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. 😉

Don’t worry – no animals were hurt during or before the creation of this blog post.

A jackal got into the girl’s pen. We don’t know how, we don’t know when, but apparently he’s been grabbing old bones and is munching on them, but since it was probably a sick animal (maybe even infected with rabies) it had to get out. That’s why Anne and James prepared the dart gun and loaded some darts with tranquilizer. Before leaving we checked the fence, but didn’t see any apparent holes. Steven, a tour guide, claimed he saw the jackal at least two times in the morning, so we figured he’d still be there since jackals are most active during twilight. We then drove into the pen (actually it was Anne), with James on the back of the pickup and with Markus and my humble self sitting in the back and trying to find him. Unfortunately, the jackal didn’t show up during our visit, so we had to leave again with our business unfinished.

Apart from that we also got to lead some tourists from Hungary and Germany around. This was a nice experience, too… I feel like I know a lot, at least I could answer nearly any question they threw at me 😀