Two nights ago I was hosting at the lodge, after everyone had finished dinner at 9:30pm, I was busy locking up the office and I heard a gunshot! I went to Daniel one of our waiters and the first thing he said was “did you hear the gun shot??” So then I realized it was not just my imagination! I quickly dropped Daniel off at the staff quarters and went to our house to tell Wimpie. We grabbed the shot gun and spot light and made our way out to where I heard the shot. On our way we phoned ProTrack Anti-poaching head office to let them know. They said that they would leave Bela Bela straight away and meet us and help us do fence checks. We drove around the whole perimeter of the reserve but didn’t find any cuts in the fence or unfamiliar tracks. Eventually at 2am we called our search off, we were quite sure at this stage that no one had come onto the reserve. Quite a scary situation though… so real!
What was cool though was that during our drive around the reserve fence line we saw an Aardvark (my first time, awesome!), 3 Hippos including a baby, a baby impala and its mom, the giraffes and a small spotted genet amongst all the other usual antelope. It’s like a different world at night, everything seems so alive! Beautiful! :)
The next day we found all our Rhinos, none had been injured thank God! We are still not sure what the gunshot was all about, our neighbours are all fine too… strange!!!
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| 2 of our 6 rhinos |
Tonight our 3 new cheetahs are arriving! :) They will get here at about 7:30 tonight all the way from the Eastern Cape. We don’t know too much about these girls. They are sisters, about 14 months old so they are almost fully grown but still have the fluffy grey fur on their necks. We think they have been in a boma for a couple of months and have not had too much human contact. If this is the case we will try keep it that way and not have too much physical contact with them. This will be better for them in the long run and it will make the re-wilding more successful. So watch this space or Facebook for photos to come! :)
Otherwise all is well. Wimpie is leaving on the 19th of Dec so time is precious – I need to learn as much as possible while he is still here. We are employing another ranger temporarily to fill the gap for Dec and then look for a permanent reserve manager/Head ranger to take Wimpies place. So hopefully after the interviews on Friday we will have found someone for the mean time.
Our owner is coming from the 21st Dec for Christmas… should be interesting to meet him and see what he is all about! :)
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