Advertisement
Published: April 22nd 2012
Manuka/maswera/maneru masweri sei (depending on what time of day you're reading this. As you can probably guess, one of the activities this week was a shona language lesson. We were told to write the words phonetically in a way we would remember so i have no idea about actual spelling. As well as good morning/afternoon/evening i can also say please, thankyou, lion, elephant and please may i have a beer - just about all i need to get by out here!
This week has flown past and as well as the usual shovelling of various types of sh*t i've been on a couple of elephant rides and a horse ride in the bush - great for viewing game up close. I also had a great session called 'behaviour enrichment' where you make toys for the lion cubs then go into their enclosures to play with them. I had no idea what toys a lion would want to play with so i asked one of the handlers for suggestions. everything we used had to be natural so you can't even use string to hold a toy together or tie it on to a stick. The handler took us to a mossassa tree and showed us how to strip and peel the bark to end up with 'natural string'. Lions LOVE elephant dung so we made toys of dried dung tied onto sticks and decorated with gerns leaves - not something you would come across in the toy section of Pets R Us but the lions loved them. We managed to wear them out after about an hour and you can really experience the strength of these animals when you're playing tug of war with them. If they decide they want to take the toy from you and run off with it there's no contest!
I've also been back into the stage 2 release site to see the pride with their cubs. They're hunting very successfully and displaying all the traits of wild lions. But these lions don't have competition from other predators or other lions so the researchers wanted to see how they would react if they thought other lions were approaching their territory. To do this they raised money to buy some seriously powerful speakers and i was lucky enough to be on research the day they tested them out. We watched the pride while another vehicle parked behing bushes just outside the perimeter fence and played the roars of 1 male and 4 female lions (apparently lions can tell the sex and number of another group of lions simply by the roars). When Milo, the captive born male, heard the roars he shot off like a bat out of hell towards the exact spot the sound had come from - exactly what a wild lion would do to protect his territory. Poor guy though, when we left him he was still pacing up and down the fence roaring his head off.
Thursday brought meat prep duty and i'm extremely proud of myself as i was the only person in my group who had the stomach to do it. Most fell at the first hurdle when they saw all the blood on the floor and the rest balked at the stench. But i managed to help load sacks of offal onto trucks to feed the big lions and also helped cut up bits of cow leg and ribs for the cubs. My reward was being allowed to hand feed the cubs pieces of meat containing their vitamin supplements before they were let out for the main feed - definitely not something you do every day.
The weather has been very hot this week with cold nights so long may it continue. Until next time - tonana!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.107s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 5; qc: 43; dbt: 0.0676s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Scott S
non-member comment
Jealous (just a bit)
"I also had a great session called 'behaviour enrichment' where you make toys for the lion cubs then go into their enclosures to play with them." I am J.E.A.L.O.U.S. Great to hear you having such an interesting time out there, Mags. Keep these blogs coming.