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The beginning of my last week….
I recorded the last elephant I needed to complete an Activity Budget for on Monday which was nice as I can now look at all the graphs and help to see if we will trial a new method of collecting the data. It dose not seem that long ago that I recorded my first elephant and now I have done them all. Yesterday was quite changeable as some of the elephants were getting filmed for a TV advert, filming is going on all week. So the day never went exactly to plan, but it was really nice to see some of the elephants down in the forest where they did the filming, the shades of green on the leaves and the blue sky above with the sounds of the elephants enjoying being in and around the dense vegetation. It was a busy day by the time the elephant were inside.
Now Wednesday already I recorded Mashudu again to day so that now there is 3 sets of data for him, it was a really nice day today. We did a couple of hours of night time observations in the boma tonight which I found quite interesting, I wanted to see if it was possible to record there behaviour at night then you can see how they react during the evening.
Today I recorded Namib one of the bulls who is on rides, I used a different method while the other volunteers did it using the activity budget, hopefully this would then show its more accurate to record the elephants using the activity budget or the way I was doing which is to continuously monitor the elephant so that every time there behaviour changes you record the time and so you now exactly how long the elephant spends doing something. It requires a lot more work, I wonted to try and to do this before I leave as I have found this something I would really enjoy doing. This afternoon was really nice, there were no guests for a couple of hours so to just sit an watch the elephants as the sun shined down on us wit blue sky’s, we sat with the guides and learn about there languages….trying to teach me khosa was quite funny. The elephants grazed in front of us as the sun begun to go lower in the sky, it was a nice way to spend the afternoon. At 5 the elephants moved closer to the boma down to the damn and so we sat as the elephants grazed the sun got lower in the sky and we walked back to the boma, it was such a nice afternoon, and I looked back behind us over the park in front of me elephants and I thought it was my last time walking in with the elephants. As it was my last night, one last game of football which was a lot of fun, it was a nice memory to take with me.
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