More mokoro and short break

My second mokoro expedition at the beginning of last week went as smoothly as the first, although we missed the last point I wanted as the sun was settting and we would have had to go quite close to hippos on the way there and back. Otherwise, we collected a total of 17 data points, which was approximately what I had in mind, and we saw some bachelor herds, which was also useful.

I went into Moremi for a day with a friend last week and saw two non-collared herds of buffalo close to Xakanaxa, one of around 200 and one of around 300 individuals. I was able to collect age/sex ratio data and faecal samples from them both, which made me very happy. We also saw Amelia the leopard and a strange albino lechwe which looks remarkably like a lamb/goat.

I have spent the last few days in Maun trying to get my hands on the aerial photos for my study site, and am hoping that today will be the day.

I have also spoken to all the air charter companies in Maun and a good few of the pilots to get them to record all the buffalo herds that they see, with a location and approximate herd size. I am hoping that this will work out as a cheap (a few beers to the pilots that help me with this) way of doing aerial surveys. If I get several reports of herds of similar sizes in the same area, the reports will corroborate each other and should prove relatively accurate. I have already received several sightings with GPS coordinates and sizes, so for now the idea seems to be working.

Sampling from a mokoro

Given the wet areas that my buff have been using, I have decided to try sampling from a mokoro (a traditional dug-out canoe). After asking several people about the best way to find a poler, I was told to find my way to Boro, which is reknowned as prime poler habitat. I found my way there ok (via the prison) and found lots of polers, but managed to take a wrong turn on the way back and get a little lost, although I knew I was heading in the general direction of Maun. Luckily, a happy smiley man in a Landrover found us and led us back to the outskirts of Maun. I returned to Boro the next day to pick up my poler and bring him out to HQ, getting back to the main road without getting lost.

We started poling soon after sunrise and found our way through channels and across floodplains to a total of seven points from which we collected vegetation data and samples. We saw one hippo, but it was out of the water close to one of our sites, so we were able to avoid it and had no terrifying experiences of hippo surging out of the water under our mokoro as I had envisaged. We also found a very fresh lion scat at one of our sites, but only when we had almost finished there, so we just completed the sampling. The sites used by the buff were mostly on the edges of islands, not in the middle of floodplains, and not too far from the water, so we didn't have to traipse across huge distances to reach the sites. The main grass, couch grass (Cynodon dactylon), does not seem to be appealing to them, and they appear to prefer the taller grasses on the island interiors.

I generally found the mokoro to be quite a relaxing way of getting between points, as opposed to bashing through mopane and hopping over logs in my car, which can be stressful and damaging to the vehicle. Several of the points we could not reach because of land being in the way, which makes a change! We will be going again tomorrow to get at least another 8 points, I hope.

I am getting aerial photographs of my entire study area from the University of Botswana. I am going to try and speak to some more people about using a boat to get up into the swampy areas north of Chitabe after getting them to look at the aerial photos and work out which channels may be navigable.

A big old elephant with the torn ear has been hanging around HQ recently, but he is very relaxed, so I really don't mind him being outside my door on a regular basis. There have also been zebra and tsessebe at the pan in front of camp for the last few days, which makes a lovely backdrop for lunch.

Trying to get around water

My collared buffalo have been moving about a fair bit lately. Nokya was on the Gomoti, then moved overnight up to the Chitabe area the others were in but has now decided she preferred it on the Gomoti and has come back down. Lasanya and Chanel spent some time together in one herd and have moved quite far north into highly flooded areas west of Third Bridge and Dead Tree Island in Moremi. Bianca seems to be continuing to wander around the NG32/ Chief's Island area, though I think she might be spending a bit more time in floodplains than in mopane.

I have been speaking to various people about accessing my buffalo in the flooded areas north of Chitabe and have generally been met with disbelieving stares. It would appear that the water is too high for driving, even with a specially adapted swamp vehicle, and that the high hippo density means using a mokoro or a small boat would be fairly (read completely) suicidal. Which is encouraging.

I have also been speaking to people who work in the area, including at Chitabe, who have said I can go up there and they can show me the roads that they use so I can work out how far north I can go. Apparently, the buff move from the permanent swamps back down towards Chitabe fairly regularly. So hopefully I can sample some of the floodplains and maybe islands closest to Chitabe when the buff are using those areas. However, if this latest northwards trend continues, they may soon be leaving the country altogether.

At the beginning of this week, I drove around the bottom of the Gomoti and onto the other side, where I thought I might be able to get to some areas that one of my herds was using. However, there is still a lot of water and they are mainly grazing on islands in the middle of the Gomoti that I can't quite get to. I got some vegetation samples from locations that they walked through apparently without stopping on their way up to Chitabe that should hopefully show that there is not much grass for them to eat in the inland habitat types, which is why they are sticking to those lovely wet areas.

I have arranged with the community in the Stanley's area to go out with a mokoro and see whether I can feasibly access some of the islands that the buff over there have been using. There are several mokoro stations there and the guys must know the area pretty well, which increases chances of success, although the community guys I spoke to were quite dubious about those chances, what with hippos and some of the channels being completely blocked by reeds, but I will give it a try and see what happens. And then of course in a few weeks the flood will come in and exacerbate these issues. But with a bit of luck and trials of various access methods, I hope to be able to collect at least some data from the flood season!