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.