To the Dogs or Whoever

8-23

Those of you who have been reading my blog for a while, know that when I can, I like to title my posts after Josh Ritter songs.  I thought this post was a good time for a really awesome JR song: "To the Dogs or Whoever"  First came out on The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter Album, and I first heard the song at the Egyptian Theatre in Boise the first time I saw JR live.

I'm well into my new project of working on the wild dog and cheetah conservation project.  As we haven't found any cheetahs yet, it's been all about the dogs.  Hopefully soon it will be to the Dogs or Cheetahs as opposed to Whoever, but we shall see.

My main duties are going out with the team and using radio telemetry to find the various packs with collared dogs so that we can track their movements. When we see them, we take photos of everyone in the pack for later ID.  We also make notes on who is sleeping with who (as in snoozing, this isn't a project funded by tabloids) as this tells us about their social structure.  We of course make notes on health and things like that.  In the pack, only the alpha female and alpha male mate.  At the moment, the alpha female in a couple of packs is really close to popping, so we are also trying to figure out where they will den.  Once back in the office, I look through the photos we have taken and compare the photos to reference photos we have so that we can ID each dog individual and keep track of who is still in the pack.  One of the dogs, a female, has gone missing recently, so we are wondering if she is still alive as she did have a big gash in her hind leg, likely from a lion.  The other main thing I'm helping with are spoor surveys.  This is driving very slow along road transects to look for tracks of all big carnivores (ex. hyena, leopard, lion, cheetah, wild dog).  We will use these surveys to estimate abundance and occupancy and compare this to the more reliable, but much more expensive and invasive radio tracking method to see if it is a good replacement to the collaring.

Of course, in order to put collars on wild dogs, one must tranquilize them.  So I've gone out to help with darting and immobilization of dogs.  After we have immobilized a dog, we take blood samples, hair samples, and various measurements before putting the collar on  I've attached some photos of my first darting and also some video (that I hope loads) of the dog being darted and then the dog walking drunkenly around after we give it the reversal drug to wake it up.  After a few minutes the dog regains its normal control, calls to the pack, and then rejoins them.

 

 

I've also gone out in the evening to watch what is called "the great".  Wild Dogs are crepuscular (they hunt at dawn and dusk), so all day they mainly sleep and cuddle with each other.  Right before they set out for hunting, they all come together and act like they haven't seen each other in ages as opposed to have been sleeping together all day long.  They play around, hop over each other, up on each other, and just play around before setting off on the hunt.  They hunt in the dense bush, so it's hard to follow them in a vehicle even when you are bushwacking with the vehicle, but a couple of times we have followed them for quite a while during the hunt.  Once we saw them harassing waterbuck and then making the calls they make after making a kill, though we didn't actually see it happening.

taking skin samples

preparing the dart

the radio collar

spraying areas we took skin/blood samples with antibiotic spray

combing for ticks

the reversal drug

taking various measurements

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A little mouse I found in my Banda