5 May
The whole team have been on Tiwai for two days now and yesterday we started opening the traps. We’ve removed the strong cover materials that, for the last month, have allowed the pygmy hippos to walk over the traps without falling in and replaced them with partly broken rattan mats on top of sticks which’ll break once they’re stood on. We’ve then covered the mats with leaves and soil so that they’re camouflaged. To make sure there’s a soft landing for the hippos, we’ve put rice bags filled with dried grass in the bottom of the pits and since they seem to have taken really well to the salt, we’ve used it to bait all the traps. We’re all good to go, so all we need now is a hippo!
Photos by Annika Hillers (RSPB)
Our team is made up of 11 people, with six of us staying in the research camp. It makes a real difference to what I’m used to here on Tiwai – normally there’s just one or two people, the camp is peaceful and I get to fall asleep to the sounds of insects and frogs and walk up to the morning calls of black and white colobus and Diana monkeys. With 10 other people here, it’s much more lively.
Capturing a pygmy hippo should in theory be relatively straight forward, but what comes next is no easy task. Once we have a hippo in a trap we need to anaesthetise it and fit it with a collar. This is seriously complicated stuff since it’s hard to anaesthetise hippos due to the fact they spend much of their life in the water and also because they’re really sensitive to physical contact. We need to make sure that should we be lucky enough to catch a hippo we all know exactly what we need to do and when to make sure there’s no risk to the hippo, so today we started to rehearse captures. I’ve got one of the best jobs – camerawoman and photographer – which means I’ll get to get up close!
The traps are being checked twice a day and every time the researchers come back to camp my heart skips a little. We’ve only got Michele and April until 2 June so we’ve got a month to catch a hippo. The clock is ticking...