Conservation - Return to Queen of the Night

Using a rope to pull down the cactus.

Matt hauls away a piece.

Bruce and Timo supervise.

 

A white backed vulture warming up in the morning sun.

Verreaux's eagle owl.

Game driving at night....

Tuesday, May 9^th.

Today, no morning drive… instead we were off on another conservation activity. We headed out at 5:30 to the area where we were two weeks ago removing the invasive queen of the night cactus. We were to finish the job on the two week started previously and to continue on another huge one that they had completed yet. On the way Timo spotted a couple of lions laying in the grass about three hundred yards off. Needless to say, exciting but we really couldn’t see them. We spent three hours there cleaning up the two sites. The top parts of the cactus are soft and have really long sharp thorns. The bottoms parts are very hard and woody which makes them very hard to cut with just a machete or hand saw. They are not allowed to use chainsaws. Then some of us moved to the other one while they poisoned the roots of the two stumps. So far African Impact has removed over 200 of the cacti in two years. In the afternoon Spencer gave us a very detailed long presentation on the art or techniques of tracking animals by the spore (footprints), scat (poop) and other methods. He showed us examples of different animals and how you could tell the species, the sex (sometimes), the pace, the direction and activity of the animal. It was quite interesting but maybe we should have had this talk earlier in our visit so we could practise it. At 7:30 we went out for a disappointing game drive. They are always difficult as the animals are obviously hard to find in the dark and actually don’t want to be found. We had planned to go to two areas tonight, but just as we were about to exit one reserve and drive to the second, we heard a really loud blast from an elephant that was obviously nearby and not happy with our approach. Chulu checked with the spot and found two large bulls right by the road… so we backed up, turned around and retraced our steps. However, we did see a couple of chameleons and I did get one excellent night photo of a spotted eagle owl, which was progress for me taking night shots. It was 9:30 by the time we got back and went pretty much straight to bed.