Safari Spot Super Week!
Last week on Karongwe, staff and volunteers
were even more excited about seeing animals in the reserve than usual
because it was time for our monthly Safari Spot competition! For the last week of
the expedition phase everybody gets awarded points for the animals they see
while on research drive, with more points being awarded for the rarer animals.
Now normally this means we end up getting ridiculously excited about simply
seeing impala and zebra (after all “every little helps”), but the competition turned into
something really special this month after we have been really spoilt with some incredible rare game sightings!
It all started with Nico Kritzinger having
an amazing sighting of a side-striped jackal, a larger, rarer and generally
cooler version of the more common black-backed jackal. This alone would have
made a good week, except the very next day he saw an aardvark while driving
back to base. Admittedly it was running away from us as fast as its (very
short) legs could carry it, but considering we usually only see two or three a
year we’re not complaining!
After calming down a bit we decided to get
on with the day job of finding our resident lions and cheetahs. Jamie Sangster
had just made a normal T-lem stop to check for Ketswiri (our female cheetah),
when one of our volunteers said she could see something in the grass that
looked like a head. Just as she said this “The Head” stood up… and turned out
to be a brown hyena! It was surprisingly relaxed with us being so close and
stuck around for a good few minutes before wandering off. Brown hyena are the
rarest of the hyena species so we are lucky to have them on the reserve,
however we know very little about our resident population. We think there are
at least 2 individuals though so fingers crossed we have a breeding population
establishing itself!
After all these sightings you would think
we would have had enough, but nope! In the last two days Andreas Fox (Regional Coordinator) saw a further three side-striped jackals in one drive. However even this was topped by Rhiannon Craig (our
Bushwise Intern) who had not one, but TWO sightings of honey badgers and on Ratel (the Afrikaans word for honey badger) Road can you believe it, which awarded her about a million bonus points! Guess
who’s going to be winning Safari Spot this month!
Tess Taylor, Volunteer Intern, Karongwe
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