RS2

Yet another good week, which started off with Dambwa Research on Monday, followed by working to plant maize seeds in the garden. Research was good - the release site has become so green since I was last in there! The lions were lying in the road right by the fence, so we actually didn’t go in for the first session, but instead just watched them through the fence. As usual, my lion just slept the entire way through our activity budget, but some of the others moved around. There was a particularly cute moment, when Zulu the pride male got up and went to greet RS2, his oldest son. The higher the pride status of a lion, the more greetings they will receive, so seeing the ‘boss’ greeting his son shows the possible startings of a shift in power from father to son. On the other hand, it could also be a nice friendly “Hi son”! The afternoon we were planting maize in the garden, which involved using the pickaxe to dig a hole, and then putting 2 seeds in each one. I only dug a few holes - the axe is super heavy and it was really hot, so the handlers wouldn’t let us do much! Still it was good fun, and hopefully in a few months time there should be a nice healthy crop of maize ready. I’m not 100% sure what it will be used for, but at least some of it will go to the schools for the children’s lunches, so they can concentrate better in class. 

The Dambwa Sub-adults

Harry, M151

Tuesday was a far less interesting day - elephant IDs all morning, followed by lesson plan in the afternoon. The funny part was being peed on by a vervet monkey during breakfast…! Elephant IDs have been very productive this week, getting through a decent number of photos, and making a lot of new ID cards. Hopefully that doesn’t mean we’re just missing the elephants we’ve already got and making lots of duplicates! We did find a duplicate of Squank, who is one of our most obvious elephants thanks to the large notch in his left ear, and his almost perpendicular tusks! Oops! Lesson plan for Conservation Education was very quick and simple, as the lesson was cancelled last week so we already had everything prepared. However, when we arrived on Wednesday, there was no children - the school teacher had forgotten and sent the children home at the end of their exam. To be honest, I’m not sure they would have been concentrating after their exam anyway. It just meant that we joined the others on lion feeding and cleaning out on Wednesday afternoon instead. Wednesday morning was our very last trees session - all the plots are now done so we’re ready to start insect research. This turned out to be another particularly amusing session, as the plot a small gorge running through it, which we had to navigate, and at times balance on the edge of trying to measure the trees!

Pubescent Female with a calf - probably her sister

Squank, M40

Thursday was back to elephant research, and my usual problem surfaced very badly… I took 618 photos in one afternoon…! AAH! SO many to sort through… But the reason for that many? Record breaking number of elephants! We saw 102+, of which 5 were in 1 herd, and 97+ were in the other! It was such an incredible sight, and we just kept finding more. Of course in that group there were quite a few that we could recognise straight off too. Unfortunately, there wasn’t time for us to wait and watch them cross the road, so we only saw the first 23 really properly with no trees in front of us. Shame, but unavoidable. The most interesting part was that we saw, 2 days in a row, an adult male elephant with a calf. ALERT has never seen that before, and it’s really interesting to theorise why, though sadly we won’t be able to confirm any of them.

The Snare Sweep Team

Snare sweep on Friday morning we only found 15 snares, but it was still good fun and included a very boggy bit to jump through! The ALERT researcher who is normally in charge of taking photos of snare sweep wasn’t able to come this week, so he asked me to do it. I realised as I was that while I have however many thousand photos of animals in the park, I actually have virtually nothing of the park itself! Thanks to snare sweep, I have now corrected that.

Playing the ball-through-the-legs game at Kids Club

The final activity of my week was Kids Club on Saturday. Due to some financial difficulties, there has been some significant disruption to scheduling, so we had no lesson planned this week. Instead, we spent the entire 2.5 hours just playing games with the kids. We started off with volleyball, which was good fun, but it seems that 2 weeks is plenty long enough to forget we taught them last time! Hopefully they’ll still remember by next time. We stopped after about an hour as the net position meant we had to be in the sun a lot and it was getting far too hot! Moving into the shade of a tree we played broken bottle (essentially catch but where you have to do various things which makes it harder and harder to catch again if you miss it), duck-duck-goose, limbo, skipping, and a game that they introduced us to, where you stand in a circle with your legs apart, and you have to try to whack a ball through other people’s ‘goals’. If you succeed, then they have to first only use one hand, then turn around and do it looking through their legs, then do it backwards with only one hand! I didn’t win, but I was the last standing mzungu so not bad! We had a half day on Saturday so we had lunch then headed back to Serenity, before I went with 3 of the volunteers to the pool at David Livingstone, That place really is a God-send on a hot and humid day! We spent 3 hours there on Sunday too!