Birds Birds Birds

This week was our birding week, a whole week of nothing but learning about birds, and trying to identify them.

Monday and Tuesday were both spent in lectures learning about birds, their beak structues, how they eat, their feathers-who knew there was so much to learn about birds!! We also spent quite a lot of time trying to identify birds from slides-some were easy, some were quite difficult=especially when you dont know what species you are actually looking for let alone what the bird is called.

Wednesday and Thursday were both spent out in the field doing game drives trying to identify as many different species of birds as we could-needless to say there was a challeng put out as to which team could identify the most birds, Team A or Team B.

We both did really well on both days, Team A ended up with 76 birds on the Wednesday while Team B ended up with 74.

Thursday we cleared the slate, so we started our counts again, this time Team B ended up with 91 birds, while Team A only had 88. (As I am on Team B, Thursday is the only day that really counts for us. Especially considering we had a slight mishap with our car breaking down, so had to tow it back to camp and get another one, thus losing us valuable searching time)

Zorbing at Rocking 4 Rhinos-so much fun!

Drivers test!!!!

This week has felt very long, and while I am glad that it is over, tomorrow we are going to the Rocking for Rhino's festival (a festival to raise awareness and funds to help fight rhino poaching which is a massive problem here at the moment) to run a kids stall. I am on face painting which should prove to be quite hilarious!

Monday we started off with a camp clean up after our week off, and then I headed into town to drop off the car and pick up supplies for the next month. The afternoon was spend in an weather and climate lecture, which made absolutely no sense at all, and as a result I spent the rest of the week attempting to understand what warm and cold fronts are, anabatic and katabatic and berg winds, the summer and winter weather patterns of South Africa, all the different cloud types and what type of weather they bring, wind, the coriolus effect, high and low pressure systems. By Friday morning I had give up and resorted to rote learning!

Tuesday was a game drive in the morning where we saw the two cheetahs 100m from the gate and got a fantastic sighing of them for about 45 minutes. we then got a brief sighting of a large herd of elephants towards the end of the drive-perhaps our luck is changing and we are going to start seeing some stuff! The afternoon was spent doing rifle dry runs again, this time we moved onto another couple of the tests we are going to do-it is hard to practice loading and aiming and shooting (slightly difficult due to the lack of bullets, our dry run turned into more of a "imagine you are putting a bullet in here" and air and pretend to pull the trigger run, but was still good to get some idea of what we need to do, and the time we have to do it in)

Wednesday was game drives all day again, as half the group were off doing their drivers tests. We didnt see much in the morning but as we were heading back from the afternoon game drive we saw some lions again, and got quite a nice sighting of them resting and playing in the grass.

Thursday sarted with our Biomes lecture, which was quite simple, but has a lot of information to remember (9 biomes with species, climate, vegetation type, geography, location). As our test had to be bought forward to Friday we got the afternoon to study.

Friday I had my drivers test, which involved a nice long day, leaving camp at 5.30, sitting at the driving centre all day studying, doing the test (which only took 30 minutes) more sitting and studying at the driving centre as the rest of the group did their test, then getting back to camp at 4.30 in time for the weekly test at 5! The positive was that I passed my drivers test (got told off for speeding as I was doing 30km which is apparently the speed limit, not the 60km that our instructor told us, and certainly not between 2 and 3 on the rev counter in third we were told to stick to as the speedometer didnt work in the truck. Mind you that didnt help me much as the steering wheel was so out of alignment I couldnt actually see the rev counter or speedometer anyway!)

Today we have off as half the group has gone to help at the Rocking for Rhinos festival, while the rest of us will go tomorrow.

Two cheetah brothers

Cheetah walk

Kruger

4 of us decided that rather than hanging around camp for our week off we would head to Kruger for 5 days and spend some time going round. It was a lovely week, we started off in the North where there are less animals but the scenery is beautiful, and worked our way south to where there are more animals.

