Trailcam Safari

I've recently returned from taking a party of guests into 'Big 5' country for an African safari experience as well as some camera-trapping - obviously!
We had a great time. The lodge was wonderful, the game viewing was sublime and our guide knew just when to back away from boisterous elephants. There were plenty of 'aaah sweeeet' moments with baby animals and also a few heart-stopping minutes when a large bull elephant gate-crashed our sundowner drinks. But it is experiences like these that make for a great safari.

Here are a few photos to illustrate what I mean:

......and his Dad:

One of the many elephants that caused some discomfort on the back of the open game-viewing vehicle....

.......and some that didn't:

This cheetah sadly didn't stay for too long......

......but this young Plains Zebra (Equus quagga) did:

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE CAMERA-TRAPPING?.. I hear you all ask.

 Sadly, the images weren't quite of the same quality. Nevertheless my camera-traps certainly attracted the interest of a few mammals:

A curious Kudu bull (Tragelaphus strepsiceros).......

....and an African Buffalo (Syncerus caffer) giving my camera a sniff:

A Waterbuck cow (Kobus ellipsiprymnus) drinking at the lodge's waterhole....

.... a Klipspringer (Oreotragus oreotragus) that passed by during the early hours........

and a beast that was just too close:

Overall, I think my guests had a wonderful safari that they will never forget. I, too, had  memorable trip - but for other reasons. That will be the subject of another post!

The Secret Seventeen

The term “Big Five” is synonymous with hunting and safaris in Africa. Many wildlife reserves will use the term ‘Big Five Reserve’ to proclaim the fact that they have Lion, Leopard, Elephant, Buffalo and Rhino on the property. 

Black Rhino

Sadly, many visitors to this region are only interested in seeing those five species. They tick them off and return home happy – oblivious to the remarkable diversity of wildlife that they didn’t see. 

 Now I have nothing against the Big Five - they are wonderful creatures and are not called the Big Five for nothing – but they are just five examples of the remarkable diversity of mammals present in Africa.

 

                                                                           However I would love this all to change, which is the purpose of this post. I’d like to encourage all wildlife enthusiasts to get excited about seeing our SECRET SEVENTEEN mammals. Why seventeen? Well, there is no compelling reason why it has to be seventeen. It could just have easily been the Secret Sixteen or perhaps the Elusive Eighteen. The Furtive Fifteen came to mind as did the Nocturnal Nineteen – but the adjectives ‘elusive’, ‘furtive’ and ‘nocturnal’ weren’t universally appropriate.

Aardvark

  The point is the number needs to be reasonably high – so that it’s not just another small exclusive club of mammals. This is about celebrating biodiversity rather than getting picky.

I’ve compiled the list that follows from mammals occurring in South Africa but there is no reason why the concept should just be a South African one. All countries should have their own version of the SECRET SEVENTEEN. Each country has its own wonderful endemic species that should be included in its national list.

  

My guidelines for selecting a proposed list of seventeen secretive species were as follows:

1. They shouldn’t be easily seen, but should nevertheless be capable of being seen with some effort.

2. They should have a reasonably wide distribution within the country. Species that only occur at the margins of South Africa might be rare but are not appropriate for this list. So something like the Suni (Neotragus moschatus) might be rare enough in South Africa but is widespread in Mozambique – so is excluded. 

Riverine Rabbit

Similarly, the Riverine Rabbit (Bunolagus monticularis) now only exists in such isolated pockets that the likelihood of most people seeing one is very slim.
 I have also favoured those rare species that occur in the traditional ‘game viewing’ regions of this country because that is where most visitors go to view wildlife.

Small-Spotted Genet

3. Where there are closely related species of a particular family, that are all worthy of inclusion, then I have simply included the generic family. 
For example, any one of the three species of genet occurring here could have been chosen so I’ve decided to include just ‘Genets’ on the list. 
The same goes for our two Otters and two Galagos (Bushbabies).

4. However, in contrast to the above, there are some families with both rare and abundant representatives e.g. Mongoose, where we have ten - I think. Here I’ve made a decision to include just one species which I think best fits my other criteria.

 

5. I’ve excluded those Orders/Families that are particularly difficult to identify (and possibly of lesser interest to the general wildlife-viewing public). These would include the small rodents, moles, bats and marine mammals. I appreciate that I’m now on dangerous ground! I know that there are many extraordinary examples of the above but most wildlife enthusiasts, and even guides, wouldn’t be capable of identifying them without catching them.

Brown Hyena

6. I’ve also excluded large mammals which might be fairly rare but, if they occur in the area/reserve, are usually easy to see during the day. Examples would be Roan (Hippotragus equinus) and Sable (H. niger) Antelopes.

