Tag: wildlife vacation

I received a couple of emails from previous team members asking to show pictures of what rain looks like here and I have attached them. (Evidently they did not believe me that it actually does rain here in November!)

Wednesday Stuart, Sandra and Markus signed up for the all day camera trap team. They kept stumm about it all day, yet at briefing they practically burst with the news: they’d seen a leopard running away from them up in the mountains. Quite a lucky team!

Thursday was our vehicle game count, the last of the season with Biosphere Expedition. It was a terrific way to finish off the expedition – all three teams seeing record numbers of animals and getting to spend one last beautiful morning driving on Okambara. In the afternoon the team helped pack up the expedition – each year the first and last teams have the privilege of unpacking and packing the expedition kit and storing it until the next season.

I’ve also attached a picture of all the groups’ elephants sightings in 2014.

Team 6 has now left the farm, and that wraps up our Namibia expedition for 2014. A huge thank you to everyone who volunteered this year. It was great to meet you all and work alongside you. Your hard work, flexibility, willingness to get dirty and be Vera’s “arms and legs and feet” on Okambara has been immensely helpful. Thanks to you we captured three leopards this year and collared two. Vera’s scientific report on the 2014 expedition will be published in a few months.

Best wishes

Alisa Clickenger
Expedition leader

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One of the things I love about working in Namibia is that when you start your day, you never know how it’s going to end. Sunday I got wet walking to briefing, something that has never happened to me before here in Namibia because normally we work in the dry spring/summer season. Tuesday night I drifted off to sleep to the deafening sound of all the frogs that had come out to call for mates with the rains.

Saturday was the day off and the teams volunteered to check the box traps. Unfortunately they were all empty. Sunday morning Stuart, Markus, Heidi, Sabine and Karen all helped Vera move the box trap from Frankposten up to Bergposten. We placed the trap where Team 4 had installed one, simply called Bergposten 2. Team 6 was hyper organised and had the trap out of the ditch and up on the track waiting for the truck when Vera arrived. They were back to camp in record time, thanks to said organisation plus the previous work Team 4 did cutting shrubs.

The elephant team did not find the elephants on Monday, but the box trap team did on their way back from the lodge, so we know they are still on the farm 😉 The lead cow’s VHF collar is barely giving a signal – very often we have to be within 300 metres or less to pick up any beeps at all.

Monday Markus and Sandra changed the trap meat in the morning, and Stuart, Christaine and Sabine changed it in the afternoon. Rough work in the afternoon for our resident vegetarians when the intestines we started using in the morning to lay a scent trail to our box traps had become fully ripe in the morning and afternoon sun.

Because of the rains all waterhole teams are reporting seeing very few animals. Tuesday we figured out why: we saw lots of puddles of water around the farm, so the animals do not have to go to the water holes where they are extremely vulnerable. Rather, they can grab a drink along the way and not have to congregate in the “danger zone”. Our territorial sable bull doesn’t seem to consider the bush camp water hole a threat, however…

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Team 6 brought the rain. Not the average almost-evaporates-before-touching-the-ground-rain, but full-on rain. With thunder, lightning and the whole shebang. With nine of the team members out at the 4WD training, we sought shelter under the roof at the scientists’ compound. They have a metal roof in their lapa and it was spectacular. Back at bush camp, merely 6 kms away, Heidi had been out checking box traps with Ligeus and wondered what all the fuss was about because no rain fell there. Such are the vagaries in the non-rainy season in Namibia.

Team 6 also brought the rhinos, two of them at their first dinner here in camp. The rhino pals were so comfortable near us, they laid down for a while, so we got a really nice front-row encounter in the comfort of our own home.

Monday was our box trap training up at the CS House box trap, and afterwards we split into three groups to check all the traps. Markus, Astrid and Christiane came with me and got the grand tour of the farm on the first day, because we were responsible for checking the Lodge trap (where we found hyaena prints walking just beside the trap) and the Mountain trap (where I forgot there is a camera trap so there will be nice pictures of my lower legs for the next data entry team to see).

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Today, Wednesday, the teams are working independently and enjoying the fruits of their two days of training. First order of business is changing the meat in the box traps, so it will be interesting to hear at tonight’s briefing how they’ve combined all their navigational, equipment, box trap and data sheet training for a successful day in the field. Most volunteers comment on how they cannot believe that after two days of training that we let them loose to work on their own in the field. Yes, we trust them. All the volunteers are so important, because we’re able to do so much more work all over the farm.

