July 8 & 9 - Botswana

July 8, 2015 – Botswana Wednesday Day 2

I got up early and dug a ditch today. Yep and 3 hours of this dam near killed me by the time we got back to camp. My hands were so sore I could not write or grip things very well and earned a nice blister right on the palm of my right hand. And I got filthy in the process, which given the fact that I have a limited amount of clothes is a bit of a problem I need to work out. There is laundry but I’m thinking that the brown dirt is not going to easily come out of my clothes. If I had known driving a pick ax into hard, rock filled dirt would be a part of this as I could have snagged a bunch of safety glasses from work. More than once rock chips few up into my face so I am rather glad I need glasses to be able to see. By the time it was finished for the day I must have been covered in reddish dirt.

 

The ditch we were digging was an overflow at a watering hole that the owner, Helena and Jane, wants to add a pump to that will bring water up and help out in the dry season. It sounds like they had a lot of baby elephants that died a year ago because of a lack of water so this is to help cover those times. However, while very noble, this seems to be a bit at odds with the rules of leave the animals alone and don’t mess with them but let nature take its course. Again not going to argue.

We got back to camp from ditch digging around 11:30 and after lunch I crashed with a two hour nap before we left again to do a bird census in the afternoon. The census entails driving around, identifying birds, and recording the location. Twenty minutes of this and I was done, let’s just say I am not into looking at birds and whatever I do, it won’t involve this.

July 9, 2015 – Botswana Thursday Day 3

Today job is fence removal. The area is a patch work of livestock pens with old electric fences that are in various states of falling down due to the elephants. The owner has bought up a large amount of the area and along with some of her neighbors, they are returning the area to the wild. So one of the jobs we have is to go out and pull the wire fences apart and open up the area so animals can move more freely.

Each fence is made of wire with electric lines and has around 15-20 wires strung on them. And each one needs to have the five current wires removed then the 15-20 wires need to have the tie unwound from each of the posts so the wires can be rolled up and hauled away. Each post is about 10 feet apart and there is about 3 miles of fence in the one line we are working on. Once the wire is pulled out, the fence posts are tossed into a pile on the side to be picked up later. All and all I will take this any day over digging a ditch.

Doing this is important because the animals walking over the downed fences can get their legs caught up into them and injure themselves, sometimes quite gruesomely. Something I quickly discovered myself walking over a section and finding my foot tangled up in the lines. We pulled about 50 feet of fence out and removed the electrical current wires from about another 200 feet in the three hours we were working on this.

Hamburger lunch and at 2:30 we headed back out to run a mammal census. More interesting than the bird census but it amounts to the same thing. We drive around and count zebra, elephant, impala, and so on, say where we say them, how many males vs. female, babies, etc. As a part of this we also climbed up another set of kopies where we got a great view of the area. There were also several Baobab trees in this area, one of which is enormous and goes by the name “Big Momma”. I asked our Group leader, Sophie, how long it would take for one to get that big and she said it was estimated at 1,000 years old and the largest they know of in the area. The girth of the thing is the size of a house and pictures really don’t do it justice.

The Baobab trees are another part of our work in protecting them as the elephants like to dig into them for water, which disfigures the trees and can ultimately kill them. The ones on the rocks like the 1,000 year old tree are better protected because the elephants don’t like to climb up to get them so they are more out of the way. But others are just mangled. A younger one we passed on the way out to this area had a ring of stones around it that Project Abroad put in place to keep the elephants from getting near it and killing it.

Elephants themselves are really destructive. I know they are majestic animals but if they were humans they would be looked on as horrible people. They run around, scare off the other animals, tear down the smaller trees, dig up the watering holes, smash the fences, and like I said, kill the Baobab trees. I in no way suggest they should be killed but I get why the farmers and ranchers in Africa hate them because they run around wrecking everything.

At the end of the census we climbed another kopie formation and watched the sunset over the bush. It was a really beautiful evening and one that made me think that only a week ago I was in an office and now I am sitting on top of an ancient set of stones guarded by a 1,000 year old tree watching the sun go down over the Botswana horizon. Thus far I think this has been one of the highlights of my Botswana trip.

At least until we got back down on the ground and had an impala poo spitting contest. I am more than a little too old to be doing something like this but it is hard not to when everybody else is. I tied for first place with an 16-year-old French kid.

Got in a little hunting this evening. While waiting for dinner, Jane the camp cook, began yelling in the kitchen and chasing a mouse out. I was the only other person there and we chased it around the commissary until it hid behind a book case. After several minutes of trying to get it out and into a net, the mouse managed to escape out of the commissary and into the bush. Not sure what we would have done with it if we had managed to catch it but Jane told me of a story later on how a mouse earlier in the year they cornered jumped up and landed into her apron! So she was keen not to repeat that.