Leopards, dassies and giraffes!

The last few weeks out here in Africa have been manic, to say the least and it doesn't look like its stopping any time soon, in a good and interesting way.

Gorgeous Thick Tailed Bushbaby

A week ago I went with Oldrich off the mountain to a community called Kransport as about 2 months ago they had 3-4 calves taken by a leopard, this is the same community where the CC and BB drama from last post occurred, we placed cameras at the kraal (where they keep the calves) to assess which leopard is taking the animals and to assess what we can do. Unfortunately in some ways there was no leopards on the cameras, and kransport have not lost any more calves since they reinforced their kraal with razor wire.

We also had a hike over Mount Lajuma to a property on the north side of the mountain called Sigurwana where we have 8 of our 23 camera traps, we hike there and then get picked up by the owner and driven round to e

Baby Wildebeest!

ach of our cameras which takes about 5 hours in total. On the way there we saw 3 of peters sable antelope, these are gorgeous black and white antelope that are huge! I found the time went so quickly as when we were looking for the giraffe, wildebeest, zebra and other animals that they have on the property, which we saw all of.

I wonder what this is?

We have also been told that instead of running the panthera grid in June we are now running it next week, even more work but it will be cool working with Panthera on a long term study on leopard density.

Stripey horse? ooh, a zebra

Panthera is a large conservation organisation based in America. The South African government approached panthera a few years ago to assess leopard densities and numbers in South Africa to re-assess the number of hunting permits given each year, previously they almost picked a random number for leopards in the country and based their permits on that, not very scientific really?

Thor with his midnight snack (a dassie)

Panthera then chose 9 sites across Limpopo province (the area that is given the most hunting permits each year) including us at Lajuma to  set up a camera trapping grid to assess density, each grid is running for 2 months a year for a total of 10 years. We have been asked at Lajuma to run one of those camera grids for panthera which is what we will be doing for the next 2 months. The data from last year has been given to us, it shows that we have a leopard density of 6.8 leopards per 100km squared which is lower than the last estimate in 2008 that had 10.3 leopards per 100km squared in the same area.

Till the next time!