Lion Guardians

Category: lion research fieldwork | Date: Nov 22 2007 | By: admin

The more faithful or our blogreaders might be wondering why the recent posts have been a bit pedestrian. Well, its raining. When it rains around here, things get muddy. When things get muddy fieldwork gets to be a challenging. And the more timid amongst us stay at home eating pancakes and writing Durrel-esque blogs (thats Gerald Durrel, the naturalist who wrote the bed-time stories I had read to me).

And then some of us get it into our heads to go and do fieldwork, after spending days in the office in camp. To cut a long story short, Ernest and I got stuck today. It took us about 2 hours to get unstuck, and then some tricky driving to get home. Without the winch we would still be there, wading through mud, and doing battle with the hi-lift jack and logs.

Before we got started.

One’s humour and enthusiasm tend to deteriorate as the day wears on, while stuck. Luckily Ernest is fairly amicable about most things and offered constructive suggestions. Like using the machete as a shovel when the chinese shovel that we were using broke in half (yes, in half). I don’t think this blog is a suitable forum for me to express how I feel about the quality of imported chinese tools.

For those of you who follow recipe books (instead of having it cooked for you) this is how we did it:

Take a hi-lift jack, logs, spare tyre, saw, panga (made in South Africa), half a chinese spade, some boards…. and a 3,000lb electric winch. Dig, saw, chop, hammer, jack, sweat, winch and curse. Then drive away.

And the storybook finish: the sun came out. Here we are, 2 hours later, packed and ready to tackle black cotton soil waiting for us on the other side of the koppie ahead

Perhaps tomorrow we will be a little less intrepid. Till then,

S.

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