Usually, my day begins with either a scat walk, sometimes with tracking and usually with cleaning the goat kraal. Today, everything was a bit different. Since there are some experiments involving scat planned, we had to get rid of as much poop in the Elands pen as we were able to. This was not particularly fun, but it’s always somewhat exciting to be able to work with the cats so close by to you, and even if they don’t actually do anything than look at you or pace around, it’s still nice to know you’re not alone.
This was followed by feeding the cats, but we were not able to go by the usual routine since today there was a safari in the Bellebenno pen, forcing us to feed the other cats closer to the CCF’s headquarters first. This isn’t a problem at all, since all the cheetahs react to is the car arriving since it usually means there’s going to be food, regardless of when it’s coming. Again, we were able to take some nice pictures of the cats, but we still need a few more if we want to do the ID photos of all sponsored cats properly.
Markus and I then spent the afternoon modifying the cub’s pen – any rain would only drain very slowly from their pen, leaving puddles and not too many dry spots for them to lie on, so we had the task of creating a small river bed and filling the sides with sand so the water will (hopefully) make its way into the river bed, leaving the other areas dry (or at least not completely drenched). Of course carrying around all the stones and sand wasn’t easy, but it was definitely worth it, and quite fun because the little ones were watching us while we were busy working. We brought a lot of scents into the pen via the sand, and the cubs were very curious, sniffing and digging at the sand when they were let back into their pen.