Week 9 - Mkuze Camp

Only 4 weeks left.  I can’t believe how fast 2 months has gone by.  The first 2 weeks seemed to take forever, but these last 6 have really passed quickly.  Myself and 2 other volunteers arrived to Mkuze camp on Monday.  The other 2 girls with me are Tania (New Zealand/England) and Viviane (Germany).  The monitor here is Liam, but Kevin is arriving on Tuesday/Wednesday so Liam can go on holiday.  Tania also left today, so the rest of the time it’s just Viviane and I.  It will be nice to see Kevin again – he’s been so lovely and it’s been nice to have something constant during my time here. 

This camp is a bit like iMfolozi, but with lots of electricity and hot water J.  There is one building with 2 bedrooms (5 beds total) connected by a breezeway to another building that has the kitchen and bathrooms.  There is no fence around this camp, but that’s because there are no lions at this park.  We are located near the park’s lodge, but there haven’t been many tourists this week, so it’s been very quiet.  The focus of this park is on wild dogs, cheetah, suni, black rhino, elephants and spotted hyena.   

Monitoring here is really focused on the wild dogs.  There are 9 dogs in the one pack at Mkuze.  Liam is asked to check on their location and get a visual every day, twice a day.  One of the reasons for this is because this park has a lot of poaching for bush meat in the form of snares set for antelope.  These snares catch a lot of other animals, wild dogs being one of the most common by-catches.  The snares can do a lot of damage in a short time and getting a visual on each dog is important so, if it is snared, the snare can be removed as quickly as possible.  The week before I arrived, one of the dogs had a snare through its mouth and around the back of the head – they were able to successfully remove the snare and the dog is healing nicely.

I haven’t seen as many critters at this park as I have at the others.  Part of that could be because I’ve been spending more time working on the data at this park then going out monitoring.  We did have a very cool encounter with a black rhino on Tuesday evening.  He came pretty close to the vehicle to try to figure out what we were, but then he turned around and went back into the bush.  We were also able to be a part of a wild dog collaring on Thursday night.  We went out with one of the organization’s founders and he was able to successfully dart and collar the alpha female of the pack.  It was wicked cool to watch the pack move in on the bait and see how they interacted with each other over food.  It was also wicked cool to be able to get close to the dog while it slept and really get a good look at it – amazing!  Then this morning, we had a very good sighting of a female black rhino and her calf.  We accidentally surprised her and she mock charged the vehicle and then turned around and ran off into the bush – quite cool!

I won’t be posting again until September 10^th, so I hope you all enjoy the next 10 days – and GO GATORS!!!!

Love to you all,

Stef

This lovely male black rhino hung out near the car for a good 5 minutes.  They usually run away pretty quickly, but this one was VERY chill.

All 9 wild dogs from the Mkuze pack.

We had a dead male impala as bait to bring the dogs in close so one of them could be darted with a tranquilizer so a radio collar could be put on her.

Dogs feeding on the bait.

 This is the alpha female of the pack, Thandazile.  She is tranquilized so the collar could be attached.  It was VERY cool to get up close and personal with these amazing animals :-).