Guess what?! Another good week - imagine you’ll get bored of reading this soon! Unfortunately, thanks to my stomach and head deciding they hadn’t played up in a while, the second half of the week was less good… Thursday I just slept, and Friday afternoon I didn’t manage to go out on the truck either.

Reflections at Dry Manzi

Again I’ve mainly been on elephant research this week, though unlike last week, unfortunately no herds of 70+ elephants at a time…! Still no Dabs to help me with identification of elephant photos, so I’ve spent a lot of time staring at a computer screen by myself again, trying to decide if this ear matches that ear, and if this elephant is male or female, adult or pubescent and so on. I’ll have my helper back soon… or rather the head researcher will be back and I’ll be back to being the helper soon! Got a new helper too arrived today, so there’ll be an extra pair of eyes on the look out for elephants, buffalo and bushbuck when we’re out in the park. Monday we had a herd of 15 big males who walked halfway through the park, past several perfectly drinking spots, before reaching the one that they wanted. Part of that group was M1 (the very first elephant that ALERT identified) also known as Piet. Not especially exciting as he’s seen fairly frequently, but in the previous 5 weeks of being here, I’d heard “That’s Piet… Oh no that’s not Piet.” so many times that it was quite fun to be told that it finally was Piet I was looking at! Saturday was when we saw our biggest herd of 24 individuals. However, they’d decided to be exceptionally awkward with us this time! Of all the days to hang out in the sewage ponds, where the road is super bumpy to get to them, and lets just say the air is not exactly a fresh pleasant scent, it had to be when I just recovering from a stomach bug didn’t it?! Thanks elephants! Having said that, it’s fully understandable - a large containing all the water and vegetation that they need, that’s also nice and cool… delightful really! The funniest experience this week had to come from a vervet monkey… and I’m beyond gutted I didn’t get a photo! In case you don’t know, vervet monkeys, for whatever strange evolutionary reason, have really bright blue testicles, and there was a volunteer on the drive with us who said she really wanted to see this… and just as she said it, this male vervet goes shooting up a tree to a fork right at eye height, and straddles himself between the branches, full flasher style! It was just the funniest moment any of us had had that day, and we were all nearly wetting ourselves at the volunteer’s face - a look of pure shock, mixed with trying and failing not to burst out laughing! So funny…

Taking a dip in the sewers!

Elephants on parade

Conservation Education was slightly disappointing this week. We followed the lesson plan as it was laid out, and we thought it sounded like a good plan, but they just didn’t seem interested… I don’t know if it was how we presented it, or if it was just the topic itself (poaching), but they just seemed bored… Having said that, they all seemed to come away understanding the major points etc. at the end, so fingers crossed they at least learned something from it, even if they didn’t seem especially enthralled!

White fronted bee eater

Monitor lizard

We spent Friday morning doing a snare sweep in the park that was very satisfying. We found 13 snares between us, 2 of which I spotted which is definitely a good feeling! And even better, there were no elephants or buffalo to have to move away from this week!

 Sunset at Victoria Falls

Victoria Falls with some new amazing friends <3

Last thing to talk about is what I did on Sunday after writing last week’s post. First, I was asked to write a research proposal for a new part of the elephant study… asked on Saturday to be done by Monday… when I’ve never even read a research proposal before, and only half understand the study that I’m meant to be proposing… Talk about throwing me in the deep end! On the other hand, all about learning, and clearly shows that they’ve liked the work I’ve done so far if they’re asking me to take on new stuff like that! After that, I FINALLY made it to Victoria Falls! I went with 2 American girls who are here as lion volunteers, and it was really great fun. We had a great time, explored all the different walks on the Zambian side of the gorge, including walking right down to the boiling pot - a knackering climb back up when you’ve done no real exercise for 5 weeks! Was proud of how easily I managed it at the time, then realised the next day I should be less proud when my calves were aching with every step! Had a really lovely afternoon there, and then finished off with the sunset over the falls. Fantastic!

Yet another week flown by! I'm going to be done here before I know it!

Fantastic Sunrise from the park

Climbing out after a dip

F37, Donna

Tough guys? Big wusses!

