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.
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