Happy New Year to you all, and may 2021 be more predictable than 2020! This evening, Joe Biden will become President of the United States, and we can only hope that he succeeds in turning around America's carbon emissions. Best of luck Joe - we're rooting for you! As for me, I have now submitted my Masters by Research thesis, "The function of nest-calls in the chestnut-crowned babbler (Pomatostomus ruficeps)", so my time is now all yours... when I'm not walking the dog, writing PhD funding applications, reading papers, attempting to get my thesis published and job hunting that is!
Something which I'm very much enjoying doing in my new-found free time is playing with my wildlife camera trap named Gertrude (Browning Recon Force) that I got for Christmas 2020. I got the bug for wildlife photography during my internship year in Zambia and Zimbabwe with the African Lion and Environmental Research Trust (ALERT, www.lionalert.org - watch this space for lion chat!). I spent many days driving around the national parks searching for elephants, giraffes, bushbuck and hyenas, aiming to identify individuals based on natural body marks: tusk configuration and ear notches/holes for elephants, and spot patterns for the rest. Getting the necessary photographs isn't always easy, but in daylight we can often manage something usable. Nocturnal hyenas however are a whole different story. We did our best during night drives, using red lights to illuminate them without affecting their vision, but often it was just too dark to photograph a moving hyena with sufficient clarity for identification.
Enter, the camera trap. Camera traps, trail cameras, whatever you want to call them, they're a blessing to those of us trying to monitor wildlife remotely or at night. Why bother messing around with ISOs, apertures and shutter speeds, freezing your butt off in the dark and pouring rain, when you could just go to bed and let a neat little camera do the work for you? Actually, I love night drives so I'd always opt for both, but camera traps enable continuous monitoring of an area and using infra-red gives better images and without disturbing the wildlife. If we found a kill or a fresh set of tracks in the park, we could set up cameras all around it and it was a great way to observe all of the species using the general area and the interactions between them. Pairs of camera traps facing each other across roads meant we could identify individuals from both sides, improving our estimates of population size. We captured all manner of species on the cameras that we never saw for ourselves: caracal, aardvark, and even the first brown hyena recorded in that national park for over 50 years.
A further, and even more important use we had of the camera traps was in monitoring human-wildlife coexistence. The villages surrounding the Zambezi National Park were suffering severely from lions attacking their livestock. ALERT set up a camera traps at each farm to observe the lions (and occasionally leopards) coming to the cattle bomas at night, along with flashing red lights to deter them from breaking in. The camera traps enabled us to do what would have been impossible by human observers: watch the natural behaviour of the lions and their reaction to the lights every night for months on end at 15-20 different places all at once. Camera traps are critical in human-wildlife coexistence and understanding how wildlife behave around people.
And as for Gertrude and the wildlife in my garden during lockdown? Well we've certainly had some fun, even if so far the roe deer have eluded me. There's a fox (which I think is female because she crouches to pee) which comes through the woods in front of the house every night, and another that sometimes comes to clean up the bits of fat ball dropped from the bird feeders (in Zimbabwe we had hyenas doing the same thing, only they were cleaning up the bones left at a local vulture feeding station!). I've also discovered that one mouse cleans up under the bird table, and a second lives in the greenhouse with our rabbit. As for the guinea pigs, all I can say is that "Little Pig" lives up to her name, and just never stops eating... pretty good life eh?
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