Leopard

This last week I crossed the Gomoti and went into NG31 to get samples from Nokya, who has been spending most of the last month on the other side of the river and has just come onto this side in the last couple of days. We managed to get samples from several quite wet areas by island hopping and wading around trying to find non sludgy routes whilst keeping a wary eye out for the many hippos in that area. I now realise why using a mokoro in that area would be rather dangerous - there really are hippos everywhere! We found a non-collared herd of buffalo that were not hugely co-operative. They hid in bushes and when they did come out they ran straight across water in a big bunch, which was not conducive to accurate counts of sex and age. We camped out on an islands surrounded by hippos that were calling all night - I never realised quite how extensive their vocabulary is.

The next day we drove further north along the Gomoti, looking for places to get across to the sites that I wanted to sample. Unfortunately every time that I thought we might reach one we came up against a rather large hippo-filled channel. We stopped off at the Afriscreen filming camp as we were driving past and asked them about crossing the channel. They took us further up to where they thought was a crossing for that large channel. Unfortunately it turned out to be a backwater and we found a much smaller crossing on the way back. We sampled a couple of sites on our side of the channel but unfortunately had to give up on the other ones. It was useful to find out where we could get to for future reference. And on the way back we found a beautiful, very relaxed male leopard in a tree.

We came back across the Gomoti but I think that will be the last time I cross until the flood water starts to go down, as the sand bar in the middle is almost underwater and the water came up to my fuel cap. Nokya had crossed over as well, so we went to get population dynamics from her herd, close to Black Pools. We found another herd close by and managed to age/sex 500 animals between the two herds. As I was calling out age/sex for the first herd, I spotted a male lion sticking his head up from sage behind the herd and looking rather interested. However, by the time I had finished my count I could no longer see him and when I went to look for him could not find him. The second herd managed to leave a calf behind, so the lion might have found him a bit later but not while we were there.

Counting buffalo

Earlier this week one of my collared cows, Lasanya, was on the Gomoti in a location that I knew would be accessible. She was on the other side of a main channel, but we could see the herd very well from the Moremi side. It worked out better than us following them as they seemed to feel less flighty with a decent volume of water between us and them. The first herd we found I estimated to be between 400-500 animals and I got data on age/sex/body condition for 247 individuals. The signal from the collar was coming from further north, so we continued and found another herd of a similar size, where I got data for 265 individuals. Earlier that animal was in a larger herd that was probably these two combined. We continued along the Gomoti to see if there were any other herds in the area and found a small herd of around 70 animals, and I managed to get data from almost all of them.

Lasanya then crossed to Black Pools, which is fairly inaccessible by vehicle (we tried unsuccessfully) and spent a few days in that area before crossing the land tongue again back to the Gomoti and heading north. A couple of days ago we followed the route that she took and got vegetation samples from the sites that she used.

Lasanya and Nokya are currently in the northern part of the Gomoti. Chanel is still further up to the west of Mboma. Bianca is on the Santantadibe, not too far from the buffalo fence.