We have had a number of visitors over the past two weeks. First there were six volunteers from the Dete Animal Rescue Trust (DART) who stayed with us for a week. Amel, Didier, Gwen, Jean Pierre, Matthieu and Sebastien linked up DART through the French organisation Planete Urgence and after their week with us they travelled to the Main Camp sector of the Park to spend a week with Paul de Montille of DART.
Jean-Pierre, Sebastien, Mattieu, Didier, Amel, Sue, Stephen, Gwen
Just before the volunteers arrived we received a report that the pump at Bumboosie South had gone wrong again. Sinamatella had no manpower available to pull up the pump so I suggested that we should go there with the volunteers. When we got to the pump we were surprised to find that it was working perfectly and the pan was holding more water than it had on our last visit. Rather than waste the journey out there we spent a couple of hot hours helping to shore up the trough, which is slowly being undermined by elephants.
Amel and Sebastien working hard.
The result of all that effort.
Elephants can be incredibly destructive without really intending any harm. They undermine water troughs as they scoop up mud to throw on themselves then the troughs collapse under their own weight. Unfortunately they also do a lot of damage on purpose. The pump at Baobab Pan is currently in need of repair after elephants pulled up the outlet pipe for the second time this year.
After our day of hard work at Bumboosie South we spent three excellent days tracking rhino with Sinamatella Rangers Prosper and Stewart. Their tracking skills and their company were greatly appreciated by us all. Using the telemetry equipment to track rhino leads to hard work climbing hills to get the strongest signal but there’s usually the reward of some great views from the highest spots.
Looking east across part of the Deka safari Area
Stewart checking for signal
There’s a rhino out there somewhere.
Over the three days, we monitored rhino number 186 on two occasions, staying with her until early evening on the first day but leaving her on the second day when we found her sleeping amongst rocks where she had left no spoor and poachers would not find her. On our third day we helped locate number 299 whose transmitter isn’t working properly. We found her by old fashioned tracking of spoor until we got close enough to receive the radio signal then called in two other rangers who were based in the area to stay with her for the day. Although we saw rhino on three occasions, none of us got decent photos due to the thick cover they were resting in.
From Rhino tracking we moved to a twenty-four hour animal count at Shumba. On a previous occasion when we counted at Shumba in May we saw nothing at all apart from a distant Jackal so I wasn’t too confident of a big count. The moon was superb and bright so conditions were good.
Full moon rising
Lions called from all around us throughout the night and in the course of the twenty four hours we eventually counted four warthogs, thirty eight elephants and either two or four lions. In the early hours of the morning Sebastien briefly saw two large predators on the edge of the trees but wasn’t able to identify them. They were almost certainly the two lionesses that came past the pan and back into the trees just as the sun rose but of course we can’t be sure.
When the count at Shumba was over we drove straight to Shapi where the volunteers joined Paul and a former volunteer, Aurelie, and her mother Collette joined us to stay at Sinamatella for a few days. Having behaved well throughout the volunteer week, our old vehicle “The Mighty Hilux” let us down at Shapi, refusing to start without a push. That meant we were unable to stop until we reached Sinamatella but even so Sue managed to photograph this late-afternoon Zebra as we passed him.
The Hilux has since given me several hours of unpleasant greasy work but it’s moving again – temporarily at least. It’s really too old to be completely reliable but has been a great workhorse for many years. The Land Cruiser that we took to Bulawayo
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