Water problems

I have been struggling to carry out fieldwork lately, given that my lovely study animals have been spending most of their time in wet, inaccessible areas. However, two of my animals were considerate enough recently to spend some time in the Chitabe area, which is mostly dry enough to get around. Therefore Janette and I went out this week to collect samples and try to meet my target for the season.

We were driving up to the closest fixes when we came across fresh buffalo faeces, so we followed the trail for a while. We were still quite far from the last fix from the collar, but when I checked for a signal I picked a strong one up straight away. The herd was at least 300 strong, and fairly relaxed, so that we were able to get age, sex and body condition for more than 200 of them. We also managed to see the collared cow, looking healthy and fat.

We continued up to the vegetation points, and after we had been sampling for a while we were approached by a vehicle, which was being driven by a friend of mine who works for Afriscreen. He invited us to stay at their filming camp that evening, which was very kind and much appreciated. We headed there as it was getting dark and spent a pleasant evening swapping stories.

The next morning we headed out as soon as it got light and sampled intensively to meet our target. I wanted to cross a channel to get to some more floodplain points, but it turned out to be rather deeper than I had hoped, so I abandoned that plan and decided to call it a day, after we collected samples from 20 points. We passed through Chitabe, where we were given a warm welcome, as always. They told us about a collared cheetah that they had seen that morning, so I passed the information onto Dog Camp.

Darting again

Last week I made arrangements for darting buffalo and putting out the collars. Larry Patterson the vet came up from Gaborone and Peter Perlstein flew the helicopter for us. On Thursday, I asked several of the charter pilots to call in buffalo herds that they had seen, which helped us to find the first herd, a few km south of Stanley's airstrip. We put the first collar out, then searched for more herds. We found two more at the bottom of Santantadibe island, and put the next two collars out without incident. We then returned to Maun, as I was hoping to re-collar two animals the next day and Tico kindly agreed to track them for me on the Friday morning.

Tico found two of the collars I had been looking for, but from their positions I thought that they had probably broken off already. One was close to the Gomoti, so we went to check that there was not a herd there, before heading back to the Gomoti to collar two more animals. We found a large herd of around 500 animals fairly far up the Gomoti, where we decided to put two collars, to save time. We darted a cow and flew higher to watch her as she went down. We then noticed a young male lion crossing the water after the herd.

We monitored the herd, but they went through some thick palm scrub and we lost sight of the cow. We kept an eye on the lion to make sure that he did not find her. Unfortunately he spotted her at the same time as we did, and as we flew down towards her we saw him with his paws around her. He was only on her for about 30 seconds before we used the helicopter to shoo him away, so was unable to do any damage. When Larry examined the cow, he told me that she was very old, as she only had one very worn tooth left, and he was unsure how much longer she would live for. We decided to let her go and collar more suitable animals. We reversed her and kept an eye on the lion to ensure that she made it back to the herd without incident.

We targeted a second cow, who was much younger. Just after Larry put the dart into her, we caught sight of a leopard that walked across an open area and jumped up into a tree next to the buff herd. The darting went smoothly, as did the last one, and we headed for Maun. The buff herd were watching the lion then, though he still seemed determined to get something!

I have been monitoring the collars since they went out, and have been somewhat dismayed to see that the second two collars that we put out on Thursday joined up and have since walked 30 km up Chief's Island. I do not know why they have done so, as I have not observed such long movements apart from the migrations, and can only hope that they stop soon, before they reach Mombo! The other newly collared animals have moved only a reasonable amount, and are all in areas that I hoped they would stay in, although with the high water they are still largely inaccessible..