Tembe Elephant Park

We have now been at Tembe two weeks and it should really be known as Tembe Dung Beetle Park! Yes they are David’s hands!

Dung Beetle (known here as ‘Spitfire’ due the sound it makes when flying past you)

This is a lovely place 30,000 Hectares of ‘sand forest’ which basically means the earth is all sand where some grass, shrubs and trees have grown into thick woodland in some areas. If anyone has been to Studland Bay near Poole in Dorset it is very similar to that, but rather than the whole area only going 1 mile inland it is 50/60 miles inland and down a couple hundred miles of coastline, with slightly alternative wildlife!

We have now gone back to some serious game viewing. The priority species we are checking here are Wild Dog, Lion and Elephant. The Wild Dogs are a bit of pain to catch up with mainly due to the serious lack of roads and sometimes our tracking equipment can’t find them due to distances involved, so due to the lack of hills to get some height it requires some serious tree or antenna climbing. Lions are much tougher to find as they prefer a tree to sleep under all day although they have come out to play on a couple of occasions. Elephants are all around and here they have as a percentage the largest Elephants and Tuskers (tusks weighing over 45 kilos each) in the world. The Elephants here are absolutely massive and we have not seen any of the top 10 yet!

David climbing one of the antenna to try and achieve a signal for the Dogs and Lions

The wild dogs though when found are great to watch especially as there are 9 adults and 5 pups (3 of which are below).  The dogs are so used to the vehicle that the adults frequently leave us to “baby sit” the pups whilst they go hunting knowing that they will be safe.  You have to remind yourself that they are deadly hunters when they look this cute!  

The Lion viewing though should improve dramatically as we are about to undertake a ‘Lion Call Up’ – this entails providing a light snack for the lions (usually a couple of warthog as opposed to a volunteer we are assured) and playing a dying pig sound from a loud speaker and the Lions apparently come running. On this occasion we will apparently be in a vehicle not on the back! (bad luck the kind person on the blog comments recently who requested heads in Lions mouths pictures!) The aim of this is to ensure vets can get up close and personal to the lions and check they are all healthy especially the 5 that are due shortly to be relocated to another park.

We could spend some serious time out and about as there are three sessions of monitoring available:-

4.30-11.00 – Wild Dog and Lions

11.30-3.00 - Elephants

3.30-7.00 – Wild Dogs and if did not find Lions earlier you need to try harder!

We did try all three recently but with temperatures in the mid 30’s with no cover it is a little bit of a challenge.

As you can see in the picture below, due to us usually being the first vehicle out some of our duties include removing trees knocked over by elephants to give us access but obviously someone has to take photos whilst Dawn tidies up!

What has been good fun here is having meals occasionally with other researchers talking about what is going on in our and other reserves and general admin type things which feels as if we are actually part of the team and really involved.

Last Sunday we went out with the three monitors here to the beach at Sodwana Bay about 70 kilometres away, obviously in between monitoring sessions! The beach was fantastic with only a few people about, perhaps this had something to do with the fact that there was a storm brewing whilst ended our stay rather abruptly. We are also allowed to take the 4x4 along the sand. This was then followed by a very special treat seeing people at a beach restaurant and having a fantastic home made Pizza!

Other exciting things that have happened over last two weeks-

·         Massive thunder and lightning storms – the noise is unbelievable and the lightening is incredible with regular W shaped bolts.

·         2 more snake types to add to our list in camp, green spotted and twig snake (latter very poisonous).

·         Seeing our wild dogs chase a herd of Elephants who did not like it very much and two Elephants then chased them back towards us with some of scariest noises we have ever heard.

·         Seeing the Wild Dogs being tracked by Lions and running off into the forest with us chasing by vehicle to make sure that none of the dogs had been killed which was then followed by the vehicle battery dying, the radio packing up and no mobile phone reception. We could not push the vehicle well enough to jump start it due to the sand and it being dark now being 6.30 at night, with Lions obviously very close by. We were 1.5 hours away from camp in the most remote area of the park, so we then had to sit and wait for 4 hours to be rescued after finally being missed.

