Day 12: Predators, Eland and Sable, Swimming and Pizza!

 This is going to be a long post, so I am starting early! I have about 15 minutes before I have to be in the bus to go to Three Bridges to go swimming. Then we will dry off and have pizza at the restaraunt there--food pictures to follow!

This morning we left at 6:30 again, making a short stop for gas on our way. We returned to a huge reserve where we worked last year, but even the journey there was amazing! Driving along one of the dirt roads, we came across a young female lion just strolling down the track inside the fence along the road. She appeared quite purposeful, and was beautiful highlighted in the just-risen sun. Not 300 yards further on, we saw a juvenile cheetah walking in the same direction, along the same track. The lioness was following him! As you probably know, female lions do the majority of the hunting, and they will kill cheetah. So we were immediately concerned for this oblivious-seeming youngster. We watched for a time, then went along and alerted the staff at that reserve to be watchful, both in the hope of protecting the cheetah, and of avoiding any accidental human interactions. 

Lioness on the prowl at sunrise

We again spotted the rhino that we frequently see, more cape buffalo, and later another cheetah. Arriving at the reserve, we crowded into a small game viewer and set out to find the eland. This reserve is HUGE, even by local standards, so locating anything can be quite challenging. 

We drove around for over an hour before finding one of the target animals. Rita expertly darted him, and the chase was on. Spiral-horned animals (nyala, kudu and eland) tend to run when darted. And run. And run. This eland was in a group of 3 young bulls, and keeping them and him in sight was difficult in all the brush cover. You wouldn't think that something that large would be difficult to find, but they are! This young male will get much larger! Even so, he was plenty big, but also leaped high into the air and sprang around as if he weighed nothing at all! He finally went down some way off from the track, so we walked in to examine and treat him. The game staff had noticed that he had some inflammation around his prepuce (the sheath around the penis) and insects were bothering him. So in addition to administering vitamins and dewormer, we applied an ountment that was both disinfectant (to fight infection) and insect repellant. After some lovely photos, he was reversed and galloped off to join his friends.

We then drove around for another half hour or so looking for another eland, but even in those beautiful surroundings, as the sun got warmer, everyone got progressively less patient and more sleepy. Rita consulted with the staff and they reported that the other affected animal did not look any worse than the one we saw, so she decided to try again another day to locate him. 

Then it was back to Batiki to load another younger sable bull for transport. On the way, we saw the lioness again, still prowling the fenceline. It was unususal for her to be doing this in the midday heat; we don't know why she was behaving this way, but it provided some amazing photo ops!

Since Batiki is a game farm rather than a nautre reserve, it is organized a bit differently. Various species are mostly in their own large enclosures, some with one other type of antelope in with them. They are sorted by age, sex, and for specific breeding crosses, so this looks much more like the type of domestic livestock production I am familiar with. We picked up the trailer and drove back through several camps to where these bulls were located. 

As always, nature had surprises in store for us. We found the bull in question quite quickly, but his ear tag was missing. Fortunately the staff knew the animals and were able to confirm his identity visually. Rita fired a dart, but it exploded upon impact, spraying the drugs into the air rather than injecting them into the sable! Rita says this is only the second time this has ever happened to her, so it is quite rare, at least with the darts she uses. As you might expect, however, the sable didn't exactly appreciate being hit in the rump with an exploding dart, so he ran. 

We tracked him around the enclosure, finally lining up a shot where he was not in too much brush. Rita shot, and the dart hit and bounced back off in a huge graceful arc, landing in the grass and brush. No way to know if or how much drug was injected. Once again, in pursuit of running sable. This time, he did seem to be slightly affected, but definitely not enough to go down. Unfortunately, another young bull in the enclosure decided that this provided his opportunity to gain the upper hand, so he picked a fight with our patient. The two of them clashed horns and wrestled as we blew the horn and shouted to try to get them to separate. Now we were both in pursuit and attempting to prevent injury to either of the sable. A third dart was prepared, but the bulls stayed on the other side of brush piles from the track, blocking a shot. Finally, he was darted on foot, a risky thing to do with 2 excited and aggressive bulls in the mix! So he ran, we followed, and he finally slowed. He went down, but got up again, repeated this several times, and continued to be far more awake than he needed to be. Once he had stayed down for a few minutes, Rita crept up on him to give more drugs directly with a syringe, and in the millisecond before she could inject, he moved again. Eventually, she was able to administer more drug, and they applied blindfold and ear plugs to allow him to become sedated. Meanwhile, the other bull checked in, running up along the fence toward us; apparently he decided there were too many humans in play, as he veered off and watched from a distance.

 Oncee the bull was handleable, he was pushed onto the stretcher, loaded into one of the bakkies, and driven back to the trailer, where routine data was collected: Photos, horn length, circumerence and spread, microchip scanned and confirmed, and hair collected for DNA processing.  It took everybody to heave him out of the bakkie and up in to the trailer, but the team is now functioning very efficiently together. Inside the trailer, he was given reversal drugs and stood up for transport. 

At this point, we had finished our day's work, so we returned to the lodge for an hour's rest. At 3:00, it was back in the bus for a (relatively) short ride to Three Bridges, to spend the warm afternoon in the (cold) pool. Once everyone had sunned, swam, played on the playground, shopped some more and generally had an idyllic summer afternoon (in winter!), we claimed a large table at the restaraunt and ordered pizza and pasta for supper. Everyone was super hungry, and as usual there was lots of tasting and sharing, and a general eagerness to try new foods and specialities. Jessica joined us, and we wrapped up a fun evening.

Tomorrow we will go on a 2-hour horseback safari, and probably work with the mass-captured impala in the evening. Saturday we will visit the elephants at Jabulani, then go straight to the airport to head home. I expect that by the time we reach the airport, we will be pretty tired, but 2 overnight flights should give us a chance to sleep, or at least rest. Nice leisurely start Friday morning, with 9:00 am breakfast! Mmmmm!