The beautiful island

One of my collared animals, Chanel, spent the last two weeks on one decent-sized island just to the west of Mboma island in the Moremi. Guy was kind enough to look at the area on Google Earth and pointed out a number of crossings that he thought should be possible, depending on water levels. I tried to find out where the flood was from several people in Maun, but as usual everyone had a different opinion. Pilots told me if I wanted they would make a special effort to look out of the window, and then told me that there was quite a lot of water there, which wasn't particularly useful. Tour operators and boat operators basically didn't know but some said the flood was there and others said it wasn't and then one said it wouldn't really make much difference to the water levels in that area anyway. So I decided to just go and look for myself.

I walked across the first potential crossing that I came to after driving up to the bottom of Mboma island and following a little used road and found a large sand bar in the middle that was almost exposed and at no point did the water come up past the middle of my thigh. The bottom was sandy, so I decided to go for it and all was well. On the other side, there were some tree islands in the middle of floodplain, which was completely dry and very good to drive over, once I realised I was not going to sink and get stuck.

We then reached the main island and did a couple of vegetation points, then drove up to the northern end, where the buffalo had been most recently. There were several elephants that we managed to avoid. The island itself was beautiful - probably the prettiest spot I have been in the Delta, and an absolute pleasure to drive across. The only trees were in small stands, with open grassland and dry floodplains in between. We found the buffalo across a small stretch of wet floodplain but unfortunately they decided to run after looking at us for a couple of minutes. We crossed over to where they had been and followed the cloud of dust, only to be thwarted by a deep pool with a very sticky bottom. There was no other way around, so we left them to move away, watching the dust cloud as they started out across the next island and returned to sampling the sites that they had used.

We spent the whole next day sampling and ended up with a total of 28 sample sites, so it turned out to be a very successful trip. The buff had spent 2 weeks on the island, which is 6 km long, so we were able to move between sample sites easily and quickly. There were a couple that we had to leave because elephants were there, and one bull got upset with us and mock charged but then moved away.

Camping out was lovely. It is a huge privilege as a researcher to be able to camp wherever I end up without having to worry about getting back to a designated campsite. The second night we had an elephant cow and calf come through just after we had gone to bed, but they moved on after investigating us a bit. We heard hyaena calling at night and the next morning 2 sets of lions were roaring for about 3 hours but we didn't see them.

We finished the sampling and went across to the main part of Moremi to try and find some buffalo herds to count and get population dynamics. We spent the night at Xaxanaka campsite, and I picked a spot where I thought I wouldn't disturb anyone, only to have a large group of people pitch right next to us. They went to bed relatively early, but they left their coolbox out, so of course a hyaena came along just after midnight and stole it. Shortly afterwards, a large bull elephant came to the tree next to my tent and shook it for the fruit. He was very close, but seemed very relaxed and was happy to eat the fruit and avoid my tent. He finished there and moved across to walk through the other people's camp and smelled fruit through the open window of their car, so stuck his trunk in and rummaged around for oranges. After a while, the people realised something was happening and all piled out of their tents to have a look. They then tried to shoo the elephant away - straight towards our tents. Luckily he was very aware of our tents, even when reversing straight towards them, and despite having his front and rear legs on either side of a corner of my tent at one point, he was very good and maneuvered himself so he didn't touch us at all. The people were not as considerate, as they seemed entirely oblivious to the fact that if they had managed to scare the ele, he would have come straight into us. After that, I decided not to use public campsites again - it is unpleasant and dangerous! The sunrise was nice though.

More mokoro and short break

My second mokoro expedition at the beginning of last week went as smoothly as the first, although we missed the last point I wanted as the sun was settting and we would have had to go quite close to hippos on the way there and back. Otherwise, we collected a total of 17 data points, which was approximately what I had in mind, and we saw some bachelor herds, which was also useful.

