Wow! So having read back through my diary and blog posts last week I realised that it’s 8 weeks now not 7! I really have completely lost track of time… All I know is that it’s continuing to get hotter by the day… and that at 8 weeks down, I would now be preparing to get on a plane if I was a normal intern with ALERT! A normal internship is 8 weeks, with a few staying 12 or even 16… No one stays 52! I’m very much an experiment for them too.

Another awesome sunset from the park

            So what have I been up to this week? A lot less elephants than usual, though still plenty of them. A permanent battle here is vehicles not working. We have 4, and all of them have died in some way at least once this week! As a lion project, the lions of course get priority, which takes up 2 vehicles - one for people, the other for a lion’s portion of meat! Another truck is needed for the community projects, because obviously we can’t just not turn up to the kids club or schools. Apparently they had over 100 children at kids club this week! Having said that, we’ve managed a decent amount of elephant research, and seen quite a lot of elephants. Yesterday we managed some research without the vehicle. We were sat in the office and suddenly heard this very loud rumble, and it turned out there was a huge adult female elephant standing about 5m behind us! We have no idea how long she was there - they’re SO quiet when they want to be! Thankfully, she didn’t care in the slightest that we were there, so there was no need to run to the furthest point of the office from the door that we could!

Toka doesn't like cameras...!

            Thanks to the lack of trucks for elephant research, we’ve had a couple of extra ID sessions, but it’s also allowed us to go up to Dambwa twice this week to see and help out on the research on the semi-wild pride in the release site. This means sitting for an hour watching what lions do best: sleep! We record what they are doing at every 2 minute interval, and on 3 hours worth of these, my lion got a “V” for “Visualising” for 4 of the 90 readings… Every single other one was “R” for “Resting”! Lions are renowned for being lazy, but the Lion Researcher for the Dambwa Pride did say they were being particularly lazy this week! This is for determining if the pride is behaving as a truly wild pride would, and for observing the group dynamics. It’s interesting (though maybe not so much if I was doing that every day!) and certainly makes for some excellent photo opportunities. I’ve had a hard time this week deciding which ones I want to use on here!

Zulu and his Children

RS2 has to be one of
the most handsome lions ever...

            We also did one session of trees that was good fun. Walking up to the plot we were thinking it was going to be an awful one - roasting hot, the bees were already in our faces, and the forest was actually more like a forest than a bit of sand with a few trees so it would have taken hours to do. However, when we actually reached the plot (the plots are randomly selected coordinates within the Dambwa Forest so we have no idea what we’ll be faced with until we arrive) it turned out to effectively be a clearing the exact size of the area we would sampling, and the wind picked up which cooled us down and repelled the bees! We were done really quickly and ended up coming back to the office and doing some extra elephant IDs.

Tree research!

            The last activity of the week to tell you about was Snare Sweep, since there is still no Conservation Education due to exams at the school. Snare Sweep was very satisfying this week, as between us we found 34 snares, so although it’s very sad that there are so many, that’s also 34 lives saved. Also fun because our Lions Manager who was out with us found a family of TINY baby warthogs asleep in a hollow tree! They were super cute, though no photo because it was too dark to not use flash and didn’t want to disturb them. Also at one point came out onto a bit flat bit which we usually see maybe 1 or 2 giraffe on, and there was 9! Very cool to see…

The final bit of exciting news is that I have FINALLY managed to get the photos on my laptop sorted (briefly - I know it won’t last long) so I can hopefully add them to the last couple of weeks of posts.