Tembe dag 8: F13 is just being a little bit frustrating

Maandag 12-11-2018

Tembe dag 8:          F13 is just being a little bit frustrating

Dieren vandaag gezien / Animals spotted:

·         African wild dogs

·         Nyala

·         Impala

·         Crested guineafowl

·         Speke’s hinged tortoise

·         Egyptian goose

·         Wooley necked storks

·         Grey heron

·         Village weaver

·         Blue wildebeest.

·         Common fiscal

·         Martial eagle

·         Giraffe

·         Chinspot batis

This morning we left at 4.30 am. This morning it was my turn again to scan. Not long after we left we found some lion tracks. They belonged to F13. The signal went came from different directions. First it was at 5 and then at 11. How am I supposed to get it right. Well I didn’t. So Ben took over. It did made me feel a bit bad. We drove around a bit and waited for quite a long time. Luckily Ben had the same problems with the scanning as I did and he had it wrong as well 😊. At 7.30 we had some morning tea. We discovered that one of the front tyres was getting flat so we had to change this one. Ben is fairly quick with this, much faster than the other monitors. On our way back to the camp we visited the dogs. They looked good and after driving around we left them.

We arrived back at camp fairly early, around 9.15 am. Getting our wish list ready for the shopping, washing and some writing. Then we said goodbye to Anel. She was going on her time off.

At 10.20 am Leo arrived and we left to go on our elephant session of today. We picked up Patrick, this is the environmental monitor who helps Leo. First we drove to the Mahlasela hide. Here we saw about 10 different bulls. Most of them were resting or drinking. Not much exciting happened. We did see some other animals, like nyala, wooley necked storks and a chinspot batis who I could not get a photo of. After about 45 minutes we left again. During the drive Leo stopped to educate us again about the management of the reserve and his point of view about the different predators in the boma. He taught us about the name of the place we stopped, about the names of the trees and asked us about where the camp is. This has to do with scenes of direction combined with the movements of the sun. This took him about 30 minutes after which he drove us back to camp, a 10 minute drive. I think he just wanted to fill the left over time.
 

At 4.30 pm we left for our afternoon session. First we changed the left hind tier and then we left for the boma check. We swopped a camera and after this we started our search for F13. Again! The same problem with the scanning happened to Linda. What made it quite funny. In the end we didn’t see her but it will be our challenge for this week. Except for this the evening session was a bit boring. Till Sini thought we could use the camera pole as a pole for pole dancing. This was the start of an interesting talk during the session. Just around 7 pm we got back to camp.