Waiting for Harpy

Harpy, one of my collared cows, has been spending a lot of time close to HQ lately, so on Wednesday Janette and I went out to collect some samples from areas that her herd has been using. We found the herd close to Peter Katz' old camp, in fairy thick palm scrub. We spent a while trying to be sneaky and position ourselves so that they would walk in front of us, but of course that did not work, and we only succeeded in causing the buff to run into elephants, creating a bit of a kerfuffle. We decided to give up and drove back along the road, only to find ourselves about 20 m from the closest buffalo, who seemed to have relaxed. We were able to get a modest count, but decided to come back later when they might have moved into more open habitat.

We were able to get close to the new hunter's road before our way was blocked with water. We made our way through fairly thick riparian to the water's edge, but were unable to drive along the floodplains. We sampled several sites down there, then tried for the buff again. The Gomoti is dropping, but is still very wet, and the lovely buff had decided to cross the back channel in our absence, so I decided to monitor them for the next few days and catch them in the open at a later stage.

This occurred the next day, when they found themselves in fairly open riparian along the Gomoti north of the Moremi cutline. We drove out to them and were with them within an hour of the latest fix. They were fairly relaxed, and were fine with us manouevering ourselves into a position where we could see most of them. I got a good view of Harpy, who is looking lovely and fat and happily bullying lesser individuals. We became quite familiar with several animals in the herd, and they were completely relaxed with us being 50 m away, so much so that it took them 5 hours to move. Three elephants and four giraffe came through in that time. Eventually they decided to move off, although it was in the one direction that I couldn't quite see all of them. So we tried an outflanking tactic, sneaking through the palm scrub further up and lying in wait for them next to the Gomoti. Surprisingly, this paid off and we were able to get a near total count of 147 animals as they slowly crossed some shallow water.

On Thursday, we went out to collect baseline samples further east. The day was mostly uneventful, but we did come across a group of vultures at a pan at the northern boundary of NG43. When we went to investigate, we found a little buffalo calf, only a couple of weeks old, that must have died the day or night before, as it had barely been touched and there was no smell of death. There was no fresh evidence of a herd, so I think that she was separated from the herd and had been wandering around for a while.