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 30th. 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
Impala: 253
Kudu: 100
Waterbuck: 55
Baboon: 40
Zebra: 34
Warthog: 25
Spotted hyena: 6
Black-backed Jackal: 1
Giraffe: 1
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