As promised an appropriate picture from a few weeks ago which could have a few titles:-

Spot the mosquito bite! or David and Dawn enjoying the sunshine in South Africa!, or Wish you were here!

Tip of the week:-

Welcome Thunder and lightning storms – it means you have a good excuse for not getting up at 4.00 am!

Love

David and Dawn

Vulture Special

A quick special report for you all.

Dawn’s been up a cherry picker!

A great last week at Mkhuse although Wild Dog sightings were at a minimum but we managed to have a great day out with the annual vulture tagging.

This was probably one of the best times we have had since being here and was a great experience.

There were about 20 or so people involved although most were like us, ‘hangers on’, but due to the annual event, this is big news here and everyone wants to be involved.

The light aircraft was used a few weeks ago with regard to the annual vulture count and from this 8 nests were chosen to hopefully tag some juvenile birds.

We all met up early although for us we had an hour lie in as we had to meet at 6.00.  For reasons of decency we have not published the photos of Dawn actually being manhandled into the cherry picker (although David will be happy to share – usual fees apply!)

A number of trees later we managed to actually find a bird big enough and it was manhandled into a green bag for research purposes!

A big tag later, samples of blood and numerous measurements and it was safe to be returned back to the nest.

Lucky for Dawn it was her turn for the return of M029.

One bird returned nice and safely although it should be known as the headless vulture!

Even time to take a quick photo down the side of the box without even looking and not a bad one either (please note the way Dawn managed to get some excellent shadows in the shot!).

We have now just arrived in Tembe which looks a lovely place and is very relaxed so an update on this in a week or so.

Next time we have the best picture so far of us having a great time in South Africa so something not to be missed.

Tip of the week:-

Always have good manners – don’t forget to place your hand over your mouth when yawning, especially when travelling in an open top vehicle travelling at 40 kph! The dung beetles are big here!

Got to go just seen a 6 foot Black Mamba (a snake we have always wanted to see) and keen to tell everyone about it.

Don't forget to check out http://www.wildlifeact.com/ especially the facebook wall and their twitter site - the link is at bottom right of their site or on our previous pages as this shows other things us and the other volunteers have been up to over the last five weeks.

Love

David and Dawn

Another Exciting Two Weeks – Please can we have a rest!

Sorry for the delay but no internet access last couple of weeks so this is a slightly longer version of the blog. As you will see later however this could also be called:

·         We want a new vehicle

·         Snakes

·         Mud

·         Cute Babies

For the last two weeks we have moved onto Mkhuze National Park.

As you can see from the title we have decided to stop calling the blog linked into consecutive weeks as it will start to tell us we are nearing the end of our trip so psychologically this is much better for us!

An eventful last couple of days at Thanda with some fun with Lions and the office base camp (not ours) being trashed by a big male elephant who got in through the left open gate!

Can we have a new vehicle?

The trip to Mkuze was only approximately 30 km’s but only 10 mins in we managed to have a puncture, so a great start – as always we helped by watching Liam our new guide do all the work. This later became a bit of a theme to the first week as only a couple of days later we also had a slow puncture on one of the other tyres so spent most of the time pumping both up before starting the day off. You don’t bother out here with fixing tyres just coping – not fun though when we went into Phinda game reserve (who have lions) at night to try and find an injured Hyena and just after entering the gate the tyre starts to deflate, so we had to join with one of the guides there to show us around. Nearly 4 hours round trip and all we saw was an egg eating snake (see theme later).

To make things worst on one of our long mornings 4.45- 1.00 both the tyres had deflated and we had to wait at the hunting lodge in the south of the park for someone to turn up with a compressor. This was then all capped off on Tuesday when the front wheel went all wobbly with some funny noises. We had to abandon it completely this time and were rescued with all of us piling into the back of a pick up truck sitting on spare tyres for a very bumpy 30 min trip home! The experiences of Africa.  Two days later the vehicle was still there although the roof had now been played with by a large elephant with the roof of the driving position being squashed and a broken windscreen.

By the way the railway sleeper covered in a little bit of foam and a plastic sheet is our seat for the two weeks!

