8 May
No luck so far. There haven’t been many signs of hippos around the traps, but a couple of them have feeding sites nearby. The team are busy improving their radio telemetry skills ready so that if we do catch a hippo we’ll be able to track where it goes.
Unfortunately, I have to head back to the office as there’s a big pile of work waiting for me. I’m hoping to come back in about a week. I’m a little torn because whilst the important thing is that we do manage to capture a pygmy hippo, I’d really love to be there when it happens.
15 May
I’m back on the island and still no hippo. They’re getting closer to the traps though, with one area looking particularly promising – there’s footprints, dung and feeding signs very close by. We were frustratingly close with trap 9 where a hippo had stepped onto the mat, but managed to back off without falling in. Shows just how clever they are. A few cms more and it would have been in the trap for sure. Patience is obviously needed!
Unfortunately in some areas we’re actually seeing much less hippo activity. We’re not sure why, but it could be that the increased rainfall we’ve seen lately has changed they’re movements and they just not using these areas anymore.
The heavy rain has also meant that we’ve had to shut one of the traps in one of the better areas. The trap got flooded and we don’t want to risk anything getting trapped in the water.
Photo by Annika Hillers (RSPB)
We may not have seen a pygmy hippo in the flesh, but we’ve managed to capture our first ever pygmy hippo photo on one of the camera traps we have around Gola. There’s plenty of other pictures of them in and around the area, but it’s good to see that we’ve managed to capture them on one of our own cameras. Is this a good sign of things to come?