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.