A typical day on the field

I go to the field two times a week. I set up new experimental plots and retrieve data from my camera traps. Sounds easy, but actually it’s quite some work. Besides, my experiments are running on the other side of the park, iMfolozi. It’s almost as far from my home, Hilltop, as possible – so far, that the landscape transforms from hilly to flat and the weather changes from warm and moist to hot and dusty. It’s (only) about 40 km distance, but driving slowly through the whole park makes the daily commute quite a journey.

Luckily, I have a possibility to spend a night at another research station in iMfolozi, called Mbuzane (which I still don’t know how to spell correctly since it’s a Zulu name), reducing the time spend in the car and allowing me to be a little slower on the field. 

So I pack food, pyjamas and socks and say goodbye to Hilltop for the 2 days. The same do my companions, a guard and a helping colleague.

We hit the road just around sunrise, which means we're basically having a morning game drive. Early morning is best time to see the animals and we are guaranteed to see common stuff like impala, nyala, zebra, giraffe and rhino. However, it happens sometimes that also African icons such as lions, elephants, kudus or wild dogs cross my path!

(Though, I don’t like to see elephants that much, because they often block the road with their massive butts and you can stay trapped behind them for hours.)

When we reach the area where we’re about to work, I pick a location that looks suitable for my experiment (an open grazing lawn). Since I’ve been doing that for 2 months now, I can not only decide on suitability of a lawn from the driver’s seat but also if the grass looks appropriate. With cameras and poles, measurement tapes, datasheets and a panga (South African version of machete), we leave the car and set up the experiment. We basically spend the day deciding where to put the cameras, pretending to be elephants and dragging dead logs around, and trying to identify species of completely dried out, trampled and miserably-looking tufts of grass.

Finally, with the cameras running, we leave to Mbuzane.

It’s a station powered by a generator, with little (if any) hot water and extremely basic room for researchers (furnished only by three beds). However it offers much more than meets the eye – close feeling of the wilderness, spectacular views and relaxed, friendly atmosphere. It’s a good place to be in after a day of hard work in thorny, hot and dusty savannah, to chill out and have a sundowner (such as cold cider) on the rock, enjoying the view of the buffalos gathering at the iMfolozi river on the background of magnificent African sunset.

Morning brings another day of work and with the bakkie (a pick-up truck) full of equipment, we go back to the field, pick up the cameras from an old plot, do some more boring measurements and drive back North, already looking forwards to come back to the field again the following week.