AWF Blog

• A Typical Afternoon in the ‘Office’

  Posted: August 11, 2008, 8:40 pm by Nakedi

  11:00am: I take the research car and go and upload pictures from the cameras. I’m unsettled at this stage because I’m alone. I get to the first camera station. I get out of the car, pick up the stones that lay right next to the car and throw them in to the nearest thickets and wait. At this point I’m standing at the door in the Nakedi’s Ready Position: “if something so much as growls from that thicket, I will dive in to the open door and lock myself in,” I make a mental note.

  Nothing growls and nothing moves, so I take the laptop, walk towards the camera and start uploading pictures. Sometimes I find ungulates grazing next to the camera station, and then I get relieved that they probably moved as far away from predators as possible. This should have happened in the early morning or during the night. I don’t rule out the possibility of an unsuccessful hunter from the previous night though. However, the sight of ungulates in the vicinity still puts me at ease. I hope that I will not be seen as a prey when the familiar staple food is around.

  3:00pm: It is almost time for the Singita Lodge guests to go on the afternoon drive. I must get out of the concession so I’m not in the way.

  3:30pm: I arrive at the lodge, get myself some water and head back to Shishangane (aka Shish).

  4:30pm: Arrive at Shish and start sorting leopard droppings of the day and analysing the leopard pictures that were uploaded. I have avoided the lion areas. I’ll check those the following day, only if!

  5:00pm: Play some football at Shish.

  6:15pm: Shower!

  6:45pm: Dinner!

  7:15pm: I read a scientific paper. When it stops making sense (calculus!), I get grumpy and read a novel. Sometimes I go and have a beer or two with the guys at the bar. After a beer or two I try again. Now it is the beer and me against calculus and stats…. sometimes I win. On such an evening I go to bed with a smile on my face!

  10:00pm: Snooze… with a smile on my face.

• The Elephants of West Kilimanjaro

  Posted: August 11, 2008, 9:29 am by Paul

  It’s too bad elephants aren’t smaller. If they were, perhaps they wouldn’t travel such great distances, and we humans wouldn’t have to drive for so long to map their movements. I spent the entire day bumping through West Kili’s inescapable dust, GPS mapping a snaking network of roads. It’s amazing how tiring all this sitting can be.

  I am in northern Tanzania at an AWF research and conservation camp called the West Kilimanjaro Elephant Research Project, or WKERP (we conservationists never shy from a mouthy acronym!). But many call it Kikoti’s Camp, after the Tanzanian who conducts his work from here.

  Alfred Kikoti has been running the AWF project in the area since 2000, studying the ecology of elephants, mapping their movements, and setting up a network of anti-poaching community game scouts.

  The West Kilimanjaro area supports more than 600 elephants, and is an important ecological link for elephants traveling between Amboseli National Park in Kenya, down to Arusha and Kilimanjaro National Parks in Tanzania, and out to Lake Natron further west.

  West Kilimanjaro supports a population of 600 elephants and is threatened by land fragmentation.

Blah blah blah

Fish cakes

Alas a fish cake.

Yet more fish cakes

Guess what ... yeah ... fish cakes.

The end of the fish cakes