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.