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!