Hello! Somehow it seems like ages since I last wrote, despite it only being the normal week, and the week to have seemingly flown by - funny how time does that. My week has been relatively uneventful, but equally enjoyable, and how uneventful can time really be when you're working with lions and elephants?!

Rainy season is definitely beautiful... when it's not raining!

Baby wildebeest playing chase

Baby zebra during elephant research

I've spent most of the week doing elephant IDs. Now that our researcher is back from leave we have had a lot of catching up to do. I am very good at spotting the obvious elephants, but it is so much faster to have 2 people working when the photos are unclear, or the elephant has no significant distinguishing features. We are now up to 18th August - warp speed ahead and all that! To try and have any chance of catching up, the too-nerdy-for-her-own-good intern has started bringing the laptop home in the evenings... I skip forward to the sightings that we haven't started yet and just go through each one quickly, recording all the elephants that I recognise straight away (I know more of them than anyone else so can save others a lot of time) and deleting the photos of them, and the photos that we can't use, to save time later during actual ID sessions. An example - 1 sighting of 11 elephants had over 300 pictures to sort through.... I identified 8 of them, and then went through and deleted nearly 200 pictures of those elephants, leaving only the photos with the remaining 3 to pick our way through when we finally reach September IDs...! We've only been out twice on elephant research, and both times we've spent the entire time on dung decay survey, not seeing any elephants. At this point, we are fairly convinced that they've almost all gone back to Zimbabwe, with the exception of at least 1 big male who's been laying some pretty large dungs for us to survey! We've also had a couple of reports of elephants still being seen at Dry Manzi, right on the Eastern edge of our survey area. I miss seeing my elephants... 

I'm watching you!

I've had a bit less time with the lions this week than last week, but still seen them a bit. I did 2 sessions of Dambwa Research earlier in the week, in which the lions as usual mostly slept, but LE2 was very obliging and came and sat right in front of us, posing beautifully in the sunshine. Far too many photos as usual... They've also changed their favourite position this week, moving slightly more North to hang out in the thicker bushes, making research somewhat trickier! I did do one activity budget on Kela, where I had to keep changing my recordings as the researchers and handlers kept mis-identifying my lion due to the thick brush, and so I was looking first at Loma, then Leya, then Kwandi instead! Oops! Managed to get it all sorted fairly well though... Give me elephant IDs over lion IDs any day! I spent Saturday afternoon also at Dambwa, this time with the enclosure lions. We went into Selous enclosure (Kovu and his 4 girls) to clean out bones and poo, and to cut the grass in there. Namwala is especially cute in that enclosure as she has a very white little beard, and is generally fluffier than the others, and yesterday she was just sat by the fence watching us looking SO adorable we almost felt bad for cleaning out her enclosure - she just looked like she was sad we were taking stuff out! Helped to slash the grass for a bit - an activity which isn't especially tiring, just very sweaty, especially when it's really humid - and it's incredible the difference it makes! The grass is now easily reaching knee height in places, and waist height in others, so not a lot of slashing clears an area pretty fast!

Few things more relaxing than watching sleepy lions...

LE1 looking handsome

LE2

LE2 looking slightly more awake!

The Dambwa Pride

LE2's place in the sun

Kids Club on Saturday was good, but also very frustrating. First of all we were a bit late, as one of the volunteers was ill so we had to drive right the way back to our home at Serenity to drop her off before we could head out. This meant that when we got there, we only had about 20 minutes to play with the children before we had to start our lesson plan, but we still got in a kick-around with the football, and played a bit of frisbee. We also had no staff with us, so it was only me and 1 volunteer, trying to teach a group of about 20 children who didn't want to listen. That was our problem - the children will not listen or talk to anyone who doesn't speak Tonga, the local language. They can speak English, but they just won't talk to us. The lesson plan was structured so that we would teach them a game in a group, then mix up the groups and they would teach each other. The STRIPE skills they were supposed to be using were Self-manager, Teamwork, Innovation, Participation and Enquiry, with the remaining skill (Reflection) to be used at the end when we discussed the activity. However, that activity required them to talk, and of the 20, only 2 were willing to do that! The first time around, we had them in separate groups, and they then joined the same group when it came to the teaching, so for that group it worked very well. The other group however just sat and looked at each other, and even when asked direct questions (by us when we realised that they just wouldn't do anything if we left them to their own devices) they either refused to say anything at all, or would just continue their conversations with their friends and pretend we didn't exist... We tried doing the reflection part early, and then doing the activity again with 2 new games to see if that would improve things, but it didn't. The same 2 boys were again very good about explaining, this time also working together to demonstrate the game (rock-paper-scissors) to the other group, but then they all just sat there and refused to try actually playing, and while they explained it very well (first in english and then in Tonga) we still didn't get any kind of reaction from the others to tell whether they understood or not. The other group didn't even try to explain their game... So all-in-all it was just extremely frustrating, as we continually came up with new ways to try and get through, and they just flat-out refused to talk to us. Better luck next week I suppose - the Natebe kids are generally easier to work with than Maunga anyway, and hopefully next week we might have someone who can speak to them in their own language...