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.