Each morning, I wake up at 4:00 AM. By 4:30, I am in the truck, off to whatever the day holds. It’s cold- I mean freaking c o l d. The mornings here in Zululand can go anywhere from 40-50 degrees, but riding in the open back of a truck thats going 40+ MPH makes it feel like it’s 30. While still shivering, the group travels to the Beacon, a four story structure that we climb up every morning. The purpose of the Beacon is to attain more signal for the animals tracking collars. We use a telemetry set to scan for the animals to pinpoint their location and make sure they are alive. A telemetry set involves a antenna, a cable, and a radio type device that has each of the collared animals information on it. After we scan for all the animals on top of the Beacon, we set off for the Boma. A Boma is an animal enclosure, this specific one holds Wild Dog family Lithle, Waters, and their cubs. Once we make sure the Boma fence has not been tampered with, the group and I set off to track either Wild Dog Pack 2 (WD2) or Wild Dog Pack 3 (WD3). Once the pack of the day is found, we monitor their behaviors and take down data. We record how many dogs there are, what they're doing, and they're GPS location. It’s so incredible watching these animals play and hunt, although their smell is less than favorable. These morning sessions can last anywhere from 5-7 hours. Once we return back to camp, I usually make the group breakfast. From that point on, we have until 3 PM to do whatever we’d like. That usually means sleeping and showering, as we volunteers are almost always exhausted and dirty. Luckily, my camp was a walks away from a small market that sold ice cream and soda. The group and I enjoyed walking there every afternoon for ice cream during the hot hours of the day. Soon enough, the clock ticks three and we all board the truck once more. We then search for whatever pack of dogs we’ve been assigned. Along the way to finding these dogs, we usually see a plethora of Rhino, Impala, Warthogs, and Wildebeest, to name a few. Sometimes, we run into rarer animals. On our first night out, the group was coming home when we spotted a Cheetah sitting in the middle of the road. He had just finished eating, and was in quite a hurry to leave the area as he was in his brother’s territory. Last night, on our last session, we unexpectedly ran into a Leopard who had just taken down a female Nyala. That is so incredibly rare, as Leopards are elusive creatures who are hardly seen. As you can see, anything is possible here, you just have to keep your eyes open. We come home after a 10 hour+ day out on the truck, we cook a simple dinner and pass out until another cold morning greets us.
