Day 12

I have a guest blogger today - Simon Bearder! We are between fieldsites at the moment, re-charging and re-supplying in Dar es Salaam at Andy's house. Enjoy!

Simon at a market in Kongowe.

Simon here – reporting on the delights of trying to capture animals without causing them any harm. We now have a number of individuals of the three bushbaby species and a palm civet who have learned that they can get a free meal without too much hassle, so we keep re-trapping them. They simply get released and photographed as they jump away. The palm civet has huge soft fleshy pink pads on the hands and feet that seem to grip onto anything and make them very agile in the trees. We set up a camera trap opposite one of the live traps to record how they enter. This uses infra-red light and makes only the faintest of sounds, but a tiny rondo bushbaby was obviously aware that it was there. The camera showed a sequence of shots of it approaching the trap and then staring at the camera and approaching it to look into the lens!

 

Skickat via Blogsy