The beautiful island

One of my collared animals, Chanel, spent the last two weeks on one decent-sized island just to the west of Mboma island in the Moremi. Guy was kind enough to look at the area on Google Earth and pointed out a number of crossings that he thought should be possible, depending on water levels. I tried to find out where the flood was from several people in Maun, but as usual everyone had a different opinion. Pilots told me if I wanted they would make a special effort to look out of the window, and then told me that there was quite a lot of water there, which wasn't particularly useful. Tour operators and boat operators basically didn't know but some said the flood was there and others said it wasn't and then one said it wouldn't really make much difference to the water levels in that area anyway. So I decided to just go and look for myself.

I walked across the first potential crossing that I came to after driving up to the bottom of Mboma island and following a little used road and found a large sand bar in the middle that was almost exposed and at no point did the water come up past the middle of my thigh. The bottom was sandy, so I decided to go for it and all was well. On the other side, there were some tree islands in the middle of floodplain, which was completely dry and very good to drive over, once I realised I was not going to sink and get stuck.

We then reached the main island and did a couple of vegetation points, then drove up to the northern end, where the buffalo had been most recently. There were several elephants that we managed to avoid. The island itself was beautiful - probably the prettiest spot I have been in the Delta, and an absolute pleasure to drive across. The only trees were in small stands, with open grassland and dry floodplains in between. We found the buffalo across a small stretch of wet floodplain but unfortunately they decided to run after looking at us for a couple of minutes. We crossed over to where they had been and followed the cloud of dust, only to be thwarted by a deep pool with a very sticky bottom. There was no other way around, so we left them to move away, watching the dust cloud as they started out across the next island and returned to sampling the sites that they had used.

We spent the whole next day sampling and ended up with a total of 28 sample sites, so it turned out to be a very successful trip. The buff had spent 2 weeks on the island, which is 6 km long, so we were able to move between sample sites easily and quickly. There were a couple that we had to leave because elephants were there, and one bull got upset with us and mock charged but then moved away.

Camping out was lovely. It is a huge privilege as a researcher to be able to camp wherever I end up without having to worry about getting back to a designated campsite. The second night we had an elephant cow and calf come through just after we had gone to bed, but they moved on after investigating us a bit. We heard hyaena calling at night and the next morning 2 sets of lions were roaring for about 3 hours but we didn't see them.

We finished the sampling and went across to the main part of Moremi to try and find some buffalo herds to count and get population dynamics. We spent the night at Xaxanaka campsite, and I picked a spot where I thought I wouldn't disturb anyone, only to have a large group of people pitch right next to us. They went to bed relatively early, but they left their coolbox out, so of course a hyaena came along just after midnight and stole it. Shortly afterwards, a large bull elephant came to the tree next to my tent and shook it for the fruit. He was very close, but seemed very relaxed and was happy to eat the fruit and avoid my tent. He finished there and moved across to walk through the other people's camp and smelled fruit through the open window of their car, so stuck his trunk in and rummaged around for oranges. After a while, the people realised something was happening and all piled out of their tents to have a look. They then tried to shoo the elephant away - straight towards our tents. Luckily he was very aware of our tents, even when reversing straight towards them, and despite having his front and rear legs on either side of a corner of my tent at one point, he was very good and maneuvered himself so he didn't touch us at all. The people were not as considerate, as they seemed entirely oblivious to the fact that if they had managed to scare the ele, he would have come straight into us. After that, I decided not to use public campsites again - it is unpleasant and dangerous! The sunrise was nice though.