 |
| You looking at me? |
The last few weeks have been completely manic! First a few
weeks ago we went to Leshiba and Siguwana and Tolo to set up the 210km2 Panthera camera trapping grid which we will be running alongside ours for the
next two months! In Leshiba I had never seen so many giraffe, the open areas
were spotted with giraffe and zebra and warthog. "I think they have a giraffe problem" Liam mentioned.
 |
| Giraffe and Warthog! |
The place we stayed at on Leshiba had a gorgeous view over
the Soutspansburg mountain range.
 |
| View over Soutpansburg |
Setting up the Panthera grid was a lot of using a hoe to
remove all the vegetation away from where the cameras will be placed to stop
the dreaded thousands of pictures of grass! After a long week we were exhausted from spending 6-7 hours in a car on dirt roads.
 |
| Classic African image? |
The week just gone we also had a lot of hiking even though it
is meant to be our non-hiking week as Liam was keen to finish all the veg plots
around Lajuma, on the Tuesday we hiked stations 7 8 and 22 and completed the 5 veg
plots left around station 7, we were doing our final plot in the macadamia farm,
a very easy plot with no trees. Liam was walking to the west to do the
checkerboard when he yells “SNAKE!” I jump off the rock I am on to make sure he
didn't stand on it when all of a sudden a black mamba was moving fast right
towards me, it got to about half a meter away before I got the hell away from
it, my first mamba! I have to say I was shaking after, I’d rather not get that
close to one of the most venomous snake in the world again! Personally if you
are out here and not scared of mambas then you are either stupidly brave or just very stupid.
 |
| And Of course we saw Impala! |
The next day we went to station 11, on the road to town, to
complete 12 veg plots, we left camp at 6am and didn’t get back until 6:30pm
(after getting a lift for the last hour of hiking as they were worried we were
not back yet) what a hell of a long day! At about 11 we were climbing along a
river bed when I heard a rustling along in front of us, looking up a porcupine was
clambering over the rocks with its spines up! A rare sighting in the middle of
the day, cool or what?
 |
| Liam taking in the view |
Anyway Sam has worked out the amount of roads I need to measure
for my project covering the whole of the leopard’s home range, I need to
measure 606km of roads, that means 606 points as I am measuring roads each kilometer,
a seemingly HUGE task! So next week I am off on a 2 day trip to the north side
of the mountain to check Panthera cameras and more importantly to measure the
roads over there! I can’t wait to get started on my data collection and also
start playing with the collar data on GIS. The week after that we have a 3-4
day trip to Siguwana and Tolo to finish off Liam’s veg plots and measure the
roads over there.
 |
| Coming back to see you next week! |
No comments:
Post a Comment