Cheetah Tracking Adventures, Part the First

DAY ONE

The morning was pretty hectic as there was a little bit of a miscommunication in the time we were leaving and who was ALLOWED to go to Bellebino to track the cheetahs, but it went okay in the end and I arrived at the Bellebino camp around 1pm. I re-met Ryan, who pretty much lives at the camp and tracks cheetahs every day. I had been introduced to him once before when he was at CCF to catch up on data entry and have his first day in 16 days not trekking through the bush. He is a VERY enthusiastic guy who is willing to do pretty much anything for the release cheetahs.

How the tracking works is that we WALK twice a day (we go back to camp for lunch) to find the cheetahs and using a radio collar system. Once we find Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Omadillo (the three boys we were tracking), we follow them and take GPS points and notes about any significant events (such as marking, kills, movement from one resting spot to the other, etc). There is actually a fourth cheetah in the group called Chester, but he got into a fight with Omadillo a week or so back and had to be recaptured and fixed up. They were probably fighting for dominance of the group. Anyways, it is important that we track their progress and ability to hunt because the Bellabino farm is only the first step (the “soft release”) of their release. Their end goal is actually India!

The first afternoon of tracking was very interesting. We used the car to drive half-way (it does not have 4-wheel drive, so it can’t go very far with all the large puddles on the roads) and found the cats closer than we thought they would be and they were hunting! This was VERY exciting even though I had to run after them more than I would have liked. They didn’t catch anything though because they haven’t QUITE got being sneaky yet and so the adult oryx kept running them off with their horns. They eventually gave up and wandered off, but it WAS very exciting. We had to leave the boys a few hours early because there was a HUGE storm rolling in. We pretty much RAN the kilometer back to camp, and it started raining buckets and thundering shortly after we got back. Thus, Ryan and I huddled in the back of our car and ate cold lasagna and fries from last night’s dinner at CCF. It was so rainy that I didn’t even WANT to try to set up the tent that Rachel had brought to replace the flooded one that was supposed to be mine. So I set up a pad and sleeping bag in the back of the van and slept there! Great first day!