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.