Some dry season views

OK, my ‘Smith’s Mine’ post worked so here goes for the next instalment.

A lot happened in the six months gap between blog posts so I’ll just use a few of Sue’s nicer animal photos for this one…….

The dry season is, of course, the best time to see lions as they hang around at the water points and wait for their next meal to come along. We met this nice male near Salt Spring one morning……..

 A lot of lion sightings are just a patch of tawny fur and the occasional flick of an ear in the shade of a bush but early on a mid-winter morning even the lions are awake and it was a pleasure to watch this one walking through the bush.

  At Masuma the lions killed a buffalo just behind the dam wall where they were invisible from the viewing platform. Occasionally one or two of them would come to the water for a drink……

But a great deal of the time they were intimidated by some of the dam’s resident hippos

  The viewing platform soon filled up with tourists and we changed from lion watching to people watching. Wild animals are wonderful but sometimes people are even better!

    Just last week we were passing Masuma and the attendant warned us that there was a sick lion near the road. Down by the bridge we found one of the males walking slowly towards the shade with his face swollen, one eye completely shut and the other almost closed as well

   By mid afternoon he was worse, struggling to breathe and obviously suffering. He died an hour or so later. It seems he was probably kicked in the head by a large animal and died from the effects of the kick but there was a slight possibility of disease so samples were taken and sent away for testing. This sort of tragedy happens all around the Park every day of course, usually with the predators coming out of it on top but most of the time we are not aware of it. At Sinamatella my friends the baboons have quietly played out a little tragedy of their own.

   Baboons are apparently devoted mothers. Back in July, Sue saw one of the females of our local troop carrying a dried up dead baby. We saw her many times over the next few weeks. At first she carefully put the baby down when she stopped to feed then picked it up and ran or walked with it in her arms. Eventually she became more careless and started carrying it in her mouth…

Finally she must have given up and dumped the remains as we haven’t seen her carrying the baby for a couple of weeks though we see the baboons often.

    Time for some nicer pictures I think.

    Sue selected this zebra as one of her favourite pictures. I asked her why and she said ‘because I like it’. Can’t argue with that………

   This one, I like…..

And this one as well…….

  The elephant and herd of buffalo were at the top end of Mandavu Dam. We haven’t seen all that many of either species this season because last year’s rains were so good there is still, after nearly six months without any rain at all, good natural water in a lot of places and there has been no need for animals to move to Sinamatella. It has also been a surprisingly cool dry season. Even now in mid October we are only experiencing temperatures in the low thirties. The highest I have measured so far was thirty nine but that hot spell only lasted a couple of days. Some people are saying that’s a good sign for the coming rainy season, some say the opposite. We’ll see and if I can keep uploading photos to the blog, I’ll let you know.

Game water

    I used to be a teacher. Though I left the profession years ago I’ve never really left at all and Sue often mutters the ‘P’ word (pedant) when I’m at my most pompous and, well, pedantic I suppose. She is away in Bulawayo at the moment but I could hear her in my imagination, whispering the word when I read through the first couple of paragraphs I had written for this blog post so I deleted the lot, apart from the heading and I’m starting again.

   One of the things that takes up a lot of time in the dry season is game water. That’s water for animals, pumped from underground into a variety of troughs, pans and dams. If we had money to pay extra staff, if we had good equipment, plenty of spare parts and no elephants it would all be easy but this is Zimbabwe – so it isn’t! With a minimum of staff plus help from volunteers, with Mr Mafa’s skill at keeping decrepit machinery running, with a bit of ingenuity, we manage – and then the elephants come along and break whatever we have just fixed.

    Shumba wind pump is one of our nightmares. It is perfectly placed in open grassland…….

There’s good wind through most of the year but the elephants have discovered that they can easily break the outlet pipe either at the pump or at the pan. When that happens, the first thing to do is stop the pump. Someone has to climb up and attach a rope to the chain that controls the tail and then a bit of brute strength is needed to pull the tail round. I don’t have brute strength so I climb……..

  

And whoever we have persuaded to help us, pulls……

   With the pump stopped we can repair whatever was damaged…..

   Then go away and wait for the elephants to break it again.

   Not all the pumps are such a nuisance. Thanks to Michel Buenerd, Le Pic Vert and Le Pal Foundation we have three solar pumps. One of them was only installed this year – at Tshompani. It came with clear instructions for the electrical installation but the instructions for building the panel frame were vague to say the least. We looked at all the pieces, looked at the instructions, looked at the pieces again, and applied simple logic – but still had no idea what the diagrams were supposed to mean so we used good old trial and error and in fact it was all very simple – though we did have to cut the ends off some of the pieces and there was nothing about that in the instructions.

    Anyway, having got the whole thing worked out at Sinamatella we took all the pieces to Tshompani and started work. First the site needed clearing and everyone did a bit…..

Mr Mafa and Shamiso……

Me……..

And Sue.

The frame went up pretty easily………

And even the electrics weren’t too bad….

A herd of elephants came to the dam to see how we were getting on (and no doubt to check if there was anything they could break at a later stage)..

 And that was it, job done. Well it wasn’t really quite that simple and actually took three days but not much went wrong and shortly after we finally switched on, water flowed into the trough for the first time in a couple of years..

 Last time we were there the elephants hadn’t broken anything. They were probably too busy working on the wind pump at Shumba.