Flying in the SkyJeep

Kevin arrived on Sunday in his lovely yellow SkyJeep, and took me up tracking on Monday afternoon. We picked up all the buff whose location I was already aware of, but failed to pick up any signal from the last three missing animals. Unfortunately I have not been flying much lately so am not used to it and felt fairly nauseous at some points, but generally enjoyed the flight.

On Tuesday, Janette and myself went to sample sites used by Chanel before she moved further west. She walked approximately 10 km over a day, stopping on the way. We sampled twelve sites used before the movement and a couple of the points that she walked through on the way. She has stopped in grasslands on the other side of the Moremi cutline, so has not completed her walk back to the floodplains. I will wait for this before completing the sampling for the migration. I have had several reports from pilots that they are seeing more buffalo on the floodplain systems, but the grass is still quite green in the grasslands, so the buff should not be in too much of a hurry to leave them.

Janette is currently flying with Kevin to check that B74, the double-beeping collar, is still on a buff, since all of the other collars from that original batch have fallen off. It would be useful if this one did the same, since it is not functioning properly anyway.

Finding Bara

Last week I had another attempt to dart Chanel to remove her defective collar. A vet came out and we followed her for several hours, sighting her a couple of times. However, she moved away from us continuously and ended up in dense mopane, where we encountered the same approach problem as previously, being unable to get close to her without a great deal of noise and disturbance. We had to give up after 3 hours without getting close to her. I managed to break one of the springs on my vehicle at the same time, so had to avoid bumps and off road driving until I got that fixed.

I am using baseline vegetation characteristics from habitat types collected by a colleague to compare sites selected and avoided by buffalo to general availability. There is one habitat type that my colleague did not encounter in her study area that has been used extensively by buffalo during the wet season. I have been calling it Low Mixed Woodland, it occurs in sandy areas, and is widespread across NG43. Yesterday, I went across NG34 into NG43 to collect some baseline vegetation samples from this habitat type.

There were a lot of elephants in the area, so a lot of my time was spent creeping round corners and suddenly accelerating when I heard a trumpet from right next to the car. We escaped unscathed, and were able to find a couple of the store on board collars that had gone missing. B6 (Bara) was still wearing her collar, and I was able to get a good visual of it. Unfortunately that confirmed my fears that the GPS unit had been ripped off. The VHF is still strong, so hopefully she will keep that collar until my satellite collars are returned to me and I can replace the store on board with a satellite so that I can track her movements next year.

B5 (Vice) was emitting a rapid recovery signal, so I went to find the collar, which had conveniently dropped off right next to a road. This one had also lost its GPS unit. This morning I tried to retrieve the data from the collar, but it has stubbornly refused to give me anything. I have contacted the manufacturers to see if they can suggest any ways to access these data, since I do not know when the GPS unit was lost, so this collar may have taken fixes including the wet season locations.

Darting Bambi

I obtained a darting permit last week to remove the collars from two buffalo with malfunctioning collars. A vet agreed to come and try to dart these cows from my vehicle. I was not sure that this would be possible, as they can be difficult to get close to, especially in dense vegetation.

On Monday, we went out to where we had got a signal from Chanel's collar. We went into very dense mopane to find her. It took us 3 hours of tracking a deceptive signal that bounced from the mopane on all sides. Eventually we managed to see some buff, only to realise that she had been close to us the whole time, but was in a tiny group, consisting of 2 bulls, 2 cows and 2 calves. Needless to say, they did not hang around for us to get to them. They ran from us for a while, and the dense mopane made it impossible to get close to them without spooking them with crashing through trees. They headed off after a few more hours, crossing the Sankuyo road and disappearing off into more dense mopane. We decided to call it a day as we had made no progress at all.

On Tuesday, we set out for the area where Bambi had been most recently. We found three lions on the way, an adult female, a sub-adult male and a sub-adult female. These were thought to be the remnants of a pride that had a collared female in it until she died a few months ago. I radio-ed Dog Camp, then continued on our buffalo mission.

