Week 2

Week 2 started off quite easy. The only thing on my schedule was a meeting with Grietjie about the project I was supposed to do. Originally I chose the Carnivore Competition project where I would be looking at the distribution and diet of a carnivore to map where they are and what they have been eating, but I lost some interest in that project. With Grietjie I brainstormed a little bit and then I got excited about a whole different project: Burrow Occupancy. Here I am going to look at what animals use the burrows that Aardvarks leave behind. Looking at the tracks around the burrow and placing camera traps to get video footage of the animals as well. I had until the next Monday to decide on what I wanted to do, but it didn't take long for me to decide that I really wanted to do this project.

Tuesday I had a walk with Tanja and Portia, a local who helps out at the research center and also gives lessons at the local schools about wildlife. With them, we (me and my study friend, Floris) went out to look for signs of the things we are going to do our research on, for me we looked for burrows and for Floris we tracked down some giraffes. The giraffes turned out to be really close so we didn’t have to walk far to find them. After admiring them for a while (and getting pretty close to them too) we went on our way to find some burrows. It didn’t took long as well to find a burrow, as one was pretty close to where we spotted the giraffes. Seeing a burrow up close was really cool and I felt really excited about my project once again. Having found both a burrow and the giraffes, we went back to Bush Camp, however we found yet another burrow. This one was way more elaborate than the previous one, with (at least) around 6 entrances! Today we also received two new students at Bush Camp: Kévin and Eloïse from France.

On Wednesday, we got to join two German lodge guests on a drive to the mountain reserve. It took us about 10 minutes to get to the reserve and we immediately found some Brown Hyena tracks. A short drive later we got out of the vehicle and continued on foot to the summit. While we were walking there, Portia was doing a bird count for the national database and Grietjie told us and the guests a lot about different plants and animals. After about an hour of hiking up the mountain we reached the destination: a beautiful open are on the side, overlooking miles upon miles of nature. Apparently you could see so far that everything beyond a small mountain was Botswana, instead of South Africa. After relaxing on the cliff we went back to the car, this time taking the “short” route. The road was covered with pebbles and rocks so I almost slipped around 5 times, I accidentally walked through a Golden Orb Spider’s web (thankfully the spider wasn’t in the web) and it was really hot as there wasn’t any wind. After finally reaching the car we went to a big Baobab tree in the reserve to look at it for a while and then we went back home.

Thursday Floris and I went on another walk with Portia, again to find giraffes and burrows. Getting a bit used to the surroundings of the reserve, we made our own route a bit to see if we could find our way in the bush (something that’ll be of much use when I go out there alone for my project). It took us around 2 hours but on the way back to Bush Camp we found the giraffes. The burrows were a bit easier to find, as Portia knew the locations of some. The giraffes were at a manmade watering hole, where another project is located (looks at behavior of animals while drinking), where one of my favourite animals was drinking: the Nyala. Getting to see a Nyala couple up close was really nice since these animals tend to stick to the dense bushes instead of getting into open spaces.

On Friday we went on (another) walk with Portia and the new French students. We found a bunch of Giraffe, Blesbok, a load of Impala (when you see one, you see an entire herd of those) and some of my other favourites: Wildebeest. In the evening we had a goodbye party as Tuesday, Romkje will be leaving us since her internship is over. We drank some at Bush Camp, then went to the lodge to play beerpong there. Floris knew another game called stresspong, loosely related to beerpong. After a quick (maybe not so allowed?) trip to the lodge pool at 11:30 pm we called it a night.

Both Saturday and Sunday have both been a whole load of doing nothing. Weekend at Bush Camp means time to relax. Saturday night we had dinner at Bush Dinner, a Braai area in the middle of the reserve. It was quite a nice night and we had a lot of fun trying to get the fire on (we forgot the fire lighters so we had to do it with dried Bush grass and the cigarette lighter of a student). After the dinner we went on a nice night drive to look for animals but we didn’t see a lot of them. Sunday started off great, with my laundry that was drying outside being drenched thanks to the first rain we have had here. The entire day has been on the brink of raining and now that I look outside while writing this, it looks like a storm is brewing. Time to head back to the safety of Bush Camp and see you next week!