After completing 4 exhausting days of Kids Bushcamp, starting at 5am every morning, today I spent 12.5 hours, from 8am until 8.30pm helping the rhino monitor to update the black rhino monitoring information, create and complete the 2012 rhino status report, select ID photos, and use powerpoint to draw fiddly little notches on ID pictures…..and tomorrow…. I'm doing it all again, but for the white rhino population - it's feeling like a long, long weekend! Las...

Today we completed the food shopping for the Kids Bushcamp - and as always it was a 5 hour round trip. A couple of weeks ago we did a lesson at one of the schools that came to Bushcamp back in April, after which I had the opportunity to chat with the teachers in the staff room ( a small shed like structure). The teacher who had joined the children at Bushcamp commented that for a few days after camp when the kids were back at school they looked so much hea...

I went rhino monitoring yesterday and saved a life. This poor creature was stuck at the bottom of a dry water well, so I popped him into a bag, and poured in a puddle of water from my water bottle which he crawled into. Then when we reached a waterhole I let him out - by which time he was significantly more hydrated than when we found him. He was last seen slipping happily into the murky waters of the slimy waterhole.

This afternoon I walked up to the top of one of the hills at the camp to get a better idea of the fire damage. All around there are sections that are completely burnt out, and each hill that I could see was the same. Controlled burning is good for planned regeneration of areas - but not out of control fire across such huge areas of the reserve at this time of the year. Being so dry there was already limited food and little water, but now the grass is complete...

I watched the children's film Madagascar on my laptop this evening. There is a zebra in it called Marty, and in the film he was very excited to at last be in the wild. As I watched the film I realised it was getting a bit chilly so I went to the door to close it - to find 5 'Martys' outside! It's the first time I've seen the zebra at the watering hole here, so it felt a bit 'spooky' to have seen them when watching an animated version at the same time.