Tracking buff

Last week Jennifer and I went across to the eastern part of NG34 to collect some data. We found Nokya fairly quickly but she was in very dense mopane and it took a while to actually find the herd, which made it very difficult to count them. We operated mainly off road, though we stumbled onto a road partway through the trip so we used that a little. There were quite a few elephants around and a couple of times we got into the car during a sample because we heard them coming our way, but they did not come within visual range of us. Sven helped us out with getting a recent fix for Lasanya, and we were able to track her down as well. She was fairly relaxed, but also in dense vegetation, so it was very difficult to get any population dynamics data and pretty much impossible to estimate herd size.

We kept heading north and during a sample we heard buffalo, so when we finished we went to find them. They were in a slightly more open area and were relaxed enough for me to position myself on top of the car in a location that they were walking past, so we were able to get a better sample from them. They turned out to be with Bambi, meaning that we found all of the herds with satellite collars in the area. We did not get any signal for any of the GPS collars.

We camped not too far away that evening since the sun was setting as I was collecting my last poo samples from that herd. During dinner an elephant rumbled fairly close by so we got into the vehicle and finished eating in there. I never saw anything, but Jennifer was a bit confused as she thought the sound was a vehicle quite far away. She also didn't wake up when there was an elephant walking past our tents just before midnight. My tent flaps were down as it looked like it might rain, but I heard him walking towards the tent, blowing air out of his trunk and shaking his head. He moved off after a few minutes. The next morning I checked his tracks and he must have been about 10 m from the tent. We also heard lions roaring in the evening and the following morning but did not pick up any collared animals.

We continued our sampling missions the next day and managed to finish everything by around 5pm, so I decided to head back to camp as I had things to do the next day. We drove all the way back and ended up in camp just in time for dinner.

This morning I had a slight surprise as I saw two female waterbuck in front of camp. They quickly ran off so I was unable to get photos, which I guess means it didn't happen! The vet at Dog Camp arrived last night so they are all gearing up to dart various animals over the next few days.