Spottyblog

Except for the usual work we do around here, not much is happening at the moment. This isn’t unusual, of course – at some point, certain work (like doing the goat kraal in the morning) is routinely done. However, the last time I was scheduled to do it was on Thursday, and today I helped Tusnelda (one of the genetics lab assistants) with scat collection again. We even found something we think might’ve been hyena poop.

Markus got to do meat cutting down at the senior staff house again, and this time took my camera. Since I’ve not been on meat cutting before, I gave him my camera so he could get some video footage of the little ones being fed. Hopefully I’ll get to do it before I leave. The afternoon we spent entering picture data, both today and yesterday, although we did a lot less today yesterday than today since Markus, Veronika and I were busy leading huge groups of tourists around during lunch, and when we were finally done with them it was pretty late and we still had not eaten. When that was out of the way it was almost 4 PM, which means we only had about an hour left for the data entry.

Then today Veronika was supposed to give me an interview, but instead wanted to get on the last camera trapping trip for this year, so I let her leave. Without anything to do, Markus (who was supposed to be on camera trapping instead of her) and I joined Matt and Christina for another feeding run. Things here don’t always go along with the schedule – especially tourists add some more unexpected turns to the days here. 😉

My first duty today was to assist during a scat walk around our cheetah pens. We didn’t find anything today unlike on the last time I helped when we found two pieces of scat, one probably coming from a cheetah, the other one likely from a hyena. Unfortunately, though, our GPS device ran out of battery so we couldn’t write down where the scat was found. Of course, this time we didn’t even need it.

Poop coming from cheetahs is likely to have been placed there by two cheetahs simply called the “Wild Boys”. They are quite interested in the Elands pen, which is full of females (of which at least one is in heat at almost any given time). We do these scat walks because we know there are other carnivores around. We are, of course, especially interested in cheetahs, meaning we are especially happy whenever we find cheetah scat. The poop is then analyzed – we extract, for example, Cortisol that we think might be involved with the pathogenesis of gastritis, but also extract hair from the scat and try to determine the prey species of the cheetahs around here.

The scat collecting was followed by CD data entry, and not only the morning, but also in the evening. Since we are now done with this year’s camera trap data entry, we are now doing the 2007 pictures since the CCF only catalogued the cheetah pictures so far. This means we’re going to be identifying oryx, kudu, eland, porcupines etc. for a little longer. 😉