Zombie today.

Today is Dave’s birthday but I haven’t seen him yet as I was napping when he got back from his loop. I was in bed for three and a half hours just now, woke up a bit of a zombie, sleep debt is catching up to me and we were out late last night. We left late because it started raining at 5 so it was about 6 when we reached the den. But we had perfect conditions for a box trial so Julia squeezed one in, though BilJ who had already seen the box before dived right in before we could even pull the car away! This made the other cubs much less fearful overall but hopefully still distinguishes individual differences. 

Oh, we also saw a cheetah!! Just strolling up the road that our driveway connects to just 500 meters or so from camp. A very old lanky female, less attractive than other cheetahs I’d seen, but also wilder. Fantastic siting. There are three bat-eared foxes living very near the dens and we’ve been disturbing them every time we drive in there. We also got to see Waffles, our alpha, social sniffing, parallel walking, and grooming with LCS a very low ranking female. Waffles is the benevolent matriarch having been very low ranking herself once. We also got a head poke from a black cub!! Just getting white eyebrows so probably not too much older than 5 weeks, most likely LogC’s cub and Waffles grandcub. Adorable!!

This morning we went to happy zebra and Julia did some filming with her narration for this BBC film crew that wants to do some filming of the hyenas in several different parks. Happy Zebra was fairly quiet, just Boom and Ring showed up, but we got a nice elephant siting also.