Game water

In the dry season, Hwange is largely dependent on artificial water sources. Here in Sinamatella we are lucky in that there are a number of reliable springs in the Park and the neighbouring Deka Safari Area. Close to the camp we have the large Tshakabika Hot Spring, the Salt Springs complex, the two Domboshuro Springs and the Kashawe Springs. In the Safari Area are Big and Little Gobo Springs, Big and Little Mambane and Chawato Sulphur Spring and near Bumboosie Camp there are a number of excellent Springs. We also have good water in the Sinamatella River but all of these places are in the northern sector. To the South of Sinamatella, approaching the Kalahari Sand country, water is scarce. Mandavu Dam is the most reliable and is filled each year by rain water. Mandavu, Shumba, Tshompani and Inyantue all rely on water pumped from underground.

  Last week we took a newly donated pump engine and two attendants out to Inyantue to start pumping for the season. Inyantue is the furthest pump from Sinamatella, about 80km, taking several hours. Our first stop was at Masuma where the attendants had reported the engine would not run. Mr Mafa, who has years of enormously valuable experience, soon spotted the problem, fixed it and got the water running again.

  We moved on to Shumba. A dead elephant, killed in a fight, was a fitting foreground to the very bleak-looking pan.

Shumba Pan

There is one hippo remaining in the pan, but he doesn’t look too cheerful – barely visible in the mud.

We found the wind pump and diesel pump both running and went on to Tshompani Dam.

Tshompani never holds water for long, even in the rains so it is supplied by a diesel-powered pump and a wind pump. The wind pump is currently out of action awaiting repair but the diesel is working and there is a reasonable pool of water in the lowest part of the dam.

Tshompani seen from the dam wall.

The final stop was at Inyantue where the dam was totally dry.

We had brought with us a new engine and Mr Mafa and his team soon had it fitted and running.

Carrying the engine to the borehole.

Engine installed and running. Mr Mafa cleans away a speck or two of dust!

Sue accompanied us on this trip as official photographer and, of course, provider of tea.

My job was less easy to define. Observer perhaps…..

Within ten minutes of the pump starting we found baboons drinking at the trough as it started to fill but they ran away as soon as they saw us – returning, no doubt, within minutes of us leaving.

We left two pump attendants to look after this, Sinamatella’s most remote outpost and were a kilometre or so away when Mr Mafa stopped us. Once before he had left pump attendants far from anywhere only to discover much later that they had no matches, hence no fire and no way to cook. He was concerned about the two attendants we had left at Inyantue. They are not experienced; maybe they would have no matches. We went back and indeed, they had forgotten so we rummaged around and found some matches for them and drove away again. I’ve since heard via the radio that they and the pump are doing well!

24 - hour game count

In my last post I said maybe I would have some decent rhino photos this time. Well I haven’t - but we came close to getting some of the most spectacular ever.

   We have just been working with our third group of volunteers for the year and on one day we were tracking rhino number 299. She is a young female who has a habit of sleeping under very low bushes or behind fallen trees where she can be extremely hard to see. She is fitted with a radio transmitter but it is not working properly and sometimes doesn’t work at all. Walking through some fairly open woodland, we disturbed number 299 without even knowing we were close to her and she got up from behind a fallen tree and ran away. Unfortunately in her panic she ran through the group of rangers and volunteers. Everyone took cover but volunteer Sebastien Pladys fell over with the rhino running parallel to him and she ran to him and stood over him as he lay on his back looking up at her. She pushed him, gently by her standards but hard by our standards then went away. Sebastien says she kissed him and indeed he had a small cut on his lip but unfortunately he was too preoccupied to take photos! Luckily Sebastien was unhurt apart from some minor bruises.

   No photo of the rhino then, but here is Sebastien, a few days later resting after a night counting animals on a 24 hour animal count.

The other volunteers on this mission were Cherif and Marie who were also with us on the last mission and Nadège Maunoury……

Nadège

  Apert from rhino tracking, one of the activities on this mission was the 24 hour animal count at Masuma Dam. We started counting at midday on 29 June and finished at midday on the 30^th. This count has been carried out many times over many years and we thought we knew what to expect but we were completely wrong. A summary of results is included at the end of this post but the key result is the number of elephants. In previous years June counts have revealed a maximum of around three hundred elephants in 24 hours but on this occasion we counted the extraordinary number of 1195. To put that in perspective, that’s more than is ever counted at the end of the dry season when the dam gets ‘busy’ in a normal year and slightly higher even than some October counts in dry years.

Elephants approaching Masuma. 12.05pm 29 June 2012.

This high number of elephants is presumably a sign that the natural water deep in the Park, where they would normally be at this time of year, has already dried up. It is going to be almost impossible to supply enough water to these animals – if they drink 30 litres each on average (and that’s almost certainly a very conservative estimate) then the elephants alone are taking over 30,000 litres of water per day from the dam. Add to that all the other animals, seepage and evaporation and even with the pump running 24 hours a day (as it is) there’s just not enough water.

   On the plus side it does make for some excellent game viewing..

Buffalo approaching…….

And drinking, with hippo fighting in the foreground.

The obligatory Masuma photograph – sunset with elephants.

So, here’s a very brief summary of our game count results…..

Masuma Dam Game Count, 29 to 30 June 2012.              

Elephant:     1195

Buffalo:       282

Impala:        253

Kudu:          100

Waterbuck:  55

Baboon:       40

Zebra:          34

Warthog:     25

Spotted hyena: 6

Black-backed Jackal: 1

Giraffe:       1

Second Planete-Urgence volunteers

The second Planete Urgence volunteer mission of the year has recently been with us. There were just three volunteers – Marie, Cherif and Sylvie.

Cherif, Marie, Sue and myself, Stewart, Sylvie and Thinkwell

  On the first day of their visit we did a road transect count. The weather was unusually cold but we still saw quite a few animals including this nice group of giraffe….

   At Baobab Pan we found that the elephants had broken the connection to the pump again and the trough and pan were both dry…………

 …..apart from a patch of mud in the middle of the pan.

     When we got back to Sinamatella we reported the problem and next day we accompanied Mr Mafa and some of his team to make some repairs.

      Cherif and I disconnected the solar panels to stop the pump……

  And it was only after we’d done it that we discovered a tiny on/off switch hidden away on the back of the inverter.

   We fitted some new pipes….

………bolted the pump more firmly to the well-head…….

   And when we switched back on again the water started to flow back into the trough.

This White-browed Sparrow Weaver was so thirsty it came to the water straight away as we were standing there……

    We spent four days with the volunteers looking for rhino. On the first day we got a sighting of one of the males but he was in thick cover so no-one got a good photo. The second day was frustrating. We got very close to one of the animals with a radio-implant but couldn’t see her then, as we tried to get closer, the transmitter stopped working and we were unable to find her. She was sleeping somewhere on hard ground and had left no spoor so we avoided disturbing her and returned to camp. On the third day we tried for the same rhino again but drew a complete blank though we ranged some distance outside the Park into the Hwange Colliery Concession where we found this abandoned building…..

I think it is almost certainly Doctor Evil’s secret African hideout – though it could simply be an abandoned ventilator for the closed number two mine of course…...

On our last day we located and monitored rhino number 186. She was very hard to see, sleeping in long grass but Thinkwell, then Sylvie climbed a nearby tree and got a decent view when the rhino woke up and moved to a deeper patch of shade.

 Neither of them got a good photo so I’m still looking for a decent rhino photo to post. Maybe next time.