Conservation Blog

DART 2010 Round-Up

Sat, 18 Dec 2010 09:08:17 +0200

The first, and most obvious thing to write is that I haven’t made a very good job of this blog so far! It has been exactly like my attempts (and everyone else’s attempts I suspect) at a diary when I was young – every page full up to the middle of January and everything blank thereafter. Of course I’ll do better in 2011.
So, 2010..…….
The early and late months of the year were of course cool and wet. The rainy season mood swings between beautiful……..

DART May 2010 Update

Mon, 31 May 2010 09:32:21 +0200

If I didn’t know better I would be starting to think the rhino in Hwange were invisible. In spite of walking long distances again this month we still haven’t had a good ‘visual’ since March. We took two groups of volunteers out to one of the central areas of the IPZ and found spoor but as usual failed to track it to source. The rhino seem to be very mobile at the moment and sooner or later every track crosses hard or rocky ground for a long distance and we lose it. One rhino really rubbed salt into the wound by drinking at the river no more than 50 meters from our camp while we all slept one night. We only saw the spoor when we had packed ready to leave the next day and there was no time to follow it.
All that walking seems to have worn us out. One of our volunteers on Mission 4 took this stunning action photo of the Long family at work……

There was some genuine action at Masuma from time to time. The hippo were unusually aggressive towards each other and we noted the arrival of at least one, possibly two new babies.Towards the end of the month we finally got water at Sinamatella camp after about two months without. DART bought a new booster pump to push water up onto the hill and saved us the job of going down to the borehole and filling containers.We have received a wonderful donation of equipment from a former volunteer, Patrick Jacquemin. He has bought us a beautiful vehicle which we intend to use for rhino monitoring and other equipment including a camera trap which we are busy testing. Using the trap at Sinamatella we captured good photos of Hyena, Genets and a Civet. In a four day period with the camera set up at a small pool of water we ‘captured’ doves, baboons, a mongoose and a surprised patrol of Rangers who were not aware of the camera. Great photos! No rhino yet but it is early days. Many, many thanks are due to Patrick for such a valuable donation.

Planete Urgence 2010 Missions

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 11:28:39 +0200

Our first two Planete Urgence missions for 2010 have been and gone but they were two very different missions…..
First were Karim and Hugo. They had a short trip to Umtshibi with Paul to work with the Lion Research project before coming to Sinamatella with Paul and Nic from Lion Research to start looking for lions in this area. We found José of the ‘Tequila Boys’ at Mandavu dam and were able to drive in for a fairly close look, but sadly he and his brother Patron seemed not to have any females with them. After a couple of days unsuccessfully looking for lions other than the ‘Tequilas’, we moved on to our usual Sinamatella programme. Masuma was great, with the usual magnificent sunset. The three days of various game counts went well and then we set off in high spirits to look for rhino.

On the first day we followed a spoor that just kept going ahead with no sign that we were catching up and by lunch time we had to admit defeat. In the afternoon we tried a reconnaissance in a different direction and found nothing. Returning to camp we were followed by a towering thunder cloud, beautiful but menacing in the low sun. During the night the menace became reality, rain fell heavily from around midnight and we woke to a damp and dreary morning. The rangers had all been flooded in their tents and rain continued to fall from time to time but we set off full of hope to look for rhino anyway.
Perhaps it was a bad decision! The further we went the more it rained and we were eventually squelching through mud, wading through streams and being soaked by pouring rain. As we walked our own spoor was being washed away as fast as we made it so it was obvious we would find no rhino and we returned to camp, packed up and drove back to Sinamatella. That all sounds gloomy but the photo shows how Karim and Hugo reacted. They were marvellous!

Save Foundation 2010 Visit

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 14:10:48 +0200

Last week Nicholas Duncan and some friends from the SAVE Foundation and Verity Bowman from Marwell Trust visited Sinamatella along with DART trustee, Trevor Lane. It was only a very brief visit, they stayed just one night, but Nicholas always gets things done, and plenty was achieved in that short time. I went out early on the morning that they left with 4 rangers and met up with call sign ‘Charlie’ to look for rhino to show our visitors. On our way we saw Jose and Patron, the local male lion coalition, both of them lying by the road looking magnificent in the early morning sun. They obviously weren’t happy to be disturbed and reluctantly stalked off into the bush.
We split into 3 groups and I was lucky to be with the one that found good, fresh spoor after just a kilometre. It was an easy track at first but became confusing as we went along. First we found that a second rhino had joined, then a third and eventually a fourth. There were a couple of points where the bush had been flattened and spoor led away in different directions, only to join up again later and our guess was that we were following the tracks of a cow with nearly grown calf, the cow having come into oestrus and being followed by two bulls who fought occasionally- hence the flattened bush.

Blog Update - 2010 Start

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 13:57:40 +0200

2010 was off to an interesting start with a bird-ringing course that Sue and I attended in Harare. We expected an easy week – small birds would have to be easier than 15 km tracking after rhino wouldn’t they? Wrong! Every morning we woke at 3.00 am and we had just enough time for a vital cup of tea before setting out to spend an hour or so wading around in long, wet grass putting up mist nets before dawn. Then, when the birds woke and started flying, we were soon busy getting them out of the nets for measuring, weighing and ringing. It was fascinating seeing so many birds in the hand, some of them “Mashonaland specials” that were new to us, some of them old familiars but nearly all of them, however small, ready to bite whenever they got a chance. By lunchtime the birds are resting, so we removed the nets and went back to base for an afternoon and evening of talks and demonstrations of traps and nets. By the end of the course we were exhausted but we certainly learnt a lot that will enable us to take DART’s bird research to another level. More on that in future blogs I’m sure…..