard, squacco heron, African openbill, African jacana, marabou stork, yellow-billed stork, Egyptian goose, yellow-billed kite, swift, Southern ground hornbill, red-billed oxpecker, blacksmith lapwing, helmeted guineafowl, Southern-banded snake eagle, Lizard buzzard, African goshawk, Cape turtle-dove, Grey Go-away bird, white-browed coucal, swallow-tailed bee-eater, lilac-breasted roller, Southern yellow-billed hornbill, Southern red-billed hornbill, Africa Grey hornbill, African pied wagtail, Cape starling, and many many many others that I either couldn’t identify or have forgotten! Phew! That was a pretty decent list! Unfortunately the 3 things that I really wanted to see were leopard, painted dog and hyena, of which we saw no sign bar a few hyena footprints. Particularly frustrating was that apparently there has been a family of painted dogs living by the gate to the park for over 2 weeks, and they disappeared the day before we arrived! But then that’s what makes it interesting - if you could guarantee seeing animals, then it would be a zoo trip not a safari. Our guide “Captain” was fantastic. He tried so hard to find us what we wanted to see, and even he was surprised at how few animals were out on the second day, but based on that species list we still can’t really complain! Neither day went totally smoothly. Firstly, I had an argument with the Zambian border staff that were saying that my visa expired 2 and a half months ago… No my initial 30-day business visa expired then, but I bought a Temporary Employment Permit so I really am allowed to be in the country I promise! Once that was sorted we made it through to the safari. We started off with a boat cruise, on which we saw plenty on wildlife, including a male hippo who was not happy about us being there. He dived underwater and we could just see this trail in the water as he came very fast towards us, and then leapt right up out of the water in a mock charge! We got out pretty fast… If we hadn’t, I reckon he could have tipped the boat! Oops! The rest of the day was fine, apart from the fact that it chucked it down for about an hour, so all the animals hid and we got very wet! Still it was a great first day. We arrived at our campsite (already set up for us) around 6:45, ate dinner, then tucked into bed. Having seen no lions all day, they started roaring not far away during dinner. Very cool to go to sleep hearing lions roaring to each other. We saw them the next morning (thankfully not in our camp) but they were from a distance. We watched for a while to see if they would hunt, but they stayed where they were. 2 of the females played together though which was good to see. We saw frustratingly few animals on the second day - even Captain couldn't believe how little there was out, and near the end he just turns to us and goes "I've looked everywhere  for you, I don't know where else to go". Also rather annoying was that our truck broke down, so for about 2 hours we were driving around with an engine making so much noise that the animals we did see were always running away... We eventually broke down completely just as we were getting back towards camp for lunch, so our chefs came out to help, and after finding that they couldn't tow us, they shuttled us 2 at a time back to the camp. Having said that, however frustrating it may have been it was still an amazing trip and I have no doubts that I'll be heading over again at some point! 

African Fish Eagle

Angry Hippo

Monitor Lizard

Waterbuck

Baby impala!

Family road crossing

Vervet Monkey

Baby jackals playing

Elephant by the river

A pretty fantastic sunset!

My first ever wild lions

By the river

Our very shy sable antelope!

All in a row

Hello!

Southern Ground Hornbill

Steenbok

Face paints

Moustache...

Painting some very excited faces!

