Malawi: Work

Update from our Malawi expedition volunteering with elephants, hippo, cats, pangolins and African biodiversity

Some of us were woken up in the small hours this morning by a strange sound. To me, it was the clattery rocky sound of a working quarry a few kilometres away (unexpected, at 03:00), but I was wrong. Getting up for a dawn drive at 05:00, the sound still jumping out of the darkness, I found some of the expeditioners conferring with the night guard and staring at a spot right in front of base camp, where, just visible in the murky light, was a huge herd of cape buffalo – maybe 100 of them, twitchy and in constant motion, hooves clattering and calling to each other. A new wildlife sound, for me, and one that I will not confuse with a distant quarry again.

The herd drifted into the tall grass as we began our drive. After that we enjoyed the simple pleasures of watching and recording hippos, elephants, impala, kudu, vervet monkeys and more, aglow in the red dawn as the sun rose above the lake.

With the formal training now over, the team are had at work with the research tasks involved in this expedition and have already gathered useful data including on the training days. They have all been on other Biosphere Expeditions before and the experience shows.

We are now settling into a mostly regular regime of hippo transects on foot and recording elephant herds and individual elephant IDs by car, by foot and often from base camp when the elephants wander across the river in front of us. We have also collected some good samples of elephant dung (scientist Benni is very particular about quality, and it is important to keep the scientist happy) and we have now placed all the camera traps, not without challenge: the vehicle track we use is often blocked by trees pushed over by browsing elephants and they need to be cleared with tools and muscle power if we can’t drive around them.

Our tasks from now on is to continue to gather data across all the research tasks and – during the hotter part of the day – sit in the comfort of base camp, processing elephant dung (to find any evidence of the elephants eating crops on local community land) , analysing camera trap images and entering data. We are doing well and the team is happy.

Update from our Malawi volunteer expedition including elephant volunteer Africa and lion volunteer Africa