Fires!

At the beginning of the week, Shavaughn and I went flying with Guy to get an idea of the sizes of the herds that my collared animals were in. They were in herds ranging from 250 - 700, and we saw a few herds that did not have any collars in them as well. There is a lot of water out there, but we were also able to determine which areas I should still be able to access despite the high flood. Hunting season is also over, so I can now get into all the concessions again.

Shavaughn and I headed up the Gomoti on Wednesday into Moremi to collect some data from points used by Nokya. We saw a herd of buffalo on the way, and were able to age and sex around a quarter of them before something upset them and they took off. We headed further north than we had been before to try and ascertain whether we could cross onto a rather large island that has been used quite a lot by a couple of the herds. Unfortunately, the channel there is rather deep and muddy, so we will leave it for a while and try again when the water has started to subside.

We were able to collect data from a couple of sites before we had to return to HQ in a bit of a hurry. There have been fires around camp for a few weeks, but this week they started to get a bit too close for comfort. We were monitoring the radio, and when Dog Camp said that the fire was reaching them, I decided to abandon fieldwork and go and give them a hand.

By the time we got back there had already been one back burn lit, but we were on hand to try again that evening. Unfortunately there was not much wind, so that plan was abandoned. On Thursday night, we tried to back burn along the road towards Rhino Pan. We were going quite well, but again the wind died so we did not complete the whole stretch.

On Friday, we went out around midday towards Dog Camp, where the fire was getting close. We dragged acacia trees along the road for several hours to try and create a fire break. The wind then changed to our favour, so we back burned again, moving along from the place where the fire had stopped earlier. When the wind died we headed for home again.

Yesterday, we again went out around lunch time and just made it to the fire in time to stop it jumping the road and heading straight for Dog Camp. Again we dragged acacias to widen the fire break. We had to use the bowser to stop big flames and sparks from flying across the road, and we were beating the fire out when it reached the shorter grass. We managed to get that section under control, despite a small scare when a patch on the wrong side of the road started to burn. We then went to another section and waited for the fire to reach the road before beating it out. Once that was under control, we headed back to a patch between two burns that had not burnt itself. We lit a back burn there and got rid of that threat. That was when Keren exclaimed that we would be home early. However, on our way back we found another section that was heading straight for the road, so we called everyone back in and beat that bit down as well. Then we went home.

Today, there are still some fires to the south of camp that are flaring up, so we are keeping an eye on them. There are others further away, but they seem to be heading away from all the camps so we are happy to just let them burn! Fire is an important part of the natural cycle of the bush, after all.

Hopefully the fires will die down soon and we can all get back to work, probably after a day of sleep. The the entire effort has been highly successful so far, and is by far the best team-building excercise I have ever experienced! (And I have discovered that setting fires for back burning purposes is a lot of fun!!)