Second day of a 4.40am start for conservation, this time chromolina removal. Its an alien vegetation species that none of the animals eat and just grows on everything and so blocks pathways for the animals. We spent at least 2 hours next to a croc-infested river (well, Anton said there was one in there but sadly we never saw it!) Once again the machetes, shovels and my favourite, the pick-axe were out in force, we did a pretty good job actually and cleared quite a good sized area to create a path for the animals to access the river.
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| The pile of chromolina, not actually from my days work, but you get the idea! |
Was a fairly uneventful day, we didn't see much on our afternoon drive until we ran into a bit of ellie drama. We had been looking for them unsuccessfully for a few hours when out of the thick bushes we heard an ellie trumpet, and it didn't sound like a happy ellie! So we sped off to find them and heard on the radio that the ellies were being bothered by the pack of wild dogs! The ellies weren't in any danger, I think the dogs just enjoyed irritating them! As we came around the corner we could see & hear one of the females giving chase to the dogs in the distance. They were a bit away from us though, and no chance of a photo, and then we looked in the other direction and somehow the rest of the herd had snuck up on us and seemed quite distressed. All the little ones were with their mums and they all hurried past us, ears & trunks in the air, to see what all the commotion was up ahead. By the time we got to them all was calm, we got a fleeting glimpse of the dogs looking very relaxed and the ellies feeding, before we unfortunately had to move on to make way for the proper paying safari guests staying at Thanda main (you remember the pictures of the lodge, even though we were doing important research work you can understand why the guests at the fancy lodge get first dibs on sightings!)
No decent pics sadly but a half decent video that I will try and upload later!
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