Week 3 Highlights

As the week’s pass by its hard to release that I’ve been in Africa for 3 weeks!! It feels like yesterday that we arrived here ( yeah, yeah very clichè). Like I said before, everyday is different, and every week new things happen, so here are the highlights of this past week.

On Saturday we had our fun activity of the week; Na/an Kusè’s Got Talent! In a group of 5 people we hard to make a song, sell two random products, and bake a desert using the ingredients given to us. My team followed the jungle book rhythm and produced and amazing song… making fun of all the coordinators. The products we had to sell to the judges was an eyemask and a chewy dog toy in the form of a… cucumber ;) We ended up selling these products as a thong and the dog chewy toy as… I’ll leave that to your imagination! We also completely burnt our desert on the campfire but regardless we went deep into the night with the bar open till midnight and karaoke on as well!

Play Time during the Baboon Walk

Omnomnom

Wanna Fight?!?!

They love getting in your shirt

Hannah with her friends!

Research

On Monday, my groups activity was research. This meant going out into the reserve to track down Puff Adder snakes and the resident cheetahs. The snakes have a tiny antenna glued to their head whilst the cheetahs wearing a tracking collar. Using a VHS receiver we tried to find any signal of any of the animals, which turned out to be a success as we caught the signal of one of the Puff Adders. The reason we conduct research on these snakes is determine whether they have a sense of territory or if they migrate during the year. Once we caught the signal we followed the source till we spotted our friend! We then noted the gps coordinates and added to the system. Once back on the farm, we did some different research in the form of going through 18,000 camera trap images taken all over Namibia. These camera traps are often place by marking trees (cheetahs mark their territory by scratching a tree), wild dog dens, and various other locations. If we spot some significant we add it to the database to get a sense of population size and migration.

Tracking the Cheetah

Rise of the Planet of the Baboons.

So, picture this; after a long days work you finally relax at the lapa and play cards (whilst everyone else has gone to bed) and all of a sudden you see 10+ baboons running towards you! Well this happened on Tuesday. The electricity of the enclosure of the junior baboons cut, which tempted them to jump over the fence..which they gladly accepted. Although this was not dangerous, it started to turn into a nightly happening. Once the baboons escape at night there is no way to get them back, so we were told to go to our rooms and but chairs in front of the door. These guys are absolutely reckless!! They were very eager to get into our rooms (they can open the handles), two of them eventually got into my room and jumped right under my blankets… Apparently they are quite scared and seek light/sound/companionship. From Tuesday onwards towards 9pm the baboons escaped and caused havoc. Although staff tried to identify how they could get out (given that the electricity was back on again) no solution was found. At night you can hear them on the roof run from one side to the other (yeah… not getting much sleep). In the early mornings, Johannes (A bushmen who has worked at Na/an Kuse for 15 years and is dominant over all the baboons) gets them back into their enclosure by shouting at them and throwing stones etc. As I’m writing this right now, the baboons are still coming out at night… lets hope this changes soon. 

PS. Being locked in your room with baboons looking inside your windows and trying to get in really makes it feel like the movie!

And so it Begun

Dramatic Photo

I was going to add more to this weeks happenings, but given the severity of the other 2 events, It deserves it own post!