An injured lion in QEP

The last day in Queen Elizabeth NP was productive but exhausting. We started the day with a brief meeting with the Community Conservation Warden, Wilson Kagoro, and made arrangements for day trips for senior pupils from both Kasenyi Primary School and Equator Highway Primary School to have a day out. Forty children from each school will be picked up and brought to the park HQ where they will be fed, shown around, and given some conservation classes. The highlight of the trip will be the two-hour boat ride on the Kasinga channel, the same ride that we all took last Friday.

I dropped by Kasenyi Primary School to how the solar equipment was working. One DVD had already been shown to the kids, and Gorrit had prepared two meals with the solar oven. I asked her to pose outside her home with this useful piece of equiemt as I had managed to forget to take a pic the other day.

Then we set out to continue our research efforts with buffalo. This proved pretty frustrating and for four hours we were unable to get near enough any animals to dart one. However, the group traveling with me in the university Land Cruiser did see a very lame female lion with three half-grown cubs Both her left hind and right front legs were obviously hurting her and she would have had a hard time hunting, even with hundreds of kob around her. By the time we caught up with the rest of the team we had also found a sick buffalo.

We decided to try and examine the buffalo first, as the lioness was unlikely to move far. We did get one dart into her, but unfortunately it deflected of a wisp of grass and we were never able to get close enough again to do any more. Eventually we left her and returned to the lions.

It was not long before Dr. Ludwig Siefert had a dart in her and we were able to make a very detailed examination. This picture shows the small lesions on her gums and where she had recently lost a tooth in her lower jaw. She had obviously been in a fight.There were several bite wounds in her legs, and a claw on her rear leg had been torn off. The worst lesion was a deep penetrating bite mark low down on her right front leg. An hour later she had been weighed, her wounds had been cleaned up and she had been given a healthy dose of antibiotics. I took a bunch of pictures of the bite marks with my new cell phone, as well of a couple of short video clips of her being weighed, but I have not figured out how to download them on to this computer. Sorry ‘bout that, all I have is a pic of her getting a much needed does of fluids under the skin. An hour after that she was up and moving.

Next stop Lake Mburo National Park, but complete lack in Internet until about the 25th.

Saturday 29th March

The students who came to Uganda in February did their presentation yesterday at noon. There was a great turn-out and lots of interest, not least from students in first, second, and third years of the DVM course who might be considering going on such a rotation in future years. Most of the students who had been to Africa could not make it to the talk, as they we heavily engaged in other segments of their final year work. Danica was monitoring a cat as it recovered from anaesthesia, Rebecca was scrubbed in to a lengthy surgery on a dog, and Nathan was off somewhere on a large dude ranch helping to castrate a bunch of horses.

It was obvious from the stories that Tyler and Sonja chose to relate, that the rotation had been a huge success and had made a profound impression on all of those who came with Jo and me. Without question the most emotional stories were about the children in the two primary schools that we visit each year in Queen Elizabeth National Park. We have supported them for six year now & the progress is palpable. I have almost a full chapter devoted to them in The Trouble With Lions (launch date now only 14 days away!)

It was also obvious that a major highlight had been the day we captured a male lion and replaced his collar, which had grown so weak that it was only transmitting a signal about 300 metres.

Tessa, our professional photographer had taken over 6000 pictures during the trip and has whittled these down to something under 1000, with hopes to cull even further. She thinks that she will eventually be able to get them all on to two DVDs. Then she has the challenge of getting her movie footage edited. That will take time.

Meanwhile you can see how the students reacted on their own blog site at http://blogs.usask.ca/awe/

One set of Tessa’s pictures, taken for the fun of it, showed most of the female students, who were dressed in coveralls, holding up a dart gun as if it were the ultimate “Great White Hunter” weapon and they had just shot one of The Big Five. Tyler, who was speaking at the time, acknowledged that each year I offer a “Birds of Africa” calendar as a means of raising funds for the two schools and suggested that I might like to alter the content of the calendar and offered these pictures instead. I could only think of one thing to say, and so responded “These birds have far too much clothing on to be of any use in a calendar.”

Next, we meet with the 2009 crew on Monday to begin the preparations for next February’s trip. Busy times.