Angry hippo

Last week I decided to take Rodney up on his kind offer to lend me a vehicle from HQ, and did the fieldwork that I had wanted to do two weeks ago. We set off early from HQ on Wednesday and came across a herd of buffalo, just as they were crossing the main Moremi road. They were fairly relaxed, and I got a good count, including quite a large number of very small calves. We sampled from Jezebel, but her herd was in such thick bush that we only managed to see four animals and so we left them to it. We back onto the road close to the Kazikini hunting camp, and shortly afterwards spotted a group of eland running off into the bushes. I suspect that it was the same herd that I saw last year and Gabriel saw in January, of ten adults and 2-3 youngsters, although they were very skittish and we could not get a decent look at them. We made it to S-bend, where we were threatened by an angry hippo but managed to escape with our dignity intact. As we were heading back to camp, we spotted a big buffalo bull walking down the road towards us. I stopped and switched the car off to see how close he would get. He literally walked straight up to the vehicle and got to within 5 m before suddenly realising that we were there and moving off the road.

The next day we sampled from Valkyrie, up near Mababe. On the way in we saw a roan run across the road and we then saw a herd of 21 giraffe that also ran away from us. We managed to get all of the samples that we needed bar one, so the season's sampling is nearly done, which is a relief given that the end of the month is fast approaching!