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.