Trapping Nights

With the trapping of samangos, we took advantage and convinced the vets to stay and help in the leopard trapping.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t be involved in the samango trapping due to my current duties as assistant in the predator side and my unsuccessful race to prepare all the samango’s data before the meeting with the director. Nonetheless, the Belgian kept me up to date whenever she wasn’t carrying cases up and down or watching them to avoid the baboons to get caught. Apparently, the first naïve monkeys in being caught were the both males of House and Barn troop, that couldn’t resist the temptation of picking the oranges that rested at the end of the cases. Other 12 more monkeys were caught, tagged, their teeth inspected and several samples taken. The researches weren’t very please with the number of monkeys trapped but, to be honest, I was disappointed with my samangos for being so naïve!

Speaking about more spotted mammals; I recently spent two nights in a row with leopard trapping; in addition to one day at the beginning of last week in which we were setting up and pre-baiting everything.

The first night I was spotter and the Leader was driver. Everything was going fine until we wanted to check the second trap and we found ourselves trapped on the sand. After unsuccessful trials of getting rid of our imprisonment, we had finally to call for external help. When the co-leader arrived he found out the problem in a matter of seconds…just let’s say that I hope to never forget again how the wheels look like when they are in 4x4 mode… We spent the night on a tent close to the traps, sleeping while the bush babies screamed outside.  Up before 6h and check again, no leopards this night; but the few hours of sleep let me had if I had a great hangover.

That afternoon, the French-Spanish and I went to open the traps for that night. We used the quark bike and the French-Spanish was teaching me how to drive it; apparently I do it pretty well…and I enjoy it, F&%ck! That night, we came back, now with the car, to do the first check. Nothing, but some frights due to the huge size of the cow foetus used like bait, specially because now they are swollen and look quite scary.

Another night on the tent later and we woke up to check the trap which, again, showed no signs of leopards.

Now we are stopping for some days because the vet had to go to sort out some things and we appreciated because we are in a kind of party-days because of today’s wedding. I will have a busy day learning to cook a warthog! Write you soon given a food critic about the Mopane worms!