Another week gone, and something of a milestone week: I'm halfway through my time in Zambia! WHAT?!! I can't believe how fast the time just disappears here.

Juvenile elephant from the Thursday sighting

This has been elephant ID week for me. Of course I've had a few other things to do, but basically just lots and lots of IDs! Monday I did nothing but sit in front of the computer comparing elephants, which at first I thought would be fine, but it turned out that the other research intern was doing Dambwa Research and then Feeding and Cleaning, so he wasn't helping me, and our researcher had the day off, so I was somewhat lonely! It doesn't help that the photos for some of the sightings that we're trying to do are just awful. Some of the pictures from 11th August I wouldn't even be sure if they were elephants or rocks if I didn't know! AAHH!!! I mainly just do the easy ones, then look for the more difficult ones and note down who I think they might be but don't say for sure until there's someone to discuss it with. I've also had a few sessions where I wasn't lonely so that improved the week, and allowed us to actually finish more of the sightings, rather than having me start but not complete them, due to there always being a few that I'm not 100% on! The part of IDs that I'm now really looking forward to, is the hard drive of elephant photos that we've got from 2010-2012. Now that it's arrived, I've had a quick flick through some of them and spotted several elephants that I recognise, including Harry, Colin, Sierra, Alaska, and several others. I think it will be really interesting to see which elephants are returning year after year, and what proportion of them are only ever seen once.

M14, Fred (Photo from the 6 on Friday)

I've had one session of trees this week (was supposed to be 2 but I asked to have the Thursday town time with the volunteers so that I could post Christmas cards!) which was a particularly good morning. A decent number of trees so we weren't done super-early and so didn't have to wait around and get bored, but equally not so many that we weren't able to finish the plot. We laughed so much on trees this week, especially when the volunteer with us just randomly climbed one of the trees, and the researcher challenged the other intern (who is a martial arts instructor!) to a wrestling match and then lost fairly spectacularly! Good fun, and that means there are now only 2 plots left to do and we're done with trees for the year, so then we can start doing insects.

Our researcher meeting the kids at Conservation Education

Building a Team lesson

The major bit of good news this week is that Conservation Education is back on. We are at a different school, who have a lower level of English and are a bit younger anyway, so the programme is more aimed at improving their reading skills, but using conservation and nature words. I was doing an activity based on the forest, so we had 27 words, ranging from "tree", "wood" and "bark", to words like "afforestation" and "biodiversity". We had each one written down on a slip of paper, and we played a game where I would say a word, and they would have to grab it. We went through all the words explaining their meaning, and then we played the game again, this time giving the definition and they had to work out the word and then grab it. About three quarters of the kids were very interested, and seemed to really engage, picking up what the words meant and enjoying learning how to use them. Unfortunately the rest of them were more interested in winning the game rather than what the words meant, so would just grab random words and hold them up to me, asking if they were right, and if I said no they just dropped it and grabbed another until eventually one of them guessed correctly. If I'd had time, I would have asked them to read out the word that they grabbed and define it, so they could still learn what the words were, but with the length of time available that simply wouldn't have worked. I'm still trying to come up with another way to prevent that happening again, or come up with a way of helping them learn despite that... As well as Conservation Education, I've also done another week of Kids Club, this time at Natebe Primary School. We always start with just playing games with the kids. I had the volleyball kit out again, and was teaching some of them how to play. Some of them picked it up really fast and were actually quite good! I certainly wasn't expecting to be encouraging them to move on from Catch-Push volleying to properly volleying in their first session! Similarly I was able to have the second group playing a mini-game of 4s, with a basic "setter takes the second ball" structure. When it got to the lesson (somewhat later than planned as the teacher was enjoying playing volleyball too much and she wanted to keep going!), we were doing the same as last week, which meant I was able to lead a different section of the "Team Player" lesson. All of the Kids Club lessons are structured around "STRIPE" - the set of skills required to be a well-rounded person and employee in later life. STRIPE stands for "Self-manager, Team player, Reflective, Innovative, Participator, Enquirer". This time my activity was "Building a Team", in which we imagined that there was a new classroom block being built at the school, and we were discussing who we would need on our team to build it (architect, builder, roofer, carpenter, suppliers etc.), and what would then happen if the team did not communicate with one another. As usual, it worked better for some groups than others. The oldest boys were the best, coming up with everything and discussing problems among themselves as well as with me. There was only one group who just said nothing the entire time, even when I directly asked them things, and thanks to timing, I again had to just give them the answers rather than waiting for them to open up and start talking.

