F1 (Marianne) at the office

12 weeks down! Week 12 has been another very enjoyable week, with much more variety than usual (warning - lost post coming up!). Whereas normally I do basically all elephants and not much else, this week I’ve only had 1 full day with my trunked friends! I’ve been out a couple of times on the truck though, and both times saw more than 10 elephants across the river so that was nice. The first one we saw was particularly satisfying because I was able to ID him in the field (M18, Benzu). I also had one spot that was so much fun because neither the researcher nor driver believed me that there was even an elephant there! Literally all that could be seen were his front feet and a tiny bit of trunk, and he standing in a very dark bit so even that was heavily shadowed! On top of that, we’d just decided we needed to get to Maramba quickly, so we were driving at maybe 25 mph, so I literally got this tiny snapshot view through a small gap in the trees! I enjoyed that elehant… Other than that it was mainly IDs, on which we are now up to 6^th August... Going to be doing these for a long time yet! I’ve got a full day of them by myself tomorrow which is probably just about my worst nightmare of the jobs they can give me! I hate doing them alone - so many of them need discussing because the photos are never clear, and it’s just quite dull and lonely! Hopefully I still have some grip on reality by Monday evening…

Kovu enjoying his elephant poo!

Cleaning out the pools

                  I’ve had 2 days of lions this week which was good, but I have to admit part of me is glad I’m not here as a lions intern/volunteer - the breakfast and lunch breaks are just so long with nothing to do, there’s a lot of waiting around. If I’m having lunch at the office then I’ll just skip my break and do IDs or something, but that’s not possible at Boma. I can enjoy the relaxed nature of lions for a few days, but I think I’d get fed up if I was doing it all the time. The actual lion work though is great! I’ve done Behavioural Enrichment (making toys for the lions out of sticks, leaves, grass and elephant dung) again for the first time since my very first morning here on 22^nd August! We actually made the same animal (crocodile) and gave it to the same group of lions (Kovu, Nembwe, Namwala, Kasama and Nkoya) as last time! They actually mostly ignored the actual toys we made them, but we also emptied 2 sacks of fresh elephant dung into their enclosure and they went mad for that! Rolling in it, playing, scent marking, licking and eating it, and even fighting over who got the best spot for lying in it! The other research was 3 activity budgets, 1 of which was on the same 5 enclosure lions, and the other 2 of which were on the Dambwa Pride. As usual the Dambwa lions spent most of their time just sleeping. It’s just too hot for them to be active at the moment. Kovu and his girls were a bit more active, and spent most of their of time trying to work out how to get through the fence to Toka and Bemba, who had just been fed! Final lion activity was a couple of sessions of Enclosure Maintenance. 1 of these was cleaning another pool for the lions (this time I did fall over, but thankfully didn’t hurt myself!), and refilling it with fresh water. The other was more of Enclosure Destruction! There were 3 lions kept at the office in quarantine, who were moved up to the Dambwa enclosures a few weeks ago, and now their enclosure at the office needed taking down. We spent 3 hours just unwinding wires and between about 15 of us managed to get the first side down… Another long job coming up!

King Kovu...

Rolling in the elephant dung!

                  Thursday was trees as usual. It was a little different this week as the plot was in a sort of gully, full of very spiky trees (ouch!) and there was only 4 of us instead of the usual five, so I was measuring the circumference of each tree, while also holding the other tape measure up the trunk - it’s harder than it sounds! We were very pleased and actually quite proud that we managed all 243 trees in the one morning between only 4 of us. There was one scary moment when we thought we could hear a fire coming towards us through the forest, but then the noise stopped and we never saw smoke so we don’t know what the noise was!

                  Friday was again not a normal day because I went to culture day again, so I had another go at making and eating nshima with boiled rape and beef stew. I actually it much more than last time but I don’t know if that was the flavours they used or me. We did some dancing again which is always amusing - they do a lot of hip and butt shaking here! I honestly couldn’t wiggle my bum like that even if I wanted to! The Australian girls who were there for the first time certainly didn’t look entirely comfortable! We spent most of the time we weren’t cooking playing with the children again, and talking to their kitten.

Doing some Zambian dancing

Teaching the "Watermelon" song at Kids Club!

                  Saturday I went to Kids Club in the morning which was good fun, particularly having never been before. I finally got to play volleyball for the first time since I got here - to be honest I was quite pleased I could still vaguely set and dig! I brought a net, 5 balls and a pump out with me, and will leave them here for use at Kids Club. I was coaching them the basic skills and they certainly enjoyed it, even if they didn’t like me telling them not to kick the ball! We played for about an hour then headed into the classrooms for a lesson on being a good team player. We started with a word search, looking for words like communicate, together, share, help and so on. A lot of the words they didn’t know and we had to explain them, but it was very difficult in that often you would use one of the other words from the search to explain that one, and then 5 minutes later find out they didn’t know that one either! We finished with an activity about communication to demonstrate how everyone in the team needs the same information in order for the goal to be reached. We gave them all a card with an animal on it (pig, cow, chicken, donkey, elephant, or lion) and they had to make the noise of that animal. First of all we gave them all the same card face up so they all made each noise together. I then mixed the animals together, put the cards down facedown on the table so they each picked one but no one else knew what they had. They then again all made the noise together, and of course when I asked “what did this person have?” none of them could answer. I then steadily increased the number of them all with the same card so the team steadily worked better and better, until they were all making the same noise. I was particularly impressed with their lion impressions - they genuinely sounded like a pride of happily grumbling lions! The second group definitely understood the point of the exercise, and I think the third group did too, but the first group definitely did not get it… Ah well - I did my best and they still enjoyed making noises!

                  So that’s been my week! Apologies for the stupidly long post, I never have been good at concise…