South Africa: Camera Trapping

Today we were all ready by 8:00am, which for us girls is good going. And today was the day I had been looking forward to: Camera trapping.

So after we had our demo with Liam on how to use the camera's we set out with our GPS devices to locate the existing nine that had been set up a month ago to capture aardvark's. Initially, it was really cloudy, but by the time we left the cloud had almost cleared from the hill tops. It looked really pretty. Anyway, we each took turns to use the GPS to find the camera's that had been loaded as Waypoints. Rachel came with us as it is a public holiday over here. Liam seemed really impressed with us, apparently there are some people that come here and have no interest in getting involved at all. We managed to get back by nine and set another two camera's. I was responsible for looking after the SD cards we collected from the camera's. The first trap was to capture jackals so we set it up in open scrub-land and put meat down to lure the jackals to it. We used twigs and small branches to create an L shape so that the jackal would have to go in front of the camera. We covered the meat with some acacia leaves. The second trap we set in a donga, this is like a dried up river bed, it's like a small gorge. We set the camera up so it pointed to a large branch that had fallen down and wrapped some chicken to it. We are hoping to capture Genet's and Otters on this by next week. Me and the girls climbed a tree and Rachel took our picture. Christina scored our names into it.

We spent the afternnon looking through all nine SD cards a tallied up the number of different species we saw. We had only eight pictures of aardvark in total but loads of others. Impala got a bit boring after a while.......can't believe I am saying this!

Anyway, tonight was fun. I left the girls cooking dinner, bangers and mash. There was lots of mickey taking going on in the kitching. Christina nearly forgot to drain the potatoes before mashing them. The banter reminded me of me, Nay, Janna and Debs. It was very nice. We also had rum and raisin ice cream while watching devil wears prada. Proper girlie night!