Volleyball at Kids Club

Volunteer Removing a Snare on Snare Sweep

M72, Duke (Photo from the 6 on Friday)

F37, Donna (Duke's mother)

And now to talk about Friday which was easily my best day of the week! Started off with Snare Sweep where we got 52 snares! Not a record for ALERT, but easily a record for me. There were some big ones too, and they were all made of solid steel wire this week so were much stronger than usual. The handlers reckon they were aiming for elephants and buffalo, rather than the usual small antelopes like impala, bushbuck and common duikers. Even with wire cutters we struggled with some of them. Getting back to the office, I had a fun ID session with the researcher, laughing at the terrible photos, but getting through a decent number, before heading out to see if we could find any elephants in the park on research. I jokingly said before we left "52 snares this morning, 52 elephants this afternoon?" and was laughed at and told "No way!"... Forget 52, try 85+! First and third ones were single males across the river, so we didn't get a good look or photo of either. The second group was a herd of 12 who wandered around the plains and came for a drink at the water hole. They never got very close, but we were able to spend about 30-40 minutes watching them. That left us with not a huge amount of time left, as one of the vehicles was dead (again!) so we had to get back to the office for 5pm. This meant we were already pushed for time when I spotted a herd of 6 up ahead. We waited for 5 minutes for them to cross the road, before they did indeed cross as we hoped, rather than playing their favourite game of "walk to a point that we're almost in view but not quite, then turn and walk the other way again"! This was an especially fun sighting, because as they crossed I was able to identify all but one of them straight away, despite the fact that I've only seen one of them before in the flesh, the rest only from ID photos. Even the researcher didn't recognise as many as I did! Winning! We saw some of this group the day before, but not all of them. So now that we were REALLY in a hurry, we were driving back very fast, actually hoping not to see any more, when we went flying past a group of 50+ at the side of the main road! We obviously couldn't just skip them out so had to head back (cringing at the thought of grovelling to the others when we got back that we were late!) and collect the data as fast as we could. They were fairly buried in the trees still so couldn't really get decent photos anyway, just a pain that we didn't have more time to wait for them... Getting back to the office, we jumped in the truck to come home, but told people to keep an eye out because we would be driving past the big group again. Good thing too because otherwise we wouldn't have spotted the final group of 15+ that we missed when heading back to the office! WOW! Not bad for 2.5 hours work! 

The herd of 12 being watched by a giraffe!

That wasn't the only exciting drive home this week either. Yesterday was also interesting, as the rains seem to have finally arrived, and our truck broke down halfway back! It would be the one day I didn't bother to bring my coat wouldn't it....?! The rain started during our afternoon ID session and there was a lot of thunder and lightning, and the rain was ridiculously heavy. Having said that, give me a few more weeks and I'll probably consider yesterday to have been some light drizzle! It was still raining when we went to leave though much lighter, so it was only mildly freezing and unpleasant to sit in an open vehicle...! It was about half way back that the truck's clutch just totally died. Thankfully, we were right by Park Gate 2, so we we only had to push the car about 50 m to get it off the road... By the time the other truck arrived, we were all soaked through, and I was actually really cold! Came back to the first hot shower I've had in about 2 and a half months yesterday! The rain continued all night, leaving our lodge ridiculously muddy. My wellies have now had their African christening - it's weird how I've gone for 3 months going outside and walking across the camp to go to the loo or get a drink and it's never felt weird, but as soon as I put on my wellies it feels like British camping!

Drinking giraffe

Warthog family!

So that's been my week, and yet again I apologise for my total inability to write concisely!