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!