We did not manage to get a signal for the buff, but asked someone else to track down a different road for a couple of kilometres to see if he picked her up. He did get a signal, so we headed down that way. We found the herd fairly quickly and then spent 3 hours following them until they got to the point where they were comfortable with the vehicle being within darting range. It then took us a further hour to get a good visual on the collared buffalo. We spotted her in the herd, with other animals blocking the line of fire, but I kept her in sight and told the vet which rear end was hers so that he darted her, even though we could not see the collar at that point. She flinched slightly when the dart went in, but only started to move when she started feeling the drug. We think that she was one of the dominant females, since she was usually close to the front, and when she started to move the rest of the herd followed her, which made things a bit more difficult, but we had the signal from the collar to follow anyway. She went down after 12 minutes, but was still trying to get up, so we left her to settle for a bit. We went in and the vet gave her a top up, but it still took all of us to keep her in a sternal position at first. Most of the time she was kicking with her back legs, which made things a bit tricky, but we changed her collar and got blood samples from her. We reversed her within 45 minutes of the dart first going in, and she was up and moving within a couple of minutes.

We then went back to the lions to see if Dog Camp wanted any of them darted. Unfortunately the sub-adult female was too young and the adult female was in poor condition, so the decision was taken to leave them, which I think was the most sensible thing to do.

On Wednesday, we went back to Chanel to try again. She was in a larger herd, but still in the same dense mopane. We managed to get within 12m of some buffalo, but spotting the collar was very difficult and getting a clear shot was not possible. We spent about 4 hours trying to get to her, but had to give up in the end.

Another vet will be in the area next week and he said that we could try then if he gets done with zebra darting with time to spare, so we may have another shot at it.

Recovering collars

I went out on Tuesday to collect the last of the samples that I need for this season. Janette was not feeling well so I left her behind. I had checked on the fixes from Lasanya and found that the collar had not moved and had given a mortality signal, so I went to find it. It had fallen off in the middle of a large grassland, so was very easy to get to. It looked like it had been chewed a little, but otherwise no damage, simply a failure in the remote release mechanism. I continued northwards towards the last three points that I needed to sample. I managed to collect all my samples without problems, although it took slightly longer without an assistant. I came back along the main Khwai road in Moremi.

When I returned to camp, I found Janette being tested for malaria. I told her that it would be highly irresponsible of her to get malaria having only been here one month, and on anti-malarials, so she listened and the test was negative. Good assistant.

On the way back to camp, I developed a sneaky suspicion that Bianca's collar was also off, which was confirmed when I checked the fixes. It had not sent a mortality signal, but the fixes were very close together, so I set off yesterday to collect that collar. Janette told me that she felt better but I refused to let her come with me in case she decided to feel worse again. This collar was in the middle of the NG32 area, between the Gomoti and the Santantadibe. Given the high level of the Gomoti, I decided to go all the way around, which took a lot longer, but is better than drowning my car. I drove up the middle road, stopping to move a leopard tortoise out of the road, then struck out off road for the 2 km to reach the collar. I went through a riparian tree island and bounced over several logs before coming out into fairly open mopane with lots of grass hiding yet more logs. I made it to the fix for the collar and drove to a tree to leave the car in the shade so I could look for the collar, when I saw it lying next to the tree. It was more battered than the others, and the fabric connecting the release mechanism was very frayed, but it was still the release mechanism that was the weak point. I returned to the road and made my way back to camp.

Unfortunately, this means that I now have only one working satellite collar out. I hope to dart next week and replace Bambi's collar with a refurbished collar, so that I will have two collars, but this is still a very low sample size, especially as I want to collect migration data from when they move in the next month or so. However, there is not much that I can do, and the collar company has said that they will be as quick as possible in getting the collars back to me to be put out again. They will remove the release mechanism and shorten the belting, so hopefully the collars will not fall off again!