Written by Stacie Wright (University of Vermont)
For the past two weeks we’ve been in Mababe conducting herbivore monitoring. Every day students would go on driving transects and collect data. We mostly saw elephants, giraffe, zebra and antelope on our drives. We also saw buffalo for the first time in Mababe. We saw buffalo tracks all around our campsite and heard them at night. I think it’s a more intimidating sound than the lion calls.
On March 19th we moved to Khwai in NG 19 and set up camp. Khwai is unlike any of the other campsites we’ve been to. It has different vegetation and abundant wildlife. The area is more open and the grass is beginning to die so its easier to see the animals. We are also camping at a community campsite and this is the first time we’ve had fellow campers in our area.
On the day we moved to Khwai we saw our first lions right by our camp. We drove out in our car on a tip from fellow campers and watched a male and female lion laying in the shade. This pair had separated from their pride for a few days to mate. They were sleeping underneath a Kalahari Appleleaf tree and would occasionally just roll over and nuzzle each other. All of the students were so excited to finally see lions.
The first two days in Khwai we spent catching up on schoolwork and trying to figure out which roads and transects are driveable. Many of the roads that our research transects are on are flooded. The river is continually rising as a result of the heavy rain season. The rains from up north are flowing down and flooding the region. We first went out on some exploratory drives to see what routes we could take for our herbivore monitoring. Luckily we found that we could still do most of our transects with only having to maneuver around some wet parts. We were able to drive two transects today (March 21st) however the river is still rising and could cut our transects short.
On our exploratory drives we encountered two female lions that make up the pride with the male and female we saw earlier. The female lions were pouncing on each other and cuddling in the grass. That night while we were sitting outside after dinner we saw the male and female walk right past our campsite on the road. It was thrilling to see them so close. Our campsite is right in the area of their territory, and they aren’t able to get across the river. The group is excited to stay in Khwai because of the myriad of wildlife we’ve already seen in such a short time of being here. We will be here for the next week and will continue collecting data as long as the roads allow.