Although we were spending long hours in the day (about 10 a day) it didnt feel like, it and we got to see some amazing things. Over 150 elephants, 18 Rhino, 5 Ground Hornbills, Lions, a Leopard, Buffalo, the Big 5 on our last day, too many birds to count, mongoose, kudu, impala, sable, waterbuck, hyena as well as an adorable hyena cub! The time flew by, all too soon it was time to head bakc to head back to camp.

Friday a couple of us headed in to Hoedspruit to do a lion walk, which actually turned out to be a cheetah walk, but considering cheetahs are my favourite animal, im not going to complain about that! It involved another early morning (leaving at 4.30am) but was well worth it.

Today and tomorrow some serious study needs to be done, in preperation for Bioms and Weather and Climate lectures next week.

Photos when the net decides to play nice

Pied Kingfisher

Lilic Breasted Roller

Buffalo

Impala

Impala

Rhino

Purple Roller

Ground Hornbill

Waterbuck

Elephant

Vulture

Where does the time go?

Clearly time has been speeding up, not too sure where the last two weeks have gone, but they have certainly disappeared quickly.

We started the last week of semester with a reptile orientation at a local reptile park-where I hope to be able to do my reptile handling course sometime soonish. The course was more of an onientation and not so much on learning, but we had a bit of a lecture then go to hold a large python, a lizard and feed some monkeys-life is so hard here :P

Then the hard work started for the week, we had lectures on fish and arthropods, which not being my favourite subjects so far, I found slightly more challenging than some of the others-there is also an amazing amount to learn on arthropods, that was always going to be along week-the chapter in the book just kept going and going!

The weather deteriated during the second half of the week so by Wednesday it was cold (15 degrees) and raining, which when you are prepared for summer is not terribly pleasant. We had another rifle dry run, and an aborted game drive, the positive being that we got some extra study time!

Thursday we braved the wet and headed out on a game drive, getting soaked and frozen in the process, and seeing nothing more exciting than our first Leopard Tortoise. The afternoon game drive was again cancelled as we were not going to see anything in the raina and everyone was cold and wet.

Friday was still pretty miserable but we headed into town to pick up our hire car for the week off-4 of us were heading to kruger for 5 days. We had been expecting something like a Corolla, but somehow ended up with a BMW-who can say no to that!

Saturday finally bought some better weather, it had stopped raining and was beginning to get a bit warmer, although still overcast. After the test the rest of the day was spent relaxing, by the end of the semester all we want to do is relax we are so tired!

Tracking

So the last week was all about tracks, how to identify them, learning about poo-who would have thought it could be so interesting and tell you so much!!! It has been a very long week, leaving at 6 every morning, and getting back at 11, to head out again at 2 and back again about 6.30, with a lot of it out in the heat and sun, but it has been very well worth it.

We started off with just the basics on how to look at tracks, what to look for to identify them, not to look at just one track etc. and then spent each day out looking at tracks and getting some experience on how they look different to each other, how to judge the animals size by their walk.

Wednesday night we then headed out on another sleep out, where my roomie and I got the first watch this time. While it was good as it meant we could then go to sleep and not have to get up in the middle of the night, it did mean we ended up doing a 3 hour watch instead of a one hour watch as everyone headed to bed early.

The positive of this was that when a hyena crossed the riverbed 50 meters from where we were sleeping, we were the only ones who got to see it, despite our calls almost no-one woke up! After that it was easy to stay oup for the rest of our shift, as we were excited from our viewing!

Friday we started our assessment for our track and sign certificates-we had to identify 51 tracks and signs (poo and tree rubbings etc) over Friday afternoon and Saturday morning. While I felt I was doing well (we went through the tracks afterwards so we all knew what they were and if we didnt get them go through the caracteristics that identify them) I was surprised when we got our results back and I got 93% (I got 57 out of 51 right), the second highest out of the group, beaten only by one trainer and one of the guys who both got 94%.

Hyena

Porcupine

Our trainer-always prepared :D

Trying to make fire-we got smoke but no flames

Learning tracks