Gardening at Dambwa

Toka tucking in XP

Time for another update and it’s been something of an eventful week! Monday was just slightly crazy with the number of things that could have gone horribly wrong. First off we had to leave late for Dambwa Research, but we made it into the site and found the lions just approaching their favourite place. 404 acres and they still hang out right by the main gate in! They very nicely paraded past us, which was very helpful in terms of seeing how their condition is looking, not to mention of course a good opportunity for photography! However, thanks to the lions now being by Main Gate, we obviously couldn’t just hop out the car and open that one, so we had to drive across the site to East Gate in order to get out… problem. How we ever managed to get through that site without getting stuck I will never know! We must have skidded around a hundred times by the time we got to the gate, not to mention some significant off-roading to avoid the worst patches! We eventually made it out of the site, and then had to drive along the edge of it to get to the Boma for breakfast. It was doing this that we came across our second problem - the release site had been pulled over during the storms so, once they found the break, the lions could just walk straight out! Definitely not good… That changed our plans for the second session a bit! We got everyone up to the site and did a rapid fix job of the fence, then I spent about 20 minutes up to my knees in leaf litter, lobbing armfuls over the fence so that next storm it doesn’t all get immediately caught back in the fence and bring it down again! The afternoon was far more normal, with a standard feeding, cleaning, and grass slashing session, but even that had one trauma - the storm had toppled an acacia in Temi and Bisa’s enclosure, again landing on their fence, so again we had lions that, had they realised it, could very easily have escaped! We left the Dambwa guys to sort that one while we the 7. Wednesday I was again at Dambwa, but a far less exciting day - no disasters overnight to contend with! The coolest part of Wednesday was actually when we got home and were on our way to dinner. We were joined by a fruit bat as a dinner companion! Being used to British bats, this guy (or girl I’ve no idea) was huge, and had a fantastic nose for producing echolocation calls.  Finished off my week at Dambwa again, this time in the garden. The garden isn’t big, but we grow vegetables (currently maize) in there which go to a combination of staff lunches, and some to the local schools so that the children have a bit more to eat, enabling them to concentrate better in class. This time it was weeding, shovelling the other plants away and leaving them to dry, to become fertiliser again for the maize. Unfortunately, one of my own issues of this week has been injuring my arm - too much slashing I think - so while I was glad to be weeding rather than grass cutting, the shovel still hurt! Going to pay for that for a while I think...

Playing cards in the park when we got stuck...

Elephants only had the one disaster for the week, though thankfully it was at least on Friday during our last session, and we had already visited the dung that we needed to get to. Doris, our not-quite-as-reliable-as-she-used-to-be research vehicle, broke down right in the middle of a ditch! Brilliant… We called the office asking them to come pick us up, and sat playing Elephant Pictionary (nerds drawing the distinguishing features of different elephants and the other has to get which it is!) until we got a call back… At first we assumed they were lost trying to find the Sussi road, but then heard that actually no they’d set off to come tow us out, and then the TDI had died too, producing smoke and sparks from the ignition! Double brilliant…! So then we had to wait for the Ford to get back to the office from Dambwa to come and pick us up (now moved on from Elephant Pictionary to cards!), but the Ford has very poor pulling power so we came back in the hopes that the TDI only needed some rewiring… It didn’t! Eventually the guys gave up on the TDI and just took the Ford to pull Doris out, so while we now have all 4 cars sat at the office, we are now down to just 1 working… Fingers crossed they get fixed quickly! Other than that, elephant research has gone pretty well this week. We’ve got ahead on our dung decay survey, and while we are still on the same ID sighting now as when we started the week, we have progressed a long way through it and are slowly increasing the number of elephants in our database. I have however checked to see how many photos we have left for August, and it seems we still have over 300 photos to get through before we actually reach the sightings for which I was actually there! I arrived nearly 5 months ago! 

GECKO!

The office! How have I never posted this?!

Snare Sweep

We had a very successful couple of mornings at the end of the week. Friday Snare Sweep we found a total of 44 snare wires in the park, and all of them very fresh - they hadn’t even had time to mark the trees. I found a pile of 7 new ones just lying on the floor, not yet set up. We think that something (maybe even us, though we think the Wildlife Authority is more likely) disturbed the poachers while they were setting up and they simply dropped the stuff and ran. We’ve had a very slow couple of weeks with Snare Sweep so this week was very successful. Kids Club yesterday was also a lot better than last week. This time at Natebe school, we were doing the same activities as last week but with different students. Natebe is slightly more advanced than Maunga, so it’s not surprising that they a bit more confident and their English is better. We started off with reintroducing STRIPE to them - they couldn’t remember what any of the letters stood for besides S for Self-manager, so we ended up playing Hangman to find the others. This worked very well, with more and more of them getting into it as we went through. We then moved onto the games section and it was so much more rewarding than at Maunga! Again I taught one group a game called Thumbs Up, while the volunteer with me taught them a game where you have to slap your hands on the table in a certain order. This time when we mixed the groups up, there was so much more participation and the kids seemed to really enjoy it, especially the hand slapping one. We came back together about half an hour before the end, going through the STRIPE skills and discussing which ones we’d used and how. We finished off by teaching half of them how to play Rock-Paper-Scissors like last week, and then getting them to pair up and play against the ones who hadn’t been taught it. This meant they had to first listen to us, then explain (and listen to) each other in order for it to work. We were then going around and challenging the ones who had been taught by each other to see if they understood. It worked really well this week, and they all seemed to both enjoy it and also improve when we did it the second time around which was very rewarding to see. 

So that’s about it again - only 3 broken fences, 2 broken cars, and 1 broken me!

Yet another awesome African Sunset <3