February 2012 so far...

Thanks to the SAVE Foundation we have been able to reward some of the rangers that have been involved in contacts with armed poachers recently.

Senior Wildlife Officer Masara receiving rewards on behalf of some of the rangers – a few of them are in the background. Calington Sibelo who was at a contact in January had to be persuaded to take part as he was embarrassed not to be in uniform.

The saga of our on-off Red-headed Weaver nest has taken a new turn. After sitting for a few days, the female abandoned the nest and two or three days later new tenants moved in. They are Cutthroat Finches, which often take over abandoned weaver nests. At the moment the female is almost permanently inside, sitting on eggs we assume and the male occasionally visits. She also gets visited by another pair of Cutthroats who are presumably looking for an empty nest, but she scolds them loudly and won’t let them in. She is able to distinguish ‘her’ male’s call from the hopeful nest- seeking male and she never seems to ‘swear’ at the wrong one.

 

Male Cutthroat Finch

And the female before she started sitting on the eggs

This is the time of year when the elephants start to return. Yesterday afternoon there were over fifty down on the floodplain. The grass isn’t as high as last year but the smallest babies still disappear into the longer patches. Anyone who has visited Sinamatella will recognise the Palm trees…..

 

We are still only getting rain but it has been enough to make the grass grow long on the roads…..

 

Heading towards the Smith’s Mine Hills

I’ve been having a lot of trouble with grass seeds blocking the radiator of the car and making it start to overheat. This morning I stopped at a pan near Chawato to collect water to try to wash away a new accumulation of seeds…..

These temporary pans attract various species of birds such as these Comb Ducks that were on the pan when I arrived.

A pair of Comb Ducks. The male has a strange protuberance on the top of his beak that grows in the breeding season. This is the breeding season!

I noticed this morning that the grass is also rather long on the runway at “Sinamatella International Airport”. As you can imagine, we don’t get a lot of visitors arriving by air.

The runway at Sinamatella International.

If we did get some planes landing we might have to smarten up the airport terminal….

Airport terminal (Duty free shop, Car rental office – that sort of thing)

At this time of year the sky can be beautiful with masses of white clouds. Sue photographed this positively biblical cloud from Sinamatella Hill.

It really looks as if it should have a huge finger pointing out at some hapless sinner.

Crossing the Smith’s Mine Hills I was also attracted by the cloudy sky but my photo turned out in the end to be better as a landscape than a cloudscape….

The road across the hills has suffered a lot from the occasional heavy rain. Road maintenance has become a real problem as the Parks Authority don’t have the money to employ road gangs or to maintain a road grader and donors are rarely interested in funding that sort of thing. We have had a little help from Makomo mine on the Sinamatella access road but side roads such as this one need a lot of attention

 

And it is as bad as it looks!