Earthwatch and Hiking and Snares, Oh My!

Life at Lajuma is rarely dull, but it is repetitive, so I’m scratching the whole every two weeks update thing and just posting when enough of note has happened. Thinking about how long it’s been since I last posted on here, I’m realizing that I’m over halfway through my stint at Lajuma, which is fairly crazy. I’m so reluctant to leave already, as I know that when I do it’s likely to be the last time I ever set foot on this mountain (no, those aren’t tears in my eyes, it’s just…allergies). But anyway, it’s been a fun few weeks. I can now add making a fire and (kind of sort of) driving a stick to the list of skills I’ve learned this year (previous entries on this list include splicing line and tying a fair assortment of knots) and blesbok, impala, and wildebeest to the list of meats I’ve sampled (kudu, springbok, warthog, ostrich, nyala, and Mopani worms round out said list — if there’s one thing I’ve learned about Africans, it’s that they like their red meat. Vegetarianism isn’t a concept that is well understood here and so often doesn’t last long. Meredith, one of my fellow research assistants and a vegetarian for 12 years prior to arriving at Lajuma, lasted only a few months here before becoming a carnivore. This isn’t surprising, I suppose, as some “vegetarian” meals I’ve heard of being served on the continent include chicken and cucumber topped with melted cheese).

I’ve also of course been continuing with the predator work, hiking to camera trap stations and tagging the images captured with the species present in the photos. I’ve gone on a few new camera runs since the last time I posted, one to a station on Lajuma and one to a group of eight camera stations on a neighbouring property called Sigurwana. Both were pretty great. The hike to station 12 has one of the best views I’ve come across here. After about half an hour of scrambling up the cliffside, you arrive at a clearing that overlooks the Soutpansberg. The first time I hiked it there was a slight mist around the base of the mountain, shrouding the unsightly tar roads and townships and leaving visible only peaks jutting out of the fog. I’ve hiked to 12 twice now — we do it every three weeks rather than every two like the rest of the stations — and both hikes have presented their own unique struggles. The first time Liam and I incorporated it into a rather massive hike wherein we walked to six stations, two of which are located on the tops of cliffs. The hike was just under 9 hours and I was completely beat by the end of it. I mean hiking for 9 hours on flat land is one thing, but spend that long continuously climbing up and down mountains…that takes it out of you. The second time we hiked to 12 I was feeling particularly accident prone. Within the first half hour of the hike I slipped on some rocks and flew down several metres on my ass, skidding to a stop just before I plunged into the base of a waterfall. As if that weren’t enough grace for one day, I bashed my knee against a rock on the hike up the fairly steep trail leading to the camera station. This incident was ideal in light of the fact that I had a couple hours of climbing over loose rocks covered with impressively slippery grass ahead of me. Won’t lie, the rest of the hike was painful, but I now have a pretty rad purple bruise blossoming over my kneecap, so there’s that. Sigurwana was really nice too. The property is gorgeous and hosts animals like kudu and waterbuck and giraffes (resulting in us nicknaming it ‘Giraffic Park’ on my first trip) and since it’s such a big camera run we get to drive there. The two Sigurwana days I’ve had so far have involved riding around all day in a pickup with the windows down, changing SD cards and batteries in between photographing giraffes and klipspringers and masses of vultures. At the end of my first Sigurwana trip, we nicked loads of lemons from out front of the owners’ house and then made our escape standing up in the bed of the truck as we raced home across rusty dirt roads. Upon returning to camp, we used said lemons to make homemade lemonade and guacamole and tortillas to accompany ostrich meat tacos. I swear I eat better here than I do at home.

Earthwatch is also a thing that’s been happening for the past month or so. Earthwatch is basically how the PPP keeps running — people pay to come to Lajuma for a couple of weeks on holiday, and in that time they learn about the research that goes on here and contribute to some data collection. As a predator assistant, I got more involved with the groups this time than last. Along with Liam, I took groups on a hike to one of our camera stations, supervised tagging images from the camera trap grid, took people to do phenology (the monthly assessment of trees around Lajuma for how many leaves, fruits, and seed pods they have as well as their maturity), and oversaw scat washing. Earthwatch groups definitely required me to be a fast learner at times — for both phenology and scat washing, I got a quick overview of the protocols about five minutes before having to run the activity. Stressful as it can be — we definitely keep busier when groups are here — I do enjoy Earthwatch. I feel like once you’ve been here for a while, the research we’re doing starts to feel commonplace, routine. And then a group gets here and marvels at the views on a hike or gets really excited the first time they identify a leopard or see a samango…it reminds you how lucky you are to have this opportunity.

To segway into non-work related news, we’ve had some good parties since my last update — two parties in a row celebrated a combination of my birthday, a fellow assistant’s last week on the mountain, and the Fourth of July. Shenanigans at said parties involved delicious American-ey food (read: potato salad, devilled eggs, grilled burgers and barbecue chicken, and barbecue baked beans), all of us wrapping our heads in cling film for the duration of a drinking game, kissing circles, and me passing out under kitchen tables. Not exactly how I imagined I’d spend my 21st, but a good celebration all the same [because yeah, I’m 21 now. Is it too early to start feeling old? Because I do a bit].

Not all of my news is good, unfortunately; remember how I told you that we had been looking for a snared leopard? We found him dead a few weeks ago. Heartbreakingly, the research coordinator determined that he’d passed away mere hours before we’d found him. Pimms was the third leopard GPS collared by the Project to be killed by a snare. His death has spurred the project to start educating the community more about the dangers of snaring. Most local people don’t realize how wasteful snaring is as a hunting method — most of the species caught by snares are not the species the snare was set to catch. It’s also inhumane — animals that meet their end via snares suffer slow, painful deaths. Snares increasingly tighten as the animal tries to break free, meaning that if an animal is snared round the belly like Pimms was, it will cut further and further into their skin until it interrupts their digestion or spills their intestines onto the ground. To try and raise awareness and crack down on snaring in the Soutpansberg, the PPP asked me to design some posters to put in the local communities which will hopefully go up soon. Earthwatch groups have also started doing snare sweeps, walking through forest at the bottom of the mountain and looking for snares — both old and active ones. They’re hard to spot, as the wire disappears into the bush when camouflaged well, but on the first snare sweep we went on we found something like 6 or 7 snares. Eradicating snaring is a bit of a pipe dream as it’s so integrated into culture and tradition here, but hopefully the Project’s efforts will reduce snaring-related fatalities somewhat.

I’ll close with a random fact that I’m not sure how to integrate into this post organically — there’s a Welsh guy here and he taught us a couple of Welsh words the other day that are rather superb and that I felt I needed to share with the world: popty ping and pysgod wibblywobbly. They mean microwave and jellyfish, respectively. You’re welcome.