Saturday, March 5, 2011

Monday, Feb. 28th

This morning the vervet monkeys that live around the camp woke me up early. They live in the trees around the buildings but come around 6am they jump onto the roof and start running back and forth across the roof, making a whole lot of thumping noise in the process. Our morning work shift was relatively uneventful; we weeded around the exterior electric fence until breakfast. The views of the reserve were pretty good though, and I took some time to get a couple panorama shots with some blesbok and wildebeest in the background.


After breakfast, we did a game drive for our late morning shift. This time, we saw a whole lot of zebra, springbok, blesbok, blue wildebeest, eland, and waterbok. Some of the animals, like the eland and waterbok, are just massive for antelopes and can somehow jump clear over our Jeep if they wanted to. We got pretty close to several herds near the reserve's various water holes and I was able to get some pretty good pictures.




We were supposed to go and chop more alien trees down in the afternoon, but our Jeep got a flat tire and we had to wait for the guys in the camp to bring us a new car. We had the telemetry equipment with us, and when we turned it on we got a signal coming from Shiesta, the dominant lion female in the reserve. It was funny and unnerving at the same time to be stranded without a vehicle with her on the loose. By that time we got a new vehicle, it didn't make sense to go and start tree-chopping so we just drove around with the telemetry equipment to try and find Zulu and Shiesta. Both of them wear tracking collars for this purpose. Zulu we couldn't pick up a signal on to save our life, but Shiesta we cornered in a deep valley where the Jeep couldn't really go. During this process, we saw a few animals that I hadn't seen yet, like the kudu, meerkat, and an Egyptian goose.



Our night was relatively uneventful, though, and we just watched a horror movie. Later in the night, a new group of five older Brits showed up as volunteers. It will be interesting to see how older people adapt to a youth-oriented environment that is anything but a 5 star hotel.

No comments:

Post a Comment