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.