Mkhuze

Another shopping experience at the local town down the road (Spar) but this time we made sure enough chocolate was purchased to last the full two weeks! Dawn however was slightly disappointed when she noticed that Ernst (Biology teacher on a 3 month sabbatical from the east part of Switzerland) our new volunteer joining us, had more bars then we did put together! Ernst also enjoys experiments and is more keen than us to ‘play’ with insects and try out experiments – e.g. some beetles have a spring mechanism in their shells that allows them to turn upright if they land on their backs – we have to keeping picking up beetles, put them on their back and see if it works! (and rescuing those that don’t have the mechanism before something else eats them.

The new camp is excellent out in the bush with no fences just two thatched roofed roundhouses being the local style, one with two bedrooms separated by a small passageway for the meat freezer and the other being the kitchen 1 toilet and 1 shower/washroom (in separate rooms obviously). Liam and his girlfriend live in a small corrugated building just behind us. So 5 people sharing 1 toilet and 1 shower is interesting. However the water is gas heated and the shower is brilliant.

The Impala love sleeping in camp as they feel very safe but this presents its own challenge, the reason for this is that predators do occasionally like Impala for tea.  Apparently only a few weeks ago a Leopard killed one 100 metres away. On a couple of evenings we were also joined by Elephant and Hyenas, with Rhino tracks also seen only a few metres away. All good fun.

Snakes

We had the initial chat in camp about animals in our space etc and then the infamous word ‘SNAKE’ was mentioned – unfortunately Liam’s girlfriend Mel loves them as well as Spiders, so guess what we have to keep looking out for! Only a few hours later we came across a nice black looking one called a Mozambique Spitting Cobra (spits very poisonous  venom into your eyes very accurately for up to 2 metres). Following night we came across the infamous Puff Adder which injures and kills more people in Africa than any other mainly due to its large numbers rather than its specific deadly poison. (see below – by the way Liam used our camera to take this shot) - ‘ I’m not a celebrity but please get me out of here anyway’ springs to mind.

Main aim of our work here is Wild dogs again who have 4 month old cubs and are very cute (until they start ripping Impala apart in a few weeks time), Cheetah especially the two called Tim and Tom who we saw on a kill the first night, Vultures and again Rhino etc. We also do a lot of camera traps which are fun and in the first day we have managed to get two fantastic pictures of a leopard from both sides, apparently  this is excellent for research work re identification. Slight problem though we leave every morning at 4.45 am (YES that is right). But hey this is the view we have whilst we watch the dogs and their cubs.

We also managed a walk to find the dogs more closely and met up with a couple of the APU (Anti Poaching Unit) as the area we were going to has in the past had issues with poachers and more specifically when walking with tourists we need men with guns! 

Some our best fun this week was though pulling around the old Wildebeest kill from the Cheetahs and setting up cameras to take close up shots of the vultures feeding and trying to identify them as some are very rare and tags need to be checked.

For the more gruesome among you we also briefly met Marcus from Spain studying a doctorate on carnivorous behaviour. He passed us in his vehicle with a dead Impala on the back which he was due to set up camera traps on, to see what animals come along and review any specialist behaviour. We passed this later in the day with not a lot left and numerous well fed vultures which was great for us as we could count them for our work!

Cute baby and mud week

We were very lucky with popping over to the viewing hide around the corner to camp which was an amazing experience as it is built over a waterhole and the animals come right up to you. Yes the picture of the Rhino rubbing the mud off his horn on a piece of wood is taken through a broken floorboard below us! – It was fantastic and we stayed for 5 hours and you will all be pleased to know we took nearly 1000 photos!

The first shot inparticular reminded us that we must remember to book ourselves in for a Spa treatment on our return – mud wrap anyone!

2 Tips of the week for you this time

Never underestimate the volume of Tonic in the fridge! – Gin and Sprite is just not the same.

For our lady readers – Dawn has discovered the limitations of Clinques’ Eye cream  - it does not work under these extreme conditions!

Thanks to all who added comments to the blog, much appreciated and we think for this week’s caption competition some of the above pictures could get those brain cells working.

Look forward to hearing from you.

Love

David and Dawn