Slept in after the kill
due to rain. Julie had a busy day IDing animals while I had a busy day bringing
first the cruiser up to the lodge to get the brake booster reinstalled and then
the hi-lux to have Sampson look at a leak. Endless car problems! And then last
night we got a flat on the hi-lux after going over a large rock and spent an
hour fixing it. Just after we’d gotten a text from Wes telling us to be back
early because Chelle (shelly) was coming over for dinner! We finally made it
back, one hour late, at nine for a delicious dinner of burgers. Exciting morning
today but ended very anti-climaticly because Saur led us all over north
territory for two hours. We spotted her fairly early on after checking out the
den with her two subadult cubs Koala and Spec and another adult female Angi.
They were wandered south and kept up a good walk but we were luckily able to
follow even through some rocky bits. Eventually it looked like they were
heading to the den and I did the most off-roading I have ever done. Saur hung
out at the den for a while driving us crazy, Dave was ready with the rifle from
about twenty minutes after we first saw them but her constant movement kept us
from getting a good moment. So finally she leaves the den and sacks out but our
angle is bad and along comes Angi again who gets Saur up and then they all disappear
over a hill covered in thickets that we cannot follow. Extremely tantalizing but
super cool to learn about the darting process.
So not until the end do you mention that you're tracking her to dart her! :P Is this for radio collaring, or taking measurements or what?
ReplyDeleteOops yes we were tracking her to put a radio collar on her! In the talek half of the park they will sometimes dart animals just to take samples but here we only dart to put on/off a collar. Since Zoey has died/gone missing we are in need of one more animal that is in the top 5 to put a collar on. There are 6 collars for north clan and 6 for south and the requirements to get a collar are: female, has had cubs and will have more cubs, in the top 5 or bottom 5 clan ranks. When darting we take blood and also do teeth measurements and I think also urine and milk? We haven't had any luck yet but hopefully I'll get to see a darting soon. In north it will either be Saur or Digs whichever presents the opportunity and in south Marten's collar has stopped working so we are hoping to dart her and get it fixed.
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