The rest of the week has been pretty fun. Monday was all about the lions, doing Dambwa Research followed by by Feeding and Enclosure Cleaning. We cleaned out the pool and removed all the bones and poo in the 8 lion enclosure. I love feeding the lions - they always sound so happy and they make the most fantastic noise. Thursday and Friday I was on Elephant Research and Elephant IDs. We saw a few elephants, but not the super herds of the past couple of weeks. However the elephants we did see included individuals that were definitely present in the massive herds, which would suggest that it has broken up into the old smaller herds. Sierra remains my favourite elephant. While I think big tusks are very impressive on elephants, her lack of tusks just makes it look she's smiling! She's so cute! Kids Club yesterday was fun. No lesson plan again, so we were just playing with the children and having fun with them. Started off with tennis and badminton with a little girl who simply handed me the racquet as soon as I was off the truck, then we started a skipping game with a long rope. We were going to play some volleyball, but it was so hot and humid that no one wanted to even stand in the sun, let alone run around in it! Then we got the face paints out... Oh my goodness! I've never seen them so excited! I spent over an hour sat on the floor just painting cheeks, hands and arms with random patterns! Thankfully they mostly just wanted flowers or stars which made things much simpler. Once I'd painted one lion though? Everyone wanted lions and elephants! I got so totally covered in paint, including a green moustache and beard thanks to the researcher getting hold of the paints! Couldn't he have been slightly more creative?! Yesterday afternoon was back with the lions doing another Feed and Clean session. However, the feed wasn't quite ready... Also known as the donkeys being fed to the lions were still alive...! It was quite lucky that all 7 of us had to be on the same activity, as only some of us were able to handle it... The handlers shot 2, and then we went and helped out with the chopping. So I've now completely butchered a donkey almost by myself! My one was pregnant which was quite sad, but the lions will appreciate that, especially Toka if he gets it! When we were done with butchering, we went and joined the others who had started cleaning while we finished. Being slightly covered in blood, the lions did find me very interesting to follow and sniff through the fence! We fed Toka and Bemba, Temi and Bisa, and the 6 lions in Etosha enclosure. 

Sierra, F52 - Such a cutie!

LE1

RS2

Yet another good week, which started off with Dambwa Research on Monday, followed by working to plant maize seeds in the garden. Research was good - the release site has become so green since I was last in there! The lions were lying in the road right by the fence, so we actually didn’t go in for the first session, but instead just watched them through the fence. As usual, my lion just slept the entire way through our activity budget, but some of the others moved around. There was a particularly cute moment, when Zulu the pride male got up and went to greet RS2, his oldest son. The higher the pride status of a lion, the more greetings they will receive, so seeing the ‘boss’ greeting his son shows the possible startings of a shift in power from father to son. On the other hand, it could also be a nice friendly “Hi son”! The afternoon we were planting maize in the garden, which involved using the pickaxe to dig a hole, and then putting 2 seeds in each one. I only dug a few holes - the axe is super heavy and it was really hot, so the handlers wouldn’t let us do much! Still it was good fun, and hopefully in a few months time there should be a nice healthy crop of maize ready. I’m not 100% sure what it will be used for, but at least some of it will go to the schools for the children’s lunches, so they can concentrate better in class. 

The Dambwa Sub-adults

Harry, M151

Tuesday was a far less interesting day - elephant IDs all morning, followed by lesson plan in the afternoon. The funny part was being peed on by a vervet monkey during breakfast…! Elephant IDs have been very productive this week, getting through a decent number of photos, and making a lot of new ID cards. Hopefully that doesn’t mean we’re just missing the elephants we’ve already got and making lots of duplicates! We did find a duplicate of Squank, who is one of our most obvious elephants thanks to the large notch in his left ear, and his almost perpendicular tusks! Oops! Lesson plan for Conservation Education was very quick and simple, as the lesson was cancelled last week so we already had everything prepared. However, when we arrived on Wednesday, there was no children - the school teacher had forgotten and sent the children home at the end of their exam. To be honest, I’m not sure they would have been concentrating after their exam anyway. It just meant that we joined the others on lion feeding and cleaning out on Wednesday afternoon instead. Wednesday morning was our very last trees session - all the plots are now done so we’re ready to start insect research. This turned out to be another particularly amusing session, as the plot a small gorge running through it, which we had to navigate, and at times balance on the edge of trying to measure the trees!

