Another week down, and that makes it now 44 weeks done. That's my minimum placement time done!

Chameleon

Juvenile Martial Eagle

Monday was an amazing day! Started out with Bird Survey where we saw 32 species, including a juvenile Martial Eagle which was amazing, and a lanner falcon which took us so long to identify we had to give up and try again when we got back to the house using the photos we took! We got back to the house to find the photography vols all together in a bush? Chameleon! Big and usually bright green, but he darkened and brightened a few times which was pretty awesome to watch. After lunch we were off to game count where at first we saw nothing much, until another car drove past us and said "big herd of elephants just up the road". We were expecting maybe 20? More like 120! They completely surrounded us, and there were a lot that I knew from Zambia too. The best part though, was not getting very close to a large number of eles, but seeing Sierra again. Having not mentioned her for a while (I haven't seen her since I left Zambia in February!) let me remind you - Sierra is a tuskless female elephant who always looks like she's smiling, and has always been extremely calm around the calm, making her the cutest elephant ever! I've missed her... Better still, I was talking to the Zambian researcher and he said that they saw her over there on Friday last week, and again on Friday this week! Seems her and the rest of Breeding Herd 7 are very busy crossing back and forth! Tuesday morning and Thursday afternoon were elephant and giraffe research, but despite the obviously huge numbers that are currently nearby, we never found the big herd again. We did however come across a couple of smaller herds in Chamabondo, and had some great fun watching a troop of vervet monkeys on Thursday when we couldn't find any "girls"! I spent Wednesday morning, Thursday morning and Friday afternoon doing IDs for the elephant project, and am currently still exactly 2 months behind. 

Antichrist, F43. No this is cropped!

Vervet monkeys crossing the road

Baby hyena on den monitoring

Tuesday afternoon was hyena tracking and Wednesday afternoon was den monitoring. As usual we didn't see the hyena during tracking, and instead spent the time there looking for tracks and signs of other animals. I now spend my time on hyena tracking doing the telemetry which is fun, not to mention it means I get to wave the big aerial around and feel like a real wildlife scientist! Den monitoring on Wednesday afternoon was not quite so great as last week, as only one 1 hyena baby popped out this time rather than 3, and they didn't come so close, but still it was fun, and the wait at the start for them to appear made it all the more tense. We enjoyed it a lot and the little hyena was very sweet. They're so fluffy!

Liuwa during our Saturday lion walk

Friday morning I joined the community volunteers at Masuwe school, and while there we taught them how to come up with rhymes for words - cat/mat/sat/fat and book/look/took/cook - and then how to convert present tense to past tense. Honestly, I'm not sure how many of them actually understood the point, but at least some of them improved in their confidence at speaking out in front of the class to make suggestions or give answers. Probably the most difficult was trying to explain why "That is a book." works as a sentence, but "That is a look." doesn't, when they didn't seem to understand what the word look actually meant! Not something I had anticipated considering they came up with it as a rhyme for book! I just assumed they knew the word if they said it! We joined them for break time playing Bulldog, Duck-duck-goose, and failing to explain Stuck-in-the-mud! It worked until one of us got stuck, and then they all just came running and it turned into a big group hug because we put our arms out!

Liuwa climbing a tree

Saturday morning was another fun morning. After a much-needed lie in thanks to a great night out at Shoestrings Bar on Friday, we headed to the lions where 3 of us took Lila and Liuwa out for a walk. They were SO active today! Jumping in the river, leaping all over each other, and wrestling. They're so sweet!

Liuwa (I swear I got photos of Lila too!)
leaping over the stream!