I went into Moremi for a day with a friend last week and saw two non-collared herds of buffalo close to Xakanaxa, one of around 200 and one of around 300 individuals. I was able to collect age/sex ratio data and faecal samples from them both, which made me very happy. We also saw Amelia the leopard and a strange albino lechwe which looks remarkably like a lamb/goat.

I have spent the last few days in Maun trying to get my hands on the aerial photos for my study site, and am hoping that today will be the day.

I have also spoken to all the air charter companies in Maun and a good few of the pilots to get them to record all the buffalo herds that they see, with a location and approximate herd size. I am hoping that this will work out as a cheap (a few beers to the pilots that help me with this) way of doing aerial surveys. If I get several reports of herds of similar sizes in the same area, the reports will corroborate each other and should prove relatively accurate. I have already received several sightings with GPS coordinates and sizes, so for now the idea seems to be working.

Sampling from a mokoro

Given the wet areas that my buff have been using, I have decided to try sampling from a mokoro (a traditional dug-out canoe). After asking several people about the best way to find a poler, I was told to find my way to Boro, which is reknowned as prime poler habitat. I found my way there ok (via the prison) and found lots of polers, but managed to take a wrong turn on the way back and get a little lost, although I knew I was heading in the general direction of Maun. Luckily, a happy smiley man in a Landrover found us and led us back to the outskirts of Maun. I returned to Boro the next day to pick up my poler and bring him out to HQ, getting back to the main road without getting lost.

We started poling soon after sunrise and found our way through channels and across floodplains to a total of seven points from which we collected vegetation data and samples. We saw one hippo, but it was out of the water close to one of our sites, so we were able to avoid it and had no terrifying experiences of hippo surging out of the water under our mokoro as I had envisaged. We also found a very fresh lion scat at one of our sites, but only when we had almost finished there, so we just completed the sampling. The sites used by the buff were mostly on the edges of islands, not in the middle of floodplains, and not too far from the water, so we didn't have to traipse across huge distances to reach the sites. The main grass, couch grass (Cynodon dactylon), does not seem to be appealing to them, and they appear to prefer the taller grasses on the island interiors.

I generally found the mokoro to be quite a relaxing way of getting between points, as opposed to bashing through mopane and hopping over logs in my car, which can be stressful and damaging to the vehicle. Several of the points we could not reach because of land being in the way, which makes a change! We will be going again tomorrow to get at least another 8 points, I hope.

I am getting aerial photographs of my entire study area from the University of Botswana. I am going to try and speak to some more people about using a boat to get up into the swampy areas north of Chitabe after getting them to look at the aerial photos and work out which channels may be navigable.

A big old elephant with the torn ear has been hanging around HQ recently, but he is very relaxed, so I really don't mind him being outside my door on a regular basis. There have also been zebra and tsessebe at the pan in front of camp for the last few days, which makes a lovely backdrop for lunch.

Trying to get around water

My collared buffalo have been moving about a fair bit lately. Nokya was on the Gomoti, then moved overnight up to the Chitabe area the others were in but has now decided she preferred it on the Gomoti and has come back down. Lasanya and Chanel spent some time together in one herd and have moved quite far north into highly flooded areas west of Third Bridge and Dead Tree Island in Moremi. Bianca seems to be continuing to wander around the NG32/ Chief's Island area, though I think she might be spending a bit more time in floodplains than in mopane.

I have been speaking to various people about accessing my buffalo in the flooded areas north of Chitabe and have generally been met with disbelieving stares. It would appear that the water is too high for driving, even with a specially adapted swamp vehicle, and that the high hippo density means using a mokoro or a small boat would be fairly (read completely) suicidal. Which is encouraging.

I have also been speaking to people who work in the area, including at Chitabe, who have said I can go up there and they can show me the roads that they use so I can work out how far north I can go. Apparently, the buff move from the permanent swamps back down towards Chitabe fairly regularly. So hopefully I can sample some of the floodplains and maybe islands closest to Chitabe when the buff are using those areas. However, if this latest northwards trend continues, they may soon be leaving the country altogether.