This week has mainly been elephant research and identification. The fun (and scary!) part if the added level of responsibility I've received now that the head researcher for elephants has gone away for a fortnight. I've spent a couple of mornings driving around on Elephant Research with just the driver, and elephant research I've just been left to get on with - I guess that makes me temporary head researcher! Elephant IDs have become far too confusing though... The first couple of weeks it was just going through the files and photos and identifying the elephants in the pictures, but the last couple of weeks I haven't had a single session where I haven't found mistakes from previous ID sessions (not mine I have to add!). I spent one session this week trying to separate the 3, really quite obviously different, elephants who were all listed as the same one in the photo library! Always quite scary making any kind of radical change like that when you have no one to confirm it... The elephants drives we've been going around the local villages and looking for any signs of elephants, as well as asking locals how frequently they see them and which way they go etc. It was really interesting, and I really enjoyed that. However, it was nothing on the last couple of afternoons of elephant research where we were back in the park and driving around. Friday, we had a group of 18 elephants on either side of the road that were being totally calm and relaxed, with no care at all for us, until another car pulled up a bit too close... That freaked one of the big males and, clearly in a bad mood, he came WAY too close for comfort to our car, but thanks to the other car being in the way and apparently not bothering to move, we had no way of getting out! Thankfully he decided to just lose enough for some awesome photos and nothing more...! The rest of the afternoon we didn't really see all that many elephants, but they were all either solitary or in pairs, which makes recording fun because you're trying to work out a distance for one group, while also trying to keep an eye on the other 2 groups behind you so you can get to them next! Then yesterday afternoon got really interesting - there was a herd of 10 males that began to head out of the park but just as they were heading out something (and we were really close but still have no idea what it was!) totally freaked out the leading elephant, and the whole herd went charging back into the park, running and trumpeting for over half a kilometre! This was annoying at the time, but if they hadn't we'd have followed them out and we'd have missed what we saw instead... Once we were back in the park, we drove around for a while and saw very little, before eventually spotting a single elephant way over in the distance. Driving closer, we began to spot a few individuals, to create a fairly spread out herd of somewhere between 10 or 20. Again, had we not seen them, I wouldn't have spotted the other 3... That 3 then turned out to be "minimum 12", so we drove around slightly further to get a good look at them... and they turned out to be a minimum of 60! They crossed the road in front of us so fast that we can't be sure of the exact size of the herd, but once they then joined the other herd of 11+, there must have been nearly 90! Quite common in July and August, but haven't seen anything that size since I arrived! Totally incredible sight! They began to walk up towards the road, so we drove up there, and for a few moments they walked towards us in this great long line side-by-side and it was like watching an army coming through the trees! We lost them before they reached the road because it got dark... but SO worth being late for dinner! (I apologise to my English teachers for my major overuse of exclamation marks in that paragraph… and dot dot dots… and just in general with both of them to be honest!)

No this isn't cropped!
WAY too close for comfort!

Male bushbuck

I unfortunately missed out on Conservation Education and Dambwa Lion Research this week, thanks to the delightful thing that is immigration.... But I now have my Temporary Employment Permit sorted, meaning that I can officially work here for another 3 months! Took forever though... Ugh...  I also spent one morning listening to a talk by Dr Jackie Abell, the Head of Research across all of the ALERT projects. She told us all about the problems with lion conservation and how their different projects work, and then we watched a video that her friend had made of the Ngamo Pride at Antelope Park in Zimbabwe which made us all cry it was so cute! Adorable!

My big problem this week is that my laptop is playing up and refusing to move any photos onto my hard drive, but the memory is full so I can't put any more on and my camera memory card is full! AAH! Fingers crossed I can get stuff sorted.....

Week 4 was somewhat less good than the previous 3… I just haven’t been all that well, but I’m ok again now.

I am destined not to get to Victoria Falls - this time I got to the stage of the taxi being on it’s way when I started feeling sick and headachey so decided to stay at home and sleep! That turned out to be a good decision when I got steadily worse and ended up not working on Monday either, and just stayed in and read books all day! Tuesday I was back at work though and getting on with life again. Again my week has mainly been elephant research, driving around the park looking for them, and studying dung piles to see how fast they decay. This will be used to produce an equation to estimate elephant numbers based on dung transect surveys in the future. The most fun part of elephants this week was probably yesterday when I spotted them myself for one of the first times! Normally our driver sees them (literally a couple of trunk 40 m away in the thicket and he’ll spot it!) and I spend 3 minutes just trying to work out where he’s looking, and for that reason it was ages before he even believed me they were there! Particularly since we were driving at about 60 kmph at the time… But there they were - adult male, adult female, and a juvenile. It’ll be ages again (if ever!) before I spot another before David, but IT HAPPENED!

OMG! A person!

