I don't even know what week this is! Completely lost track.... 6? Both feels like I've barely arrived, and that I've been here forever!

Reflections

Taking a dip

This week has been awesome again, as I'm back to full bounce. I've been on elephants pretty much all week. The number of elephants has definitely declined. We're reaching the time of year that they begin to move back over to Zimbabwe and stay there, rather than switching back and forth. We're seeing fewer and fewer large herds, and the groups that we do see are mostly bachelor herds, consisting purely of adult males with the occasional pubescent male mixed in. The breeding herds are becoming a rare sighting. Having said that, yesterday was a particularly fun day of elephant research - having had car trouble (when DON'T we have car trouble? We'd already gotten one totally flat tyre that morning that made us late) we headed back to the office early, to find a breeding herd of 6 elephants (2 adult females, a pubescent female, a juvenile and a calf) just chilling out in the offices! There's a square of grass surrounded by each office, and they were just grazing on that, and being curious about the various doors - the calf was small enough that had he been any braver I'm sure he'd have been in the resources room wreaking havoc everywhere! They stayed there all day, and just as we decided we'd got all the information we needed on them, we discovered that there was actually a total of 37+ elephants all around the offices, just that the rest of them were less brave in coming in that close! The rest were all feeding around the now empty lion enclosure that held the quarantine lions before they could be moved to Dambwa. I'm still having computer/photo trouble, so I think I'm going to have to spend the rest of the day deleting photos that I don't need to make some extra space on my camera card - I took a lot of photos of that big herd! The other elephant news is that I've got a new friend to help me out - a Spanish research intern started on Monday for 8 weeks, so I'm working with him a lot which is good fun, and gives Dabs and I someone else to discuss elephant ears with! There's been a lot of IDs to do this week, but we've now eventually made it through the final sighting from July, so now onto the August sightings! August may just kill us - there were herds of 90 elephants on multiple occasions, and a brief glance at the photos from the 8th August is showing that this was when their camera was playing up a bit... ALL of the photos are out of focus for that sighting at least! HELP!

Dust bath!

There was no Conservation Education this week, thanks to Wednesday being World Teachers Day so there was no school as all the teachers and many of the students went on a march around Livingstone, celebrating the work of all teachers around the world. This meant that other than elephants, I've only done a morning of trees, and half a morning on Snare Sweep. The snare sweep we found 9 snares between us, and lots of litter that we picked up too. No elephants or buffalo to avoid this week! I'm not sure if 9 snares is good because it suggests there aren't any, or sad because it means we missed most of them. I like to think it's the first, but we can't ever know. Trees meant heading back to Dambwa Forest for the first time in a coupe of weeks - with Dabs away we've missed a couple of weeks so there's some catching up to do! It was really good fun this week. The mupani bees were out in force again and making a total nuisance of themselves! They really do make houseflies and bluebottles seem like the least annoying creatures ever! Thank goodness they don't bite too... We managed to survive and enjoy ourselves despite them this week thanks to the various methods of covering faces. I had a scarf tied around my head the whole time, while the other girls had a t-shirt, and the netting bag that one of them uses to wash her clothes in! The others struggled more... We got slightly less filthy this week too! Maybe those tress hadn't been burnt so much as they often are...

M4, Qasir

Being watched!

That's it for this week I think - time to get back to photo sorting AGAIN! AAAAAHHHH! And thanks to the lack of photo space on my laptop, I'm afraid you'll have to wait a while for photos to appear with this entry again.....