Black Leopard Tracking in South Africa

COUNTRY: South Africa
PROGRAM: GapBreak
PROJECT: Black Leopard Tracking & Conservation
WRITTEN BY: Izzy Green Moore

What an experience we've had so far in South Africa! We've endured early starts to battle the blue gums, stayed in an incredible lodge, and seen antelopes, jackals and porcupines. After our game drive last week we undertook sensory deprivation under Becky's supervision. We were blindfolded, had our ears blocked and had our sense of touch taken away. After ten minutes you get your sense of touch back, ten minutes later you get your hearing back and finally you get your sight back. Afterwards, all your senses are on hyper alert and you can hear, see and feel so much more. And boy did it pay off- Jordan and Jess heard a leopard! A very cool and rare experience. On another occasion, Becky and Jordon were lucky enough to hear lions!

We've been working hard on the leopard tracking, which involves a fair amount of computer work to ID the leopards, sort through carnivore pictures and input data into spreadsheets. We also do experiments for Tara to test our skills and see how much we improve over our time here. The experiment itself is simple - a 50m stretch of road is laid out and we each walk along separately trying to find and identify spoor. After an initial guess we then check against the sheets which have all the carnivore spoor and see if we are right or try again. We were okay at it, much better when we had the sheets but hopefully we will improve. After that we went to Luan's, a neighbouring farmer whose property has some camera trap which we went to change. We arrived at the first one to find that some animal had ripped it out of place (later we saw it was a baboon on the camera trap opposite).

We entered our last three weeks in South Africa with a mixture of surprise and sadness. Surprise that we had already been here for more than a month and sadness that we were leaving so soon.

We started the week with another trip to the school. We were put in to teach the kindergarten class. Our intention had been to tell them about Australia but it mostly involved a discussion of different animals. Nevertheless, it was very fun. Most of the kids had only just started learning English that year but were already speaking it very well. On Thursday we went to a local pig farmer who had lost some cattle to what he believed was a leopard. We went to set up cameras on the carcasses to try and see what was eating them in the hopes that it wasn't a leopard (apparently there were talks of getting a permit, not something we want to happen).

Recent days have been spent visiting the blue gums, walking out to the lodge to tackle some prickly pears, doing some camp maintenance, as well as some more experimental tracking and computer work. We also went out to two of our neighbouring properties to change over their camera traps and then made a trip to the pub to celebrate the recent work we've done as well as our time here coming to a close.