Today we went out to ground truth some collaring movements and the day was a combination of success and failure though it’s ultimately a good representation of our normal weekend excursions. There have been dozens of excursions like this that I haven't really blogged about but these are kind of easy weekend activities that only take a morning or an afternoon.
There is a very wild habitat about a half hour from us and we knew a lion had passed through a few days ago. We wanted to follow up some of it’s movements and see what it had been up to. The area was near to a watering hole frequented by elephants and thus had a somewhat accessible network of elephant trails. Although this was good for accessibility this also meant that we had to be very careful to ensure we did not run into a group of elephants. Elephant populations near to village land are not very calm and often have negative experiences with humans while crop raiding and thus we had to be careful.
We tried to drive as far as we could with our car and somewhere along the way we hit a gigantic log that somehow flew up and hit the side of our car. When attempting to get out of the car I realized my door was stuck and then I realized that the frame of the car had been pushed in against the door. No worries, I took the ax out from the back and wedged it between the door and car frame. A few cranks and the door was able to open although it’s certainly a tight squeeze. After this short interlude we began walking to the GPS point.
 |
| You can see where the door was folded in |
As suspected the area was full of elephant trails and due to their constant foraging it was also quite open. This allowed us to be a little more comfortable detecting wildlife from a distance. After about a 45 minute walk we reached our destination but unfortunately did not see anything notable.
On our way out we stopped at the water hole to look at some birds. While waiting quietly we suddenly saw a cautious elephant emerge from the opposite side of the pool. He came to mud bathe and drink and he was soon followed by six other large elephants. I don’t think they noticed us and we were thrilled to have an intimate sighting.
The elephants eventually left and we decided to drive another bush road. We ended up seeing a nice group of giraffe but the road was in very poor condition. After bashing through some particularly busy roads we began our journey home only to fly off the road and nearly have an accident. The steering felt off and we inspected the car to see our steering rod ball joint had broken. No worries once again, we straightened the steering rod out, hammered the ball joint in with a rock, and then tied some rope for a temporary fix until we could reach home. Due to the corrugation on the road it untied once but after a second re-tie it served us until we reached home.
No comments:
Post a Comment