SQUANK! (Again)

Another week down, another enjoyable, if somewhat stressful few days! I've yet again been doing a lot of elephant IDs and it's been crazy busy. I've finally reached the end of the 406 elephants from Zambia that all need ID sheets, bar the last 12 that I still need data for from the researcher over there which means I've managed to finally start actually going through the sightings that I've recorded and identify who is there. Exciting, but also depressingly slow and unbelievably frustrating to have the very first sighting already going wrong! If we see the mother, then we record the calf of an individual as present whether we see the baby or not, so when I found F100 (Karina, named after one of my best friends from university!) there, I also listed her calf U4.... Fine apart from the fact that the only 2 calves I saw in the sighting were not U4... so now I have 1 too many calves.... Ah well - hopefully the next sighting goes better! Uh oh - that's the herd of 67+ for which our longest telescopic lens was 250 mm so the photos really aren't great.... HELP! I'm currently 2 months behind, doing the sighting from 9th March, and with every day my list grows longer. Friday night this week we went camping at Chamabondo again, and we saw a total of 83+ elephants! Too dark to photograph most of them, but still got a lot to go through! We saw another 83+ (good number it seems!) on Monday in the park too, so lots of work to be getting on with, especially since I actually broke the record and took over 1000 photos in one day...! Camping was great fun - a nice group all just sat around the campfire, sharing stories, enjoying a drink, and then burrowing down into warm sleeping bags to avoid the freezing temperatures! It was so cold... Last time I went out there I was roasting so barely took any warm clothes with me this time, and then everyone was so cold we barely slept and were all totally buried in blankets! We saw 5 hyenas on the way back which was awesome too! 

Stanley helping me with IDs....

Stars at Chamabondo

Stars and elephants!

Giraffes

Wednesday we went to Human Wildlife Conflict Mitigation as usual, and checked all the cameras. We're struggling with a major battery shortage, so if anyone has found this and is reading it before they come out here, PLEASE BRING BATTERIES!! We never see any animals, so there's nothing especially exciting out there, but we still had a good time. 

Pied Kingfisher

2 bird surveys done this week, and it's good to know that I'm improving with my species recognition. The last couple of times we've been out I've been running it, which is quite fun. Again we've averaged about 17 species, and have started listing birds that we hear now too - that I'm not good at yet... There was a guy here with a bird app on his phone that gave the calls as well as the photos, and that was really helpful. Think I'm going to get one of those for UK wildlife when I get home. Once we finish the bird surveys, we start doing elephant and giraffe research, and last time we went we saw hundreds of birds after bird survey ended, and then we saw no big animals at all! What's wildlife for if not keeping you on your toes eh? 

That's actually been all for my week: Human Wildlife, Birds and Elephants.... no occupancy, no hyenas, no community and so on. It's actually felt more like Livingstone - fewer jobs to do, more time on each one, and therefore feeling more productive!

Baboon baby!

Waterbuck baby

Little bee-eater