Saturday, November 15, 2008

Bambi migrates


I have not been able to do any fieldwork this week, as I have had to write my first year report and deal with immigration issues. These have now been sorted for the next 3 months.

The rains have caused two of my collared buff (in one herd) to move away from the floodplains. They walked almost 30 km in 11 hours, pretty much in a straight line, and followed the buffalo fence for some of it. They have stopped in NG34 and then split up. I have attached a map of the movement pattern in the last couple of weeks. They walked on the evening of the 12th November.

Unfortunately one of these, collar 74, which is one of the original collars, seems to be experiencing difficulties similar to those that the collar 77 had in April, when I had to take it off and send it back for repair. I have emailed the collar company to see whether there is anything that they can do, but they may well tell me the same thing as last time. Needless to say, this is not good news, but the collar does appear to have started working properly again

I will go out tomorrow for a few days and follow the path taken by the herd, sampling sites from the area that they left, all along the path that they walked and in the area where they chose to stop.

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