So here goes. This is my suggested list – in alphabetic order:

1	Aardvark	Orycteropus afer
2	Aardwolf	Proteles cristatus
3	African Civet	Civettictis civetta
4	African Weasel	Poecilogale albinucha
5	African Wild Cat	Felis silvestris lybica
6	Brown Hyena	Parahyaena brunnea
7	Bushpig	Potamochoerus larvatus
8	Caracal	Caracal caracal
9	Galagos (Bushbabies)	Galago moholi; Otolemur crassicaudatus
10	Genets	Genetta genetta, G maculata, G tigria
11	Honey Badger	Mellivora capensis
12	Otters	Lutra maculicollis, Aonyx capensis
13	Pangolin	Manis temminckii
14	Porcupine	Hystrix africaeaustralis
15	Serval	Leptailurus serval
16	Southern African Hedgehog	Atelerix frontalis
17	White-Tailed Mongoose	Ichneumia albicauda

This is a very personal selection and I’m very aware that some worthy species have been excluded. So I would really welcome your suggestions as to what would be other appropriate inclusions to this list, or simply your preferences. As mentioned above, this is my South African selection. So if you’re not from South Africa I’d also love to hear what your SECRET SEVENTEEN would be in other countries. Please do respond – I’d love to hear what you think.

African Wild Cat

 p.s. So when you do go out and find these secretive species please do take a photo and send it to the University of Cape Towns's MammalMAP programme ( http://mammalmap.adu.org.za ). The distribution of the Big Five is fairly well known but data on the SECRET SEVENTEEN would be invaluable to them.

Sometimes you get lucky.......

.......AND SOMETIMES YOU DON'T.

I fear I might be guilty of mis-representation!

 Its not that I've claimed someone else's camera-trap image as my own (or something else equally dishonest) - its just that I've possibly made camera-trapping in Southern Africa sound particularly easy. As if we really do have lions and elephants walking our streets.....or great herds of antelope passing through our back yards.

For a couple of years I've posted photos on this blog of creatures great and small that I've been lucky enough to catch on my camera traps. But what I haven't done is to confess when my camera-trapping efforts haven't been rewarded. And there have been loads of those opportunities for confession! I guess its vanity, or perhaps a sense that the readers of my blog will desert me, that keeps me posting only 'success' stories.

A good example occurred a few weeks ago when we were invited to join some friends in walking the Whale Trail along the Southern coast of South Africa. This is a stunningly beautiful 5-day walk where one should see remarkable whale sightings during our winter and spring.

 

The area has been protected for some time and there are plenty of large ungulates in the area. There is also some anecdotal evidence of predators that forage in the intertidal zone. So I, obviously, carried along a few trailcams in the confident belief that this would present a good camera-trapping opportunity.

I put out the two cams on each of our four nights in the reserve. In each instance I spent some time scouting the area and was confident that I'd identified the best possible sites. And this is all I got:

A blurry porcupine...

......and a 'only just' image of a mother Common Duiker (I think) with her offspring.

For all that effort! I should have carried a bottle of wine rather that the cameras.

So, I've resolved to be more transparent about my camera-trapping results in 2013!

Having said that I also resolved to eat healthier food and do more exercise......which resolutions I've already broken. So don't hold your breath.

I wish all you camera-trappers out there a year of photographic miracles in 2013. I hope you all capture that Snow Leopard, or equivalent, that you've been dreaming of.

A Cederberg Survey

As regular readers of my blog will know I'm fortunate to be able to spend a fair bit of time in the wilds of Southern Africa with my camera traps. Over the last few years I've visited many fabulous sites, rich in biodiversity, but seldom get to spend long at any one of them.

So I've been looking for a site that is reasonably close to home where I can leave out a few cameras for many seasons - and possibly even a few years. I'm not exactly sure what I'm looking for - in fact, I have no idea what I'm looking for. I just like the idea of surveying a location that's wild and remote enough that my cameras are unlikely to be spotted by anyone. I'm keen to produce a video rather than a snapshot - if you will excuse the metaphor.

One such place is the Cederberg mountains where I've recently spent a few days. My local readers will know the Cederberg as a wonderful place for hiking and exploring. It is criss-crossed by hiking trails and the odd 'jeep track' but there remain many remote valleys that almost never get visited. But the vegetation has a low carrying capacity and the term 'abundant' would not be used to describe its wildlife. So its certainly not  'big 5' territory but I'm always more interested in the smaller animals: call them the secret seventeen.

The owners and managers of a wonderful place called Mount Ceder ( www.mountceder.co.za ) have agreed to let me leave my cameras on their vast property. I've done a bit of scouting around and I think I've found, with their guidance, a few great spots for cameras. So they're installed and, hopefully, clicking away (to the extent that camera-traps ever click away) as you read this.

