Pula! Pula!

At last the rains have started! After weeks of searingly hot temperatures (well over 40 celsius) the clouds thickened and delivered huge great drops of water this week. The word pula in Setswana means rain but it is also the name of the Botswana currency, so the importance of rain in this arid region is underlined. Although the rainfall is very localised, with some areas getting a great deal and others only a few millimetres, it has already transformed the landscape. The brown, dusty bush is starting to turn green as the trees burst into leaf and the grass emerges in the most unlikely places.
The rain, and how much you got, is the subject of everyone's conversation and the wildlife is already starting to move away from the guaranteed water sources of the dry season.
Although the rain can cause problems for doing research, especially looking for spoor, it is very welcome and I hope there is plenty more to come.

Looking for tracks

I have just completed my first week of driving transects looking for spoor of predators and prey. This involves getting up at a ridiculously early hour so that I can pick up my tracker and get to the start of my first transect by the time the sun comes up. We then drive along the transect (they are around 15 km long) at a speed of 13 kmh with my tracker sitting on the bonnet of the vehicle and look for the tracks of any predators that have used the road in the past 24 hours.
The roads are all sand tracks so it is easy to see the tracks. When we see some we stop and examine the track to decide what species of animal made it, how many there were, whether they were adults or juveniles, what sex they were and if possible what they were doing. My tracker is a Bushman and is very good at identifying spoor. Once I have driven enough kilometres on my transects I will be able to get an estimate of the numbers of each species in the area.

I am also doing transects to look for prey once a month to see what prey animals there are for the predators to eat and how many. This is very important as if prey numbers are low it is more likely that the predators will be forced to take livestock. This is pretty much the same as the predator spoor survey except that the transects are shorter and I also count all prey I see from the vehicle while driving.