24 March 2012
I arrived on Tiwai Island last night along with Mohammed, one of my assistants from Gola. It’s just a couple of hours drive from our HQ in Kenema and luckily, since it’s the end of the dry season, the mud roads are still ok to drive on. The journey may have been a little on the bumpy side, but at least there wasn’t any danger of getting stuck.
The back of the car was all loaded up with shovels, pickaxes, empty rice bags and buckets ready for digging the traps. This sort of equipment is pretty common place over here, but it’s usually used for illegal mining so we had a bit of a job to do to convince the police men at the check point of what it was actually for.
With the team assembled, this morning it was time to get on with the job at hand – digging at least 20 pitfall traps over the next five days. There’s two teams and the team leaders, Alusine and Kenewa, live close to the island and have been involved in pinpointing the best spots for the traps.
It’s really hard going and at the end of the day we’d only managed to dig one trap per team. It’s the end of the dry season and soil is really hard. How on earth are we going to dig 18 more traps in four days?
Photo by Annika Hillers (RSPB)
28 March 2012
Well we’ve been digging for five days and as we thought, we’ve not been able to dig all 20 traps. The teams have been working really hard to try and get the job done, and we’ve even increased the number of team members to speed things up a little. It’s back breaking work and we’ve had some workers drop out after the first couple of days as it was just too much for them.
We’ve managed to dig 15 traps so far, but we’re going to have to take a rest day tomorrow before carrying on.
We need to get these last five traps dug!