Wild dogs

My supervisor, Prof. Steve Harris, came out to visit myself and his other students for a few days, so I have spent a fair amount of time in town over the last week or so. He was generally very happy with my progress and made several very useful comments, which should help me to produce a better PhD. He spent several nights in Maun, so was understandably keen to get out to the bush, so he came out to HQ last night for a visit. We had a little potter about in the evening, going down to the Gomoti, which I have not visited in about a month. I was amazed by how high the water was - it has burst its banks in several places already. This morning we went to find the dogs, who were close by, and found them to be engaged in a bonding experience, which was very interesting.

B4, one of my store-on-board collars, one of the ones that had gone missing, has been picked up during a tracking flight. It was quite far east, which was the direction that I thought they may have gone in if the collars were still working. This is very good news, and hopefully means that the others will come back from wherever they went as well.

The collar that I sent off for repair has arrived, so I will check it out, then apply for darting permits to replace Chanel's collar, which is still double beeping.

Avoiding pans

I have just returned from two nights camping out for field work. Last week we had a lot of rain, so it was not until the weekend that I felt that field work would be worthwhile. The roads are definitely drier than they have been, but all the pans are a lot fuller than they were a few weeks ago.

One of my collars, B74, has not sent me new fixes since the 10th, so I needed to find the herd to check whether the collar was still sending a VHF signal. I have been in touch with the company, and they said that the data and battery seem fine, but there could be a problem with the wires in the collar, potentially with the wires leading to the GPS unit so that it cannot take fixes or send the data. I managed to find the herd because the collar was still giving off a strong signal, although it is double beeping. The collar did not look particularly damaged. She was very co-operative, since the one time that I wanted to get a good look at a collar was the longest time that a collared cow has stood in my field of vision. She also had a young calf, which was lovely to see. My contact at the collar company said that the VHF should be ok for a while, but I should send it back to them to be fixed. I should shortly be receiving the repaired B76 collar that fell off at the end of January, so I will try to replace 74 with 76.

After finding Chanel, we continued northwards to collect samples from Bambi, who has been spending time in Moremi, north of the very top of the hunting part of NG34. It is not an area that I have been to before, but we made our way up through NG34 to the cutline, finding a small herd of buffalo on the way. We made our way through 2 km of mopane, which was not a particularly pleasant experience, but we finally broke through into grassland and from then sampling was relatively easy. We picked up a signal from Bambiand tracked her down, but of course she was in some of the thickest mopane that we found up there. The herd was fairly relaxed, although we did have to follow them for a bit before they settled. By the time we had counted them, we had made our way fairly close to the cutline, so we just continued, only to find that the cutline was fairly flooded. We got around that and came to the inside cutline so started down that. After a few km, I noticed that my GPS had a waypoint called 'Waterhole', right on the road. We found it, and it was indeed a very large pan stretching right across the road and flooding the mopane as far as the eye could see. At that point it was starting to get dark, so we camped just off the road.

This morning, after a night spent thinking of options, I decided to drive the 1 km through mopane to the main Khwai road in Moremi. This turned out to be a good idea and we did not have any detours after we reached it. I thought that I could be useful to Dog Camp by tracking a few animals around that area and the Xini area, but only managed to pick up Darkness, the lion. The last two times that he was tracked the collar was double beeping, but when I picked up the signal it was fine. The big old elephant bull with the torn ear has been hanging around camp with a few friends in the last several days, which adds a little spice to walking to the office in the morning.

Getting stuck

A few months ago I received a complaint that my blogs were not as interesting as they used to be, since I have stopped getting stuck and whacking myself on the head. So I decided to listen to the constructive criticism and take this advice on board.

Janette (my new assistant) and I set out to the NG32 area between the Boro and the Santantadibe on Saturday morning, having obtained the latest fix from Bongolo just before leaving camp. We managed to find her fairly easily, in the same herd as B7, the only GPS collar that I have managed to pick up. We got a decent count of around 80 animals, althought I think that the herd was much bigger. We collected faecal samples and left them to their buffalo ways.