At the beginning of this week, I drove around the bottom of the Gomoti and onto the other side, where I thought I might be able to get to some areas that one of my herds was using. However, there is still a lot of water and they are mainly grazing on islands in the middle of the Gomoti that I can't quite get to. I got some vegetation samples from locations that they walked through apparently without stopping on their way up to Chitabe that should hopefully show that there is not much grass for them to eat in the inland habitat types, which is why they are sticking to those lovely wet areas.

I have arranged with the community in the Stanley's area to go out with a mokoro and see whether I can feasibly access some of the islands that the buff over there have been using. There are several mokoro stations there and the guys must know the area pretty well, which increases chances of success, although the community guys I spoke to were quite dubious about those chances, what with hippos and some of the channels being completely blocked by reeds, but I will give it a try and see what happens. And then of course in a few weeks the flood will come in and exacerbate these issues. But with a bit of luck and trials of various access methods, I hope to be able to collect at least some data from the flood season!

Chief's Island

My last field trip was reasonably successful, when I managed to collect faecal samples, vegetation samples and observational data. The herd was on Chief's Island, which takes about 7 hours to drive to. The water on the roads has finally started to go down, which is a relief. However, when we stopped off at Stanley's Camp to say hello, they told us that Chief's Camp had already started to reduce the area that they use for game drives because of rising flood water, and the water was expected to start rising again at Stanley's abut 3 weeks later. We managed to find the herd quite close to the road, in relatively open mopane, and were able to age and sex 111 individuals, with a total estimate for the herd of about 150 - 200. I saw the collared cow as well, looking healthy.

After spending a few hours with the herd, we moved onto sampling vegetation from areas that they had used over the 2 weeks prior to that date. Despite the vegetation map that I have telling me that there was lots of acacia woodland, the only habitat types to be found were mopane and grassland. We sampled several sites in which the herd had been grazing, resting and walking. We managed to find a route through the dense mopane using open grassland areas, which was a huge relief as the last time we were in that area we encountered mopane that was very difficult to drive through. Needless to say I saved that route onto my GPS for future reference!!

Unfortunately, as we were about to reach the 16th sample site, the drag link arm for my steering fell off (the second time that has happened, although the first time was at the other end!). I re-attached it using cable ties and duck tape, but was not convinced of the wisdom of continuing since we had just decided that we had to go through a particularly dense stand of mopane. So we re-traced our tracks and returned to the road to get back to Maun and fix the steering. We drove very slowly on the tar just in case the cable ties decided to snap, but luckily they held together and I was able to get the car fixed the next day.

I have been in the UK for the last 10 days, where they were very excited to see the sun for the first time in 2 years. Bless them. I was able to access data from my collars but did not have the software with me to work out where the fixes were, so I have just been checking that they have been moving. Above is a jpeg of their movements over the last 6 weeks, with the big red symbols representing their current locations. The three on the NG34 side have generally moved west, with the sole survivor in NG32 still just moving up and down between Chief's Island and NG32.

My new assistant (Shavaughn) will be arriving at the end of May, so we will get cracking on field work then. Until then, my supervisor has asked me to write a summary of my work so far and my plans for the rest of the year. I am also going to have to revise one of my chapters, so I will be spending a decent amount of time in the office, unless one of my buff decides to take pity on me and come closer so I can spy on them without travelling too far or crossing too much water.

Darting Savanna

Another of my collars (B77) has started malfunctioning. It seems to be very confused about the date and is sending me old fixes instead of new ones. Televilt (the collar company) said it is a problem with the processor and could I send it back so they can fix it? This is not as simple as it sounds, and involves a vet, a helicopter and the means to pay for those!

