Good news everybody, a week ago we have finished the first part of our research! The transect along the river has been completed, in total we made 19 plots of 4 x 4 meter along the Ewaso Ng’iro river and found a total of 115 different species of grasses and herbs. There is still some work that needs to be done with the plants, such as the drying and storing of the specimens, so that we can provide STE with a permanent collection of plant species, which hopefully in the future will only become larger. There are also still a number of descriptions that need to be made of the plants, but all in good time.
We have started the second part of our research now and are focussing our time and energy on the focal study on the feeding behaviour of elephants. We decided to stick with the original plan of tracking down the Biblical Towns and have selected the individuals that we will be observing for the next weeks. Allready we can see that they definetely seem to have a preference, although we will need to collect much more data to be able to make conclusions.
Recently we finally came across a few lions here in the Samburu Reserve, just at 4 meters distance were two females, two cubs and a male, it was a great experience to see and hear them roar at such a close distance. Living here at the STE camp it has all become a part of the regular life and we can say we really made some good new friends here. The evenings are filled with either playing some cards of watching a movie, which everybody really seems to like. We only have three weeks left here at the research camp but we plan to make the most of it!