This morning the elephants gave Markus, Astrid, Christiane, Karen and I a merry chase. We searched for 4+ hours with no luck. We did telemetry in the north, south, east and west, and not a single beep. Yes, we even had fresh batteries in the telemetry receiver. Christiane and Markus even climbed up the Boma treehouse to have a listen. Well, no data are still data, so we have to record those as well.

On the way back from searching for the elephants, our team came across a large group of giraffe. Take a close look at the horns on the wee one. You’ll notice that they are crooked. That’s because when giraffes are born their nubs aren’t yet connected to their heads. Over time they grow and adhere to the animal’s head, becoming fully fused at 4-4.5 years (~7 years in females). But at birth they are loose and lie flat so they’ll ease through the birth canal.

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Thursday was our weekly vehicle game count. What a difference a week can make. Last week we were frozen solid on the backs of the trucks and counting game like crazy, and this week the weather was much warmer and the animal counts much less. The mountain team consisting of Mark, Helen, Uli and Ashley didn’t see much game on the game count, but they did see a lot of tracks. In fact, one track they followed led them straight to out box trap! There the leopard put on paw in the trap, then proving how very clever they are decided it was a bad idea and stepped out again without activating the trap. We can’t wait to see what leopard it was when we view the camera trap pictures!

Elephant observation teams were extremely unlucky after the first encounter. We scoured the farm for four days never finding them, getting random beeps but never seeing them. Finally on day 5 we went out and found followed their signal (and them) to the Sandposten waterhole. We had a lovely encounter for more than an hour, unfortunately never observing any feeding behaviour because they were so absorbed in the water. What was very interesting to all of us was how they chased off the cows: they blow water at them!

Vera’s game count team of Mara, Paul, Emma and Bruce didn’t see much game at all according to Helen and Uli doing data entry to my right, but they reported seeing the rhinos on the way back home. My team of Louize, Di, Vibeke and John on the east side of the farm didn’t see the bat eared foxes this week, but we did see a plentiful amount of the beautiful and delicate Steenbok. (Our data sheets were so full we didn’t want to brag that we also saw the rhino family group plus the big male.) We also counted among our animals a sable antelope.

The rest of the week’s activities hummed along swimmingly well. The teams worked hard even though it has been quite hot these past two weeks. We’ve changed around the activities a bit so that we’re doing the more sedentary activities in the afternoons, but for some activities like box traps and changing the bait meat in the traps, it’s just a hot, sweaty, smelly business no matter what time of day you do it.

A hearty thanks goes out to all the Team 5 volunteers. We wish you safe travels home.

Team 6? See you at the Josephine Gate on Sunday!

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Last Friday Team 5 set up a new box trap at the south fence. Last year’s volunteers reading this diary might know its location on the ridge on the fence south of JM House where we set the camera trap. I don’t think I’ve shared the attached camera trap picture yet. While it’s not the target species of this project, it is an awfully cute picture.

With the help of IZW scientists, Team 5 also set up a new box trap in the mountain area of Okambara this past week. We’ve stepped up our trapping efforts as you can tell and have borrowed two traps from the IZW in order to catch as many leopards as possible. There are still several females we are targeting to get collared, and we wouldn’t mind re-capturing the leopards we caught last year in order to refresh their collars.

So Team 5 now is lucky enough to have a total of six traps check. Traps are far enough apart that we’re spending considerable time driving all over Okambara both mornings and evenings, and sometimes we split up the box trap duties and combine them with other activities in order to make sure we’re operating at maximum efficiency.

Team 5 has been super helpful not just on science-related tasks and I have to commend them for their fantastic “dig in and do it” attitudes. For example; three nights ago Emil the male rhino came along and thought the fence surrounding our lapa was a pretty good place to get a good scratch. Unfortunately, the fence toppled inwards and left a lovely hole for every animal coming to the waterhole to crawl through, so Bruce, Ashley, John, Paul and Mark put their heads together, put their backs into it and got it fixed. Bruce, Ashley, John and Paul then went out with Ligeus to gather firewood too.

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