As we were driving back along the road to start sampling points, we came across a lovely herd of around 200 relaxing in grassland. This gave me the best count of the whole season, as they were very helpful, moving slowly in one direction, allowing me to get good visuals of most of them. We also collected faeces there, then moved on to vegetation sampling. That area seems to have gotten quite a lot of water in the time since I was last there, and a lot of the roads were flooded. Janette thought that flooded acacias were pretty, whereas I was slightly less impressed since I know what the ground turns into.

As we drove to our first point, a rather small elephant trumpeted at us and ran towards us from fairly far away. Janette was a bit concerned, but I just drove on and told her that she should only start worrying when I start swearing. We did a couple of sample points and were heading to another when we came across a section of the road that was particularly nasty-looking. There was a dry game trail going around it and lots of sage growing, so I foolishly thought I could go around. We went off the dry ground and straight into cotton soil, promptly sinking. Janette was a star and got stuck in straight away with the spade, while I jacked, keeping well away from the arm. We managed to get out within about 45 minutes, which was rather efficient of us, and was a good thing as it was starting to get dark by the time we were out. We hurried to a decent campsite, after turning around on the road and going back the way we came.

We heard lions roaring, followed by a gunshot, which was a bit disturbing, but I would have thought poachers would be going for meat as opposed to lions. There were also hyaenas and hippos calling, which pleased Janette. As I was cutting vegetables for our evening meal, I managed to slice the tip off my finger, which was foolish but not too painful. I eventually stopped the bleeding and got a bandage onto it. It rained pretty much all of that night.

The next morning we sampled a few more sites, then got ready to head into another area to collect samples from another herd. As we were driving towards that area, the sky was growing progressively darker and I heard someone on the radio talking about a storm at HQ. Given the already flooded state of those roads, I felt that an additional storm would probably lead to more time spent getting stuck than collecting data. I made the decision to abort and come back to camp. That was the right decision, since it rained all that afternoon, night and the next day. Today it has eased off a bit, but the skies are still overcast, so everyone is waiting for things to dry up before venturing off-road again.

Tracking flight

I have been keeping an eye on my buffalo herds via the Televilt website to see when they move close to a road so that I can go and collect population dynamics from them, thus minimising wear and tear on my lovely vehicle. I saw that Bambi was close to the twin palms road last week, so went out to find her. We got a double signal at first, which was rather distressing as the collar was only put on in October and the batteries on the collars that have been on for more than a year are fine, so this one should be too. As we found the herd, they got spooked and moved off, so we followed them to try and get a good visual on them. We could hear them for most of the time but were unable to see more than a vague movement of tails as they were in thick bush. We persevered and got a couple of counts, eventually performing my first successful outflanking manoeuvre, resulting in the herd walking through an open space slowly enough for me to count them and see the collared animal, looking healthy. Unfortunately we only saw around 30 animals, after several hours following them for 3 km. We turned and headed back for camp, stopping on the way to record a few more small groups and individuals that we came across.

Jennifer left last weekend, and Janette arrived the next day, sadly minus her luggage. We came out to camp anyway, leaving my lovely former assistant Laura to check on the bag the next day. I went up the next morning for a tracking flight to try and find the GPS-collared herds that I have not had a signal for in a couple of months. We flew down to the fence, picking up Chanel and Lasanya on the way, then up the Sankuyo Road into Moremi, striking out across the mopane towards Mboma, then across to Chief's Island, down through the Stanley's area, where we picked up Bongolo and B7 and back to camp. We covered the entire extent of the area where my satellite collared herds have been and only picked the signal from one of the GPS collars. Needless to say, this is not good news. It is possible that one or two of them could have moved into a different area entirely, but seems unlikely that all the GPS collars would go to one area, leaving all of the satellite collars in a different area. All of the animals were collared on the Gomoti, so they should all return there once the rainy season is over. It is very difficult to spot a collar in a herd, but I will have to try and find a GPS collar without a signal to confirm that they are not working. Unfortunately there is very little else that I can do.