I had Conservation Education on Wednesday afternoon as usual which was both great fun, and very effective this week! We were continuing last week’s topic of intensive farming and the issues with it, and the focus was to be on tobacco farming. Dabs walked in at the start of the lesson and announced that we’d scrapped the original lesson plan, and we were going to talk about the extremely serious deal that had just been signed to build a huge tobacco farm on the outskirts of Livingstone, between the airport and Wasawenge, very close to the National Park. At first the general comments were along the lines of this being good as it would bring in jobs and improve the economy, but as the discussion continued it got steadily more and more sinister, until I swear they thought Livingstone was going to be completely destroyed! I’ve certainly never seen anyone look so relieved as when we told them it wasn’t really happening… but it’s always possible, and could be a threat in the future. I really struggled to keep a straight face at times though!

Spent one morning on Carbon Monitoring Research in Dambwa Forest which should have been fine, but we were one person short so didn't have enough hands for the work, which made it super slow so we did''t finish. Far more annoying though were the mopani bees - small insects which don't sting or bite, but drink bodily fluids so are determined to get into your ears, eyes, nose, mouth and even pants! And there were THOUSANDS of them! There were times when I really couldn't see anything because they were so thick in front of my face... Not to mention that the Dambwa Forest has barely any trees (deforestation, hence the monitoring programme) so you're stood out in the African sun for hours at a time, unable to open your bottle or mouth to have a drink without filling your mouth with bees! Ugh - they were unpleasant... and only going to get worse as the season continues and it's already hitting 38 degrees celsius in the shade! Having said that, it was a good excuse to go and get ice cream afterwards! 

Washing the rape leaves for lunch at culture day

Human climbing frame!

Friday was definitely the best day of the week though. We started off with a snare sweep in the national park, walking through the brush and collecting up all the litter and snares we could find. Only 6 this time, which suggests we were in an ok area - normally they’d expect to find closer to 60! We got back late from that, and then the truck died (as it does just about every time it’s used!) meaning that we were very late for the mid-morning/afternoon session! We drove right out into the rural farmland areas, to a tiny settlement where we had a culture day. This meant learning how to be a Zambian woman: wearing a wraparound skirt (good thing I still had my trousers on underneath because it fell down a couple of times!), doing the cooking, keeping an eye on the children, and serving the men their lunch (which must be done kneeling), while the men sat around, chatted and drank beer! We made beef stew, nshima (a corn based meal which you boil to produce something with the consistency of mashed potato), and shredded rape leaves which are chopped into these tiny pieces by hand with a knife - none of us could manage that to the quality they wanted! When not cooking, I basically became a human climbing frame for the many small children running around, who were extremely cute, but clearly spoke no English so I had some somewhat one-sided conversations with them! They would literally appear and just start climbing you until they were on your hip and then just hold on! The baby crawled into my lap at one point while I was failing to chop the rape leaves, which gave an excellent excuse to let someone more skilled take over for a bit! The kids also adored my camera, which got thoroughly abused with every button pushed at once by some kid or another! Haven’t yet noticed any problems with it since…! After lunch (which thanks to being late arriving we didn’t start until gone 3pm!) we had a quick dance session, which was good fun though I don’t think I could ever shake and shimmy the way they manage to! The truck died again on the way home so we were very late back to camp that night… and last night too for the same reason…!

So that’s it - week 4 was still a really great week, with the culture day being fantastic, but could have been even better had my stomach behaved throughout… I was going to get ill at some point, I’m just impressed I lasted this long!

Male bushbuck are so beautiful!

Don't tread on me!

Week 3 has been the best so far! Monday was just incredible, and the rest of the week hasn't been bad either! I've been on Elephant research virtually all week again, and have seen some amazing things this week. We've identified a new breeding herd, having seen them in the same place 3 times, and they have a TINY calf that can only be about 3 or 4 months old! It's so cute! Still at the stage where he's not really in control of his trunk.... "What is this thing on my face?!" But even without that guy there, Monday was still by far he most wonderful afternoon I've had since I arrived. We found a herd of 11 elephants almost as soon as we left camp and, since they seemed to be going to keep moving for a bit, we decided to follow them and try to complete the movement corridor we've been building up. Not only did we manage that, it was just a magical afternoon following them along like that... They headed through the open areas so we got fantastic views of them from both sides (which also is extremely useful for making ID cards!) and it was.... wow.... no other words! At one point we were on this section of road that we knew they were about to cross, so we turned off the engine and just waited... and it was at that point that the birds all stopped singing... In complete silence (bar the odd cricket and fly), we watched these elephants emerge from the undergrowth, and walk in single file across only about 20 metres in front of us, with the evening sun shining behind them... The first time in my life that I've truly experienced the feeling of being utterly tiny, and totally awed by nature and life... Pure majesty, and a moment I will never forget.