During my few days there I didn't get too many images but there were a few that I liked:

A one-horned Grey Rhebuck ram (Pelea capreolus) who seemed totally oblivious to my camera. These guys are fairly common in the Cederberg but one generally only sees them bounding away with their characteristic rocking-horse motion - their white tails flashing prominently.

An African Wild Cat (Felis silvestris) - and again not a particularly uncommon species. However, what is interesting to me is that it was out at midday. There could be plenty of reasons for this but I wonder whether the remoteness of the location could make them more diurnal.

The only primate in the region, the Savanna Baboon (Papio cynocephalus ursinus). Do their babies suck their thumbs too?

One of my favorites, the Caracal (Caracal caracal) - also not often seen during the day. I've been lucky with images of these beautiful cats recently but I particularly like this one. Those eyes are mean!

So I'm hopeful that this new site will produce something interesting. And I'm looking forward to getting back there on a regular basis to check the cameras and swap out the cards.

What are the odds.....

Some friends recently asked me to check out a camera-trap that didn't seem to be working. I established that there was a defective battery in the set and replaced it. It then appeared to work fine but I though I'd put it out overnight to make sure that the flash was working perfectly too. So I propped it up outside our back door knowing that our dogs would trigger it a couple of times before the next morning.

So when I checked the card the next day there were indeed a few doggy pics in addition to one that gave me quite a shock:

This dude clearly jumped our fence (which is not difficult) and was having a furtive prowl around.
I don't recall ever putting out a camera at our back door so what were the odds of getting an image like this?

So given that millions of people around the world read my blog (yeah right!) I thought I'd take a chance and see if anyone knows him. What are the odds of that? Please tell him I'd like a quiet word.

Similarly, if you are the LOSER in this image you can be proud that you are now famous. Your image is on the database of our local neighbourhood watch, the South African Police, Interpol and the FBI! What were the odds that you'd have been so famous doing anything else?

Who's Killing the Penguins?

I've written before about work that I've done with the African Penguin (Spheniscus demersus).

This is the only species of penguin breeding in South Africa and, sadly, its numbers are dropping rapidly. Some of the  known causes of this are the depletion of its food supply, damage from oil spills and loss of breeding habitat. Fur seals are known to predate on penguins at sea but it was sad to hear that something was killing the penguins at the Stony Point colony in Betty's Bay - the only colony in the region that is actually growing.

Most of the carcasses were only partly eaten but it was estimated that, potentially, hundred of birds had died this way. So I offered to install a couple of camera-traps to see if we could identify the culprit.

Most carcasses were located near a thick stand of Rooikrans (Acacia cyclops) which suggested that this would be a good place to start looking. 

There were a couple of well used animal trails leading into the thicket so we installed the cameras a few metres into these trails. It didn't take long before the suspect was 'caught'.............

These aren't great images but they're quite good enough to identify a Caracal (Caracal caracal) as the likely culprit.

The cameras didn't catch much else other than some Rock Hyrax (Procavia capensis)  - who had better also watch out for the Caracal........

......and live penguins that wouldn't be in that thicket if they knew what was good for them:

In hindsight, getting images of the culprit was the easy part. What to do with them is way more tricky. I love the idea that we still have Caracals in coastal villages like Betty's Bay but I accept that ongoing predation of the African Penguin, now classified as endangered in the latest IUCN Red Data list, is a big problem. Translocating the cat (if it can be caught) is a possibility but it has also been suggested that it gets fitted with a tracking collar. The authorities can then monitor its movements and chase it away from the penguins when it gets too close. That's the idea anyway........

Camera-Trapping in the Tankwa

There are many extraordinary places in South Africa but the Tankwa Karoo National Park is certainly one of them. Its a place of harsh beauty where one can only admire the failed attempts of pioneer farmers to eke out a living here.

So its not what I'd call a camera-trappers paradise.

However I doubt many people do any camera-trapping around here so my friend Dave and I decided to give it a go. We certainly weren't expecting things to be easy but were disappointed that the windmills and waterholes marked on our map were bone dry.

There were certainly signs of life but not always the sort that I catch on my trailcams.

So our best option seemed to set up in a seasonal river bed where there were numerous game trails. Trees for mounting the cameras on were at a premium but there were plenty of large rocks which did the trick.

Not surprisingly it didn't take us long to go through the images each day but there were a few that turned out well:

A Small Grey Mongoose (Galerella pulverulenta) which posed for one quick image....

..and a mangy looking Common Duiker (Sylvicapra grimmia) who did hang around for a while.

But the image I was most excited about:

Its an African Striped Weasel (Poecilogale albinucha) and the first image of a live one I've ever taken. I consider these little guys to be quite rare and, sadly, seen most often as road-kill.

So while the Tankwa would never be called a place of abundance it remains, for me, a very special place.