Rain stops research
November 17, 2009
Training in the bush for NYC MARATHON
November 21, 2009

Aerial Survey

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Getting the plane ready for the survey

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One of the many channels of the Okavango Delta

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Pilot and Petri hard at work during the survey

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View from the air

arrived in Tubu Tree Lodge on the next door concession on Sunday, just in time for lunch, having been picked up by the rest of the team from our airstrip. The team is led by Petri Viljoen, Graeme is the pilot and Martin Kays is the other observer. After a lovely lunch at the lodge we headed back to the airstrip to calibrate us observers – this involved flying over the airstrip at known heights and seeing how many markers we could see. We had laid out the markers earlier at known distances apart. Once this was down we enjoyed an evening game drive before supper and then Petri briefed us on the protocol for the next few days.

Monday: Up at 0530, breakfast at 0600, depart for airstrip at 0630 and airborne at 0700. The survey then involved us flying up and down transects and counting all the animals that we see. We saw lots of giraffe, wildebeest and impala and the odd elephant. It was a really successful morning and we managed to complete NG25.

So we spent the next 2.5 days surveying NG26 – which is the largest concession area in the Okavango Delta. Here is it is a lot drier so we saw less lechwe, Martin even spotted a couple of Gemsbok in the drier areas. We included some of the area west of the buffalo fence and into the cattle areas, it was really interesting to view the differences in vegetation and the wild animals that co-habit with man, the only species we saw were ostrich (we were also surveying the larger birds) and bull elephants.

The weather was very very hot, being October, and this along with the odd bump here and there unfortunately this made me feel a little unwell – so I made good use of the sick bags and my team mates were very supportive of my predicament and pretended they couldn’t hear.
Petri is now busy analysing the data and I look forward to hearing what we saw.

Many thanks to all the guys and I hope we get the chance to do the same next year.