Pubescent Female with a calf - probably her sister

Squank, M40

Thursday was back to elephant research, and my usual problem surfaced very badly… I took 618 photos in one afternoon…! AAH! SO many to sort through… But the reason for that many? Record breaking number of elephants! We saw 102+, of which 5 were in 1 herd, and 97+ were in the other! It was such an incredible sight, and we just kept finding more. Of course in that group there were quite a few that we could recognise straight off too. Unfortunately, there wasn’t time for us to wait and watch them cross the road, so we only saw the first 23 really properly with no trees in front of us. Shame, but unavoidable. The most interesting part was that we saw, 2 days in a row, an adult male elephant with a calf. ALERT has never seen that before, and it’s really interesting to theorise why, though sadly we won’t be able to confirm any of them.

The Snare Sweep Team

Snare sweep on Friday morning we only found 15 snares, but it was still good fun and included a very boggy bit to jump through! The ALERT researcher who is normally in charge of taking photos of snare sweep wasn’t able to come this week, so he asked me to do it. I realised as I was that while I have however many thousand photos of animals in the park, I actually have virtually nothing of the park itself! Thanks to snare sweep, I have now corrected that.

Playing the ball-through-the-legs game at Kids Club

The final activity of my week was Kids Club on Saturday. Due to some financial difficulties, there has been some significant disruption to scheduling, so we had no lesson planned this week. Instead, we spent the entire 2.5 hours just playing games with the kids. We started off with volleyball, which was good fun, but it seems that 2 weeks is plenty long enough to forget we taught them last time! Hopefully they’ll still remember by next time. We stopped after about an hour as the net position meant we had to be in the sun a lot and it was getting far too hot! Moving into the shade of a tree we played broken bottle (essentially catch but where you have to do various things which makes it harder and harder to catch again if you miss it), duck-duck-goose, limbo, skipping, and a game that they introduced us to, where you stand in a circle with your legs apart, and you have to try to whack a ball through other people’s ‘goals’. If you succeed, then they have to first only use one hand, then turn around and do it looking through their legs, then do it backwards with only one hand! I didn’t win, but I was the last standing mzungu so not bad! We had a half day on Saturday so we had lunch then headed back to Serenity, before I went with 3 of the volunteers to the pool at David Livingstone, That place really is a God-send on a hot and humid day! We spent 3 hours there on Sunday too! 

It's been Elephant Week! We aren't really sure why they're still here, but they definitely are. More importantly, they have started forming very large herds again - we've identified several small herds all together more than once. We would expect them to move back to Zimbabwe about now, as this is what they have done every other year, so it's becoming quite a talking point at the office as various theories are thrown around for why they are still here. The general theory for their usual movement away is that the leaves here are all just coming out now as the rains arrive, and that when fresh the leaves do not have a high enough fibre content, but that doesn't really explain why it would be different this year. Anyway, for whatever reason the elephants are apparently not in as much of a hurry to leave as we expected them to be, so we've been getting some fantastic sightings! We saw minimums of 74 on Thursday, and then 43 yesterday! Certainly not a bad last week for the other research intern, though of course still sad to see him go. Again I really enjoyed the Thursday sighting because we got a really good view of them, and was able to recognise about 15 different elephants as they crossed in front of me, from only their left ear! Combined with the lack of tusks in the case of Sierra of course... The really annoying part of Thursday's sighting was how people behaved in reaction to the elephants crossing the road - how can anyone think it's acceptable to, in a national park of all places, see a herd of elephants crossing the road, and deliberately accelerate their enormous articulated lorry towards them and lean on the horn as hard as they can?! Seriously, can someone explain this to me?! Of course the elephants scattered so that half the herd were on one side of the road and half on the other... and then smaller cars very helpfully blocked their path by stopping to take photos...! You are in the National Park therefore by law you must stop somewhere that gives wildlife plenty of space, and allow them to do their own thing at their own pace. HOW IS THAT DIFFICULT?!?!?!?!?!?!?! 

Hunting down the Trees Plot

Idiot guy...