I was supposed to dart on Friday but Peter, the pilot, got in touch with me to say that he had to fly for the King of Spain that day, so we did it on the Thursday. Guy kindly flew for me on Wednesday to get a fix on where they were so we headed straight for that point and found a herd close by. We landed so that Rob (the vet) could load darts and we took the doors off the heli (which made the flight even better!). I checked for a VHF signal and got a strong one from in front of us. So we took off and spotted them almost immediately in a herd of around 120 individuals. We managed to spot the collared cow, Savanna, with her calf. They were close to water and quite a thick stand of crotons, so we spent some time trying to get them to run into an open area. Eventually they cooperated and Rob got a good shot off. We then circled the herd for around 20 mins but the cow showed no real signs that she was feeling the drug. This was lucky in some ways, as she got charged by an elephant whilst we were watching her. There were at least a hundred eles hanging around in various groups and some were getting a bit upset by the helicopter.

We went in again as it became apparent that the dart had somehow malfunctioned. Rob got off another good shot and she went down in 6 minutes while her calf ran off with the rest of the herd. I went in and got the collar off without problems. Peter pulled the first dart out and it discharged on his shoulder but we cleaned it up quickly. Rob thought that the tip of the needle just got clogged up with skin so that the drug could not get out. She was reversed and got up within a minute so all was well and we flew back to Maun.

Recovering a collar

One of my collars (B78) has not moved in a couple of weeks, so I went across to Stanley's on Wednesday to retrieve it. The camp managers organised everything so we were able to head out that afternoon. We tied a mokoro to the top of my vehicle and drove up the Mombo road until we were as close as possible to the fix that I had for the collar. We drove off-road for a little while but we encountered what looked like a quite extensive stretch of water. So we unloaded the mokoro and headed out, at which point we were approximately 1.9km from the collar. We were able to push the mokoro through water for a while, but soon realised that there was more land between us and the collar. So the Shaun (the manager) and Rex (the poler) carried the mokoro, refusing to let my assistant or I help them, even though neither of them had brought shoes and they trod on thorns repeatedly. We made it to the main channel that we had to cross and were able to pole along it for quite a while. It was really quite deep and I think that using a mokoro was the only realistic option. We left the mokoro in a safe spot on the other side and continued on foot (having first taken a GPS fix for the mokoro!) for a further 500 m.

When we got within 20m of the fix I had for the collar, I said that it could be anywhere around that spot. I then took two more steps and spotted the collar lying on the ground right in front of me. It was not on a carcass, as I had thought, but one of the points where the belting connects to the battery unit had been ripped. The collar must have caught on something, possibly a branch or the horn of another buffalo, but it is good to know that the collars will break in that case, and not the animal! Unfortunately I will need to send it back to Televilt for repair, but I downloaded all of the data from it without a problem.

We re-traced our steps and made it back to the car without any mis-haps, then drove back to Stanley's, arriving quite soon after sunset. The managers said that since it was quite late, we could stay in the pilot's tent and join them for a braai after the guests had finished, which was very kind.

We then drove up onto Chief's Island to collect some data from one of the herds. We went off-road and collected some vegetation data, but the habitat was really difficult to drive through. It was short stocky mopane with logs and fallen trees everywhere, presumably because of a high elephant population. It took us 2 hours to drive 2 km, so we decided to leave the rest of the fixes as I was only testing new methodology. We managed to get the car stuck on a hidden log and bent the steering somewhat, tho not enough to affect the vehicle. After that I got Laura to walk in front of the vehicle and scout a route, but it was very slow going, with some areas being completely impassable.

We drove back down into NG32 and had a look at an area to see whether we could drive there, but I think it will be a job for a mokoro. We tracked the herd there and did some counts of the herd and the age and sex classes therein. The cow in that herd is looking very healthy and has a young calf. We came back to HQ yesterday, having found a lovely road, complete with bridge, that was built to go around the water where we got stuck last week, which was a lovely surprise, but I wish I'd known about it before!!