Collar issues

One of my collars had stopped sending me GPS fixes at the beginning of September, but I was not sure if it was still on a cow or not. Kris, the new pilot, took me up tracking to find the collar. We had a very strong signal almost immediately, but we could not see a herd, so I took a GPS point and drove in the next day. I spent an hour listening to varying volumes of double beeps, eventually managing to locate the collar, which had exposed wires and had obviously been ripped off the animal. Although this meant that the collar was broken, that is still better than the animals neck being broken.

Another collared cow was spending some time at Hippo Pools, and Roz (my new assistant) and I went out to get population data from the herd. After an hour or so, they cooperated nicely and walked calmly in front of us so that I was able to get a near total count of the herd.

Another of my collars, which was put on in June, stopped sending me fixes on the 7th October. I went out the next day and found the herd and got a visual on the collared animal. However, whilst I was with the herd the VHF stopped working. I tried to get hold of a vet to come out and dart her, but there was no one available for several days so I had to leave the herd. I was hoping that the VHF would start up again, but several tracking attempts have resulted in failure, so the collar appears to be completely lost.

I organised a darting trip that I hoped would allow me to remove the collar described above, among other reasons. We were able to remove the collar from Bongolo, which had been on for just over a year, then put that one and a refurbished one onto new cows, Fury and Jezebel. Everything went smoothly, but there was no sign of the malfunctioning collar.