Trees this week was especially funny. First of all, despite the plot being as far from the office as we go, thanks to the research vehicle being down we had to wait for the Book Club volunteers to be ready before we could leave. Then, again because we weren't in the Land Rover, we struggled a lot to actually get to the plot. We can't entirely blame the Ford though - it turned out that the roads marked on our map that go to the plot are totally non-existent! So there was a LOT of off road driving to finally get to 1 km from the plot, at which point we gave up and just scrambled our way through rocks and scrub to reach the plot! Having left at 7:30, we started actually doing tree research at 10:45! Thankfully, it was a ridiculously easy plot when we finally arrived, so we were then done by 11:20 despite messing around quite a lot as we went. It started to thunder just as we were packing up our measuring strings, and the rain began to spot about 10 minutes after we got back on the truck. I can't say it was "spotting" for long - we drove for a good 20 minutes unable to see more than 10 m in any direction because the rain was so heavy! The rest of the way back was just very wet...! We had a 3 inch deep puddle in the bottom of the car! Now I was ok with this - I quite enjoyed it to be honest - as I had been really over-prepared (or so I thought until the rain started!) and brought both my raincoat and waterproof trousers with me. However, none of the volunteer, the other intern, or either researcher, had bothered with anything waterproof! Couldn't help but feel smug at that point... The good part of having the Ford instead of the Land Rover was that we could at least put our bags into the cab with the driver to keep those dry! I was totally drenched by the time we got back to the school over an hour later to pick up the nice dry volunteers from Book Club, so you can only imagine how wet and freezing the guys without waterproofs were! I was very glad the rain was much lighter at that point because I was already cold, and we were giving 2 girls a lift home and they had nothing and looked freezing so I gave them my coat to keep them dry, and I just froze for that part of the drive! We very nearly didn't make it home, as by the time we got back to Dambwa the road was a mixture of mudslide and lake! Our driver (since upgraded to "Captain") somehow managed to pull us through, to many cheers of praise and thanks that it was him who happened to be driving that day! The last part of the drive was quite fast, and this time rather than giving my coat away, I ended up kneeling backwards on my seat with my coat open, attempting to act as a windbreak for the freezing and soaked guys behind me! It was a fun drive!! 

Meat Prep

I've done quite a bit of lion work this week too, though I've only actually seen them once! On Wednesday I was supposed to be doing a double elephant ID session by myself, but thanks to load shedding (scheduled power cuts that never happen on schedule!) we had no power and the laptop had no charge. With nothing else to do, I went and joined the guys doing meat prep, weighing and chopping up meat slabs for 12 lions. I then went up to Dambwa with them to help with feeding and cleaning. I love watching the lions eat - they get so excited and then make wonderful "happy eating" noises. We actually then had Wednesday afternoon off as all of the staff had a meeting, so we went home and played Monopoly! (Apologies to all Monopoly fans when I say that it really is as dull as I've always heard and I think it will be a while before I'm bored enough to try it again...!) Thursday I ended up roped into meat prep for a second time instead of doing IDs! This time I was about to start when our volunteer coordinator came over and asked for some help getting a dead cow off of the truck. She'd died overnight in labour when her calf got stuck, so she couldn't be used for human consumption, so the guy had brought her to us for lion food. This meant she needed cutting up, weighing and then freezing, so guess what? We didn't just move her off the truck... So I've now done a full cow chop! I somehow managed to avoid to get totally covered in blood, but some of the others looked like they'd just murdered someone! 

Meat Prep

The other part of my week that has to be mentioned is nothing to do with work. Our lions researcher is American, and as part a tradition started by her predecessor she treated us to a full Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday! It was SO good! She'd taken the day off on Wednesday, and then had Thursday afternoon off too, so had by herself had managed to make butter chicken, breaded garlic chicken, green bean casserole, bread, cheesy mashed potato, sage and onion stuffing, gravy and corn on the cob, followed by an amazing brownie with ice cream, for 12 people, and there was still some left over! We were all so stuffed at the end we just didn't move for a good half hour afterwards! It was a really good night, just enjoying food and talking and laughing together. The current group is particularly lovely, so very enjoyable to just spend time chatting and playing games with them.

Being watched by 2 young giraffe

And that's it, so until next time have a good week everyone!