We still don’t have completely reliable internet access. According to our service provider…. “The satellite has a major power problem, which needs a service visit in orbit – and that mission is not planned till end of year” It must be an interesting job being a satellite technician! For now we are able to do more or less everything we need with the connection as it is and we will apparently be moved to a new satellite in the near future.
Back at ground level, recent weeks have seen a few visitors reaching us here at Sinamatella. First were Nicholas Duncan and Nia Carras of the SAVE African Rhino Foundation. It would be no exaggeration to say that without SAVE we wouldn’t be here and Sinamatella would be a very different place. Amongst other things, two of the station’s vehicles were donated by SAVE who also pay the driver of one of them and when rangers go out on patrol many of the packs, GPS, radios and even clothes they use were donated by SAVE. We are very grateful for their support.
Nicholas Duncan
As you might expect, not all of our visitors are human. A pair of squirrels has taken to coming into the house to search for food. After losing oranges, bread, breakfast cereal and jam to them we have quickly become used to not leaving anything edible lying around. Squirrels are very cute and, at first when they started coming in and just exploring we had equally cute names for them. Not so any longer I’m afraid.
Cyril the squirrel, a.k.a. @!!*?>*@!
We don’t often get animals (apart from insects) coming into the house by night. In the past we’ve been visited occasionally by snakes, regularly by frogs and sometimes by bats, one of which came in last week. Having come in through the open door to the verandah it couldn’t find a way back out and spent a long time hanging in the corner of the room until Sue eventually chased it away. I am very far from being a bat expert but I think this is an Egyptian Slit-faced Bat (Nycteris thebaica)
Many of the houses at Sinamatella, ours included, have bats living in the roof and at dusk streams of them fly out and head off across the edge of the hill to feed. We have only once seen a bat hawk here taking advantage of this food source. Presumably the few houses in the camp don’t support enough bats to keep a pair of bat hawks in food throughout the year and the ones we saw were just passing through
There are very few tourists at this time of year so the hyenas and honey badgers that regularly wake us as they tip over the dustbin in the tourist season have got out of that habit. They haven’t gone completely though and Sue photographed this neat hyena footprint near the house last week………
Returning to human visitors for a moment, Thor Thorsson, an experienced traveller and conservationist recently spent a week with us. He was also here two years ago and it was nice to see him back again.
It seems there are not many parts of Africa , and indeed of the World, that Thor hasn’t visited at one time or another so he has a wealth of experience to pass on. From here he travels to Zambia for a while then he will return to Sweden
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