February 2012 so far...

Thanks to the SAVE Foundation we have been able to reward some of the rangers that have been involved in contacts with armed poachers recently.

Senior Wildlife Officer Masara receiving rewards on behalf of some of the rangers – a few of them are in the background. Calington Sibelo who was at a contact in January had to be persuaded to take part as he was embarrassed not to be in uniform.

The saga of our on-off Red-headed Weaver nest has taken a new turn. After sitting for a few days, the female abandoned the nest and two or three days later new tenants moved in. They are Cutthroat Finches, which often take over abandoned weaver nests. At the moment the female is almost permanently inside, sitting on eggs we assume and the male occasionally visits. She also gets visited by another pair of Cutthroats who are presumably looking for an empty nest, but she scolds them loudly and won’t let them in. She is able to distinguish ‘her’ male’s call from the hopeful nest- seeking male and she never seems to ‘swear’ at the wrong one.

 

Male Cutthroat Finch

And the female before she started sitting on the eggs

This is the time of year when the elephants start to return. Yesterday afternoon there were over fifty down on the floodplain. The grass isn’t as high as last year but the smallest babies still disappear into the longer patches. Anyone who has visited Sinamatella will recognise the Palm trees…..

 

We are still only getting rain but it has been enough to make the grass grow long on the roads…..

 

Heading towards the Smith’s Mine Hills

I’ve been having a lot of trouble with grass seeds blocking the radiator of the car and making it start to overheat. This morning I stopped at a pan near Chawato to collect water to try to wash away a new accumulation of seeds…..

These temporary pans attract various species of birds such as these Comb Ducks that were on the pan when I arrived.

A pair of Comb Ducks. The male has a strange protuberance on the top of his beak that grows in the breeding season. This is the breeding season!

I noticed this morning that the grass is also rather long on the runway at “Sinamatella International Airport”. As you can imagine, we don’t get a lot of visitors arriving by air.

The runway at Sinamatella International.

If we did get some planes landing we might have to smarten up the airport terminal….

Airport terminal (Duty free shop, Car rental office – that sort of thing)

At this time of year the sky can be beautiful with masses of white clouds. Sue photographed this positively biblical cloud from Sinamatella Hill.

It really looks as if it should have a huge finger pointing out at some hapless sinner.

Crossing the Smith’s Mine Hills I was also attracted by the cloudy sky but my photo turned out in the end to be better as a landscape than a cloudscape….

The road across the hills has suffered a lot from the occasional heavy rain. Road maintenance has become a real problem as the Parks Authority don’t have the money to employ road gangs or to maintain a road grader and donors are rarely interested in funding that sort of thing. We have had a little help from Makomo mine on the Sinamatella access road but side roads such as this one need a lot of attention

 

And it is as bad as it looks!

Good news and bad news

The rainy season always brings electricity problems and this year has been especially bad. We had a week without electricity up to yesterday. The ZESA engineers started work on the line after about three days and after they had fixed it they drove through to Sinamatella to tell us that all was well. Unfortunately while they were at the ops room passing on the good news a heavy storm struck and the lights went out again! It took several more days to make (we hope) the final repair.

    Once again, poaching has been dominating all our activities. There has been some good news with a Zambian gang located hunting rhino in our southern sector and put out of action in a contact with Sinamatella rangers. Sadly another gang was hunting elsewhere at the same time and they were luckier, killing rhino number 253 and escaping with his horns. National Parks brought in a helicopter to try to locate the poachers but they still got away. Yesterday we heard that rangers from Robins Camp have located spoor of eleven poachers moving along the border with Botswana. Such a large group is probably hunting elephants at this stage but two or three of them might move into Sinamatella and look for rhino during the period of the February full moon. With poaching pressure of this intensity it is almost impossible to protect any reasonable population of rhino. Only a decrease in demand for horns can be successful in the long run.

     Meanwhile, not everything is gloomy. The pair of Red-headed Weavers that built a nest on our veranda was unsuccessful at the first attempt when their nest was destroyed and the eggs were eaten by a predator. The birds disappeared for a few weeks but have returned, re-built the nest and are trying again. A lesson for all of us perhaps?

  We are not especially innovative with animal names. The weavers are generally  known as ‘Him’ and ‘Her’. This is Him!

     On a recent rhino monitoring trip we met up with a group of young lions. These are from the pride living around Mandavu Dam and are offspring of the Tequila Brothers – Jose and Patron.

                              

  

 

 I couldn’t resist photographing this waterbuck posing as the National Parks badge

   We had a rest day last Sunday and went to Mandavu dam. A storm moved in from the west…..

In spite of the heavy clouds there was very little rain. People carried on fishing but this lady had to give up when something big – a crocodile perhaps, took all her fishing tackle at one bite and dragged it off into the dam!

Mandavu has a huge population of crocodiles, many of which are easily large enough to look at people as prey but luckily the dam has so many fish, the crocs seem to concentrate on those and so far there have been no attacks on people fishing. Let’s hope it stays that way.