Just another week at the office....

Its Saturday morning, and we're chilling this weekend after a great week of hard work this past week.  Lots of new volunteers arrived on Monday from Germany, Switzerland and the UK, and 1 from the US.  This eco-volunteer thing is very popular in much of Europe (though we haven't had any French volunteers yet), much less so in the US.  We are now up to 21 volunteers, ranging in age from 18 to 60+.

In addition to the animal monitoring we do every week (elephant, rhino and predator), this week we had a variety of projects

One of the rangers on Shamwari has a particular interest in owls.  She was able to raise a bit of money to buy some wood and nails, and then provided those supplies to a couple of local schools for the kids to build owl boxes.  Apparently, in the local culture owls are associated with death, so part of the motivation behind the project was to educate the local kids that owls are not evil.  A healthy part of what Shamwari does has a goal of building an appreciation for nature and conservation in the local communities, as well as in the paying guests.  Here we are installing one of the boxes next to one of the lodges.  The hope is that by attracting owls they may be able to better control rodents around the lodges without the use of chemicals.

We also worked up a good sweat clearing brush, chopping down non-indigenous trees and removing old fence lines, as well as continuing our work in the local township planting a vegetable garden and spending time with the kids at the daycare center.

Thursday was a particularly interesting day.  Melanie, I and one other volunteer spent the day feeding the cats at the Born Free Education Center.  The Born Free Foundation operates what is essentially a "retirement home" for large cats that have been rescued from zoos, circuses, people's garages, etc. and which cannot be re-introduced to the wild for a variety of reasons.  Our job was to cut up large chunks of horsemeat and feed it to the cats.

The fact that the cooler where the meat was stored was on the fritz so the meat was moldy, rancid and covered with maggots didn't seem to bother the cats (though Melanie did regret eating breakfast before we went)

Our day on Thursday was topped off by a campout in the bush - in a spot with fresh leopard tracks.  Only one time did we hear an animal rustling in the bush next to our camp that required our rangers to grab their rifles.  Thankfully, whatever it was decided to stay away from our stickbread.

All in all, not a bad week at the office!