August 12th-15th

August 12th 2008.

We woke at 9am on day 7 not knowing we were about to embark on our greatest day of animal sightings to date. After a hearty breakfast we were given the morning off. Group members spent it doing various activities, including several people deciding to go for a run!
Three hours after breakfast we had out lunch of chicken with rice – delicious. Once lunch was finished we spent about 45 minutes packing the equipment for that evening. We arrived at Pilanesberg at 2.13, almost exactly the same time as the day before! The afternoon was spent doing latrine surveys and record numbers were found by both teams.
After supper in a wonderful hide overlooking a huge lake, we headed out to our call-ins. Both teasm now saw a hyaena. Team A had the better luck with the hyena coming to within 20 metres! After the initial success the second call-ins were less successful! On the way back to the gates both teams spotted 2 more male lions! Team A also saw a jackal trying to hunt impala, much to some members amusement! The evening was concluded at about 11.45 after one of our most successful days so far.

August 14th 2008.

Today was our break day after 3 days of gruelling hardcore latrine searches and call-ins. We had breakfast at 9.30 and went to Pilanesberg at 11.00 to shop for items of interest. We then moved on to a spot to have lunch with a gorgeous scene – truly exhilarating. Then we went to the Pilanesberg Centre for tea. We then went game spotting where we saw huge herds of elephants – they were enormous and truly beautiful.
We came back for dinner and had some free time that night, which was very relaxing – what a superb day!

August 15th 2008.

We woke up to a nice breakfast that we all enjoyed. After that we had Dougal brief us about our next assignment. Our assignment was to help find poaching snares in common poaching areas around the reserve. Dougal explained to us the different types of poaching there is and what they do to prevent it. When we went out to look for snares we found 6 – a great success. Later that day after lunch we went to Pilanesberg to watch them feed the wild dogs. It was an awesome but gruesome sight to watch the dogs devour the meat. We then came back to camp for dinner. Afterwards we sat around the camp fire and then went to bed.