Having a sunset drink

Talking of majesty, I had my first experience of the semi-wild pride in the Dambwa release site on Wednesday. There are 12 lions in the 440 acre (I think...?!) enclosure, and they lay in the same spot and slept the entire time! Doing what lions do best.... We did an activity budget survey of them (1 hour, record what they're doing every 2 minutes), and they never moved! They were given a scavenge the day before which they had clearly found because all of them had these huge round bellies where they had thoroughly stuffed themselves! Zulu, the pride male, was so fat he couldn't even be bothered to stand up, so simply opened his legs and peed from lying down, onto the lion next to him! Lovely Zulu....

Leya's cubs, LE2, LE3 and LE1

Conservation Education on Wednesday was the advantages and disadvantages of sustainable vs intensive farming, and we had a debate with them. The kids got really involved, and the final decision was that sustainable farming was best (thank goodness!) so really successful! All I can say is that next time boys, try not to get quite so dominated by the girls!
  

Conservation Education Debate

Week 2 over already! I can already tell it's going to be one of those year's that seems to go super fast, but thinking back to arriving already seems like over a month ago! So strange...

Week 2 has been amazing - even better than week 1! Last Sunday was wonderfully relaxing, spending the morning just sorting photos and doing not a lot before going to the David Livingstone Hotel down the road where we spent the afternoon just relaxing by the pool and drinking Rock Shandy overlooking the river, while a pied kingfisher was showing off his skills right in front of us! 

Mummy, why are those people watching us?

Monday I was on lions again, spending the morning on meat prep then data collection. Meat prep definitely my least favourite part of the job so far... Large bits of donkey that need weighing and sorting, and it just smells terrible... But the lions certainly appreciate the job you do! They get dinner! We fed them and cleaned out their enclosures in the afternoon. Got a great series of photos showing the big male and a female battling over a piece of meat so much they didn't see another female come up behind them and steal it! Data collection was somewhat lazier. We spend 30 minutes at a time recording what the lions are doing every 10 seconds... We literally sat in the sun for an hour and watched lions sleeping! It's so hot they just lie in the shade and sleep during the day. Thursday was the next time I saw the lions. There were 3 of them in a quarantine enclosure having been moved from Zimbabwe, and they were being moved up to join the rest of the Dambwa lions. This gave me a pretty unique opportunity to watch lions being darted with sedative, measured, and moved around. Unfortunately for timing reasons this was as far as I got. I didn't have time to see them brought around. But... ELEPHANTS! Spent most of my working time this week chasing elephants, taking photos, monitoring dung, and clearing litter out of the park. The elephant research is fantastic, I just love it. We spent the Thursday mid morning session watching a family group of 4 (mummy, male pubescent, female juvenile and calf) from only about 15 metres away, and they just wandered around and ignored us. The pubescent male found a metal ring and spent about 5 minutes playing with it, enjoying the noise it made. Basically an elephant's guitar! Very cute, but of course we were constantly worried he would try to eat it (he didn't). We then saw the same group in the afternoon, and again the pubescent was just adorable. He spotted us in the Research Vehicle and came again quite close, then started playing Peekaboo with us from behind a tree! Totally gorgeous! The community work this week was again just Conservation Education for me. This week we were teaching the students about flower pollination and plant dispersal. I really enjoyed it, so hopefully the students did too!

Madoda

Playing Peekaboo with elephants!

My other exciting news though was from Friday afternoon. Luzia (a volunteer from German-speaking Switzerland) and I went with 2 of the ALERT staff to see the white rhinos of Mosi-Oa-Tunya! They were incredible to see. You get off the jeep and walk right up to within 15m of them! Got some good photos, though they were lying down and sleeping a lot of the time! There are only 11 white rhinos in Zambia, and 9 of them are here. We saw 5 so a wonderful afternoon. Continued from there on a game drive around the park. The same roads I've been driving every day looking for elephants, but first time we've been going slowly, and stopping for things other than elephants! The giraffes were incredible - in one place we sat and could see 7! Probably saw about 30 that day... Amazing... Also saw saddle billed stork, sacred ibis, black ibis, white-fronted bee eaters, a tortoise, a monitor lizard, puku, kudu, impala (of course - they're everywhere!), buffalo, warthogs, bushbuck, waterbuck, and a tiny little crocodile! It really was a truly fantastic afternoon.

White rhinos!