Checking Cameras and Counting Spots

So, I left South Africa for two weeks over Christmas, which managed to disappear fast and it felt, almost as soon as I arrived home I was back on  a plane again from Heathrow to Johannesburg.

When I arrived back at Lajuma I realized that completing my year with the baboons and doing my project was not possible, as my body was breaking down after 3 months.

After a long conversation with Katy and Sam we decided that I could join the predator side of the project for 4 months and then finish of my project independently.

We then had a huge New Year party at the barn with celebrating 3 midnights, South Africa and then Europe and then the UK. Including beer pong!

Beer pong at new year

The aims of the predator side of the project is to assess mammal biodiversity in the Soutspansburg Mountains using a grid of 23 camera traps. As well as research on leopard density in the mountains. The leopard density is the highest leopard density outside Kruger National Park within South Africa, with leopards being removed from most private land areas in South Africa the Soutspansburg and other mountain ranges is an important stronghold for Leopards.

Our daily tasks is to hike to each of the camera traps every two weeks to change batteries and change the SD cards, we also remove any grass from in front of the camera (it is frustrating having over 600 pictures of grass moving).

we see alot of this antelope around, A bush buck!

Once we get back we immediately back up the pictures on a hard drive and then proceed to tag the photos depending on the species. Throughout this blog there are a few pictures that I have tagged over the last 2 weeks.

We also have a scat (poo) quota for each week… This is 20 scats prepared for analysis per week, to do this we have hyaenas and leopard scats that have been washed and dried, we then add gelatin to a microscope slide and use random sampling to remove hairs from the scat and place them on the slide, we also use wax to create a cross section of the hairs. This is for analysis of diet of both leopards and brown hyaenas within the mountain range.

One of our small predators, an African Civet

When we are tagging we do a bit extra when we come across a leopard. The density analysis we use requires each leopard to be individually ID’d (this is capture-recapture analysis also known as occupancy dependent analysis). To ID the leopards we compare the camera trap picture we have to a photo of known leopards and find areas of the spots that look unique and if that is on your leopard from the camera trap photo then you know the name of the leopard. The first leopard I tagged and ID’d was a collard individual called Pimms. That night we went to the area he was caught on the camera trap and managed to download all the data from his collar which we had not been able to do for 6 months.

One of our 3 Kudu on Diepkluf!

On a farm just off the mountain a leopard called CC (who also was collard at the time) was caught in an illegal snare on her foot and unfortunately died in 2013, we managed to find her remains and collar still attached under a rock. Highlighting the huge impact of illegal snaring and farmers killing leopards and Hyaenas illegally in this area, we had 12 collard leopards and 4 collard hyaenas, 3 of the leopards were snared and killed, 3 were poisoned and one big adult male called Drogo was shot by a farmer, also one of the collard hyaena was also killed called bill.

Red Duiker

However it is not all bad news, In 2014 BB who at the time was also collard took a calf from the same farm that his mother CC was found dead at, after CC’s death Ian, Oldrich, Katy and Sam did a lot of education work with this farm in question, and the day before they planned to poison BB and kill him, they contacted Ian. Everyone then went down to the farm and rebuilt the Boma (what the calves are kept in at night) so that BB could not get through, by doing this they effectively saved his life.

The Stunning Leopard BB

So for the next few weeks I am hiking to the camera stations and in any down time writing my proposal for Katy and Sam for my project, I am planning to use the leopard and hyaenas collar data to assess whether they are more likely than expected to use roads, and whether there is differences between the leopards and hyaena road use and also compare the sexes of the leopards and temporal differences of road use by leopards. This is important when looking at where is the best place to put cameras to assess leopard density by giving the best capture rate possible.

Baboon Selfie