Bye bye Bisa!

Final week in Zambia! :O I cannot believe it - this place is just amazing and I will be so sad to leave it. 6 months has gone unbelievably fast, and I'm sure the next 6 will too. I'm certainly gutted that I have to leave Livingstone, the staff here who have become such great friends, and the Elephant project, but equally I'm so excited to go to Victoria Falls and start discovering again! The hyena project sounds fascinating and challenging, not to mention I'm excited to go to the Zambezi National ark where I'm far more likely to get a sighting of predators (Mosi-Oa-Tunya doesn't have any since it's so close to human settlements and really small) including jackals, hyena (obviously!), wild/painted dog, cheetah (if I'm very lucky!) and leopard (again, if I just happen to be in the right place at the right time!). This final week has been both fun and very sad. I had far too many goodbyes to say, and our researcher was sad for a lot of the week and simply refusing to mention the number of days. When I actually left on Monday (sorry this isn't quite on time - writing from Victoria Falls!), there were many tears, presents, and a lot of hugs! Watching the clock in the afternoon ID session was not pleasant, knowing that I only had 90 more minutes here......... 60....... 40... 30... 20... 10.. 5. Time for the off! And then when I got back it was a rushed goodbye to my 2 Zambian mothers (our cleaning staff at Serenity who have spoiled me rotten and taken such great care of me for the past 6 months) before heading straight to the border. Now that I'm here, obviously it's going to take some time to settle in, but I'm all unpacked and everyone seems very nice. I have a painting hung up on my curtains of my favourite elephant from Zambia. Sierra watches over me and brightens up my room here so I don't forget her or the amazing people across the river <3

Saying goodbyes....

My present at Kids Club - a colouring of Sierra <3

Anyway, soppiness aside (mostly) I have had a good week. A lot of IDs, a few sessions of Dambwa research, one research drive through the park, and 3 sessions of community - Conservation Education at Mukumasaba on Wednesday, Book Club at Twabuka on Thursday, and Kids Club at Maunga on Saturday. Con Ed this week was all about flowers and we were amazed at their knowledge! We did a similar session with the last group of Con Ed kids at the same school, and they couldn't get their heads around it at all, and definitely didn't seem to have any prior knowledge, so we were expecting it to be very difficult to explain. However when we started going through naming the parts of a flower (petal, sepal, stigma, style, ovum, anther, stamen) they were able to answer instantly, and we got to the end of that activity far quicker than expected! Probably a good thing since the next activity, which was aimed at teaching about pollination, turned to instant chaos! The idea was that we would have 10 kids acting as flowers, and 3 as bees, and that the bees had to pick the most attractive flowers based on their assigned physical attributes (first round was bright colours vs dull colours, second round was number of sweets that the flower held to act as nectar). However, our bees didn't really understand that they were only supposed to visit certain flowers, the flowers were giving "pollen" away from the stigma (the equivalent of being fertilised then unfertilised!) as well as the anther so that made no sense and only served to confuse them more, and when it came to the "nectar" round, several of the flowers ate their nectar rather than giving it to the bees which totally defeated the object! Wasn't really any other way to do it though that we could think of.... Book Club was also successful this week. Back at Twabuka school but with a group of older children, we switched roles so this week I was doing the word activity while others did the reading tests. We were using harder words than last week (things like "generation" and "running" as opposed to "cup" and "ruler"). I would read one out, they would write it down and hold it up, and then we would have a volunteer come and write it on the board and the others would say if they agreed or not. Mostly it went very well, with at least half the class getting every word correct. However, the word "ceiling" had them totally stumped, possibly largely to do with the fact that they hadn't heard it before! What was quite fun was teaching them the "I before E, except after C, when sounded as EE" rhyme. I know it helped me a lot with my English spelling so hopefully it will help them too! Kids Club was all about how to be a good self-manager. After the usual initial playing, we headed inside and I helped the community volunteer out with her lesson using different positive and negative self-management words (motivated, on time, enthusiastic, organised, planned, confident etc vs lazy, late, lost, messy, confused). They did understand and by the end they knew the words better than at the start, but it was quite hard going to get them to talk to us again, and they seemed fairly bored at times... I think we did well to keep them engaged, even if that did mean cutting a couple of her activities short.

My last photo of LE3

Dambwa was good fun this week, partly because I was there a lot, and partly because we had some really great sightings! I kept thinking it was the last time I was going to see them, then being able to go up and see them again! I did my last feed and clean session, and did 3 sessions of Dambwa Research. The first one was supposed to be my last, but due to the wet roads being impassable in places and the lions not being close to the dry ones, we couldn't find them. I was rescheduled to go again on Tuesday and Saturday afternoons, and were successful on both of those. The lions found us! We would know roughly where they were based on the telemetry signals from the adults' radio collars, but actually spotting them was impossible until they came out to say hello! Saturday they just walked around us and then continued on their way to Main Gate and their favourite place. Tuesday however they got rather too close! We were parked right up next to the electric fence so couldn't move easily, when they appeared out of the bush next to us and stared us down from only 2-3 m away! I still, even after 6 months, haven't managed to get over how stunning RS2's eyes are! So pale and menacing... Having him look you straight in the face when you're sat at his level is both terrifying and amazing! I was in the front seat of the car so lower down than usual putting me right at their level. As soon as they had checked us out and laid back down a few metres away, we quickly repositioned the car so we were no longer trapped! A pretty awesome way to finish my 6 months of research!
I had my last Snare Sweep this week, and again the park was looking particularly beautiful. We saw a big herd (or big for Mosi-Oa-Tunya anyway!) of Wildebeest on the way, and then once out the light was stunning coming through the grass again. We also saw giraffes, baboons and puku which was nice. My last time in the park... It was beautiful <3

Snare sweep getting quite overgrown!

The end of my last Zambian Snare Sweep