SEPTEMBER BLOG

The weather here continues to get hotter although there is still  a chill at night which is very good and enables you to get to sleep.

WESM game count went well with many members taking part to count the animals on 3 different drives around the park. On Saturday morning, Saturday evening and Sunday morning last week up to 9 cars left the camp site and counted animals on 9 different routes around the park. Around 200 separate animals were counter on each drive. The most exciting was 3 caracals.  3 leopards were seen but only when people were driving to the event. It was a good opportunity to catch up with old friends and make new ones. I t will be interesting to see the results compared to the last ones taken in 2009.

There has been a report of 4 lions being seen. 1 female and 3 cubs. No painted dog sightings have occurred but staff at the lodge reported seeing 2 dogs which have actually turned out to be domestic dogs running wild.

As the water dries up around the park the elephants are starting to return to the dam and herds between 1 and 32 have been seen. They have even started to play in the water again and behave just like children in a swimming pool.

There are now 2 osprey and 2 fish eagles around the dam and they are fighting for the fishing rights. The fish eagles have a nest and because the female is sitting quite high in the nest now I assume she has young. Water birds are returning now and there are around 130 spur winged geese, a few knob billed ducks, saddle billed stork, black stork, goliath heron and the usual array of smaller birds like the watt led plover, green shank and lesser jacana and today a woolleynecked stork arrived.

The hippos have around 6 young ones now and although there are around 14 in all this means that the adults have been reduced by about 5.

The park continues to be attacked by poachers of various tyres ranging from killing the animals to cutting fire wood, charcoal burning and even mining for precious stones. If anyone has any ideas or wants to help reduce these practices let me know.

The house is coming along slowly due to money issues and the land rover is running but burning oil. Either the turbo seals are leaking or the valve guides have worn again. This limits the amount of driving that I want to do as I don’t want it to break down.

Although I have 9 cameras only 5 are still working so finding the wildlife at night is proving harder now however some of the results are still surprising like the water mongoose again and although elephants in the past have showed curiosity towards the cameras one actually leant against one and another took a swipe at one with its trunk. It’s a good job they are quite sturdy.

I am hoping to start to offer activity weekends for visitors at the lodge and this should help to subsidise my project. We are still hoping to run a volunteer program but this seems to be taking a long time to get off the ground.

Although the diesel problem went away for a couple of weeks it is now back with us and it makes life very difficult for travel. Nobody seems to have an answer but you never know.

Meet the ultimate nosey neighbour. They watch everything I do.