While I head up the project, I have invaluable assistance from my fieldwork team and could not do without them. Azwifarwi is a student working with the Endangered Wildlife Trust’s Conservation Leadership Group. He originally came on a six month internship but we are very happy to announce that he is going to extend his stay with us for another six months. As in my previous post, he is going to be doing his Diploma research project on the Wild Dogs, while he continues with me. Much of our work at the moment involves spoor counts, which have to be conducted in the early morning to allow for the low angle of the sun to make the tracks in the sand more visible. By late morning when the sun is getting high, the tracks just seem to disappear. This means that Azwifarwi has free time in the afternoons when he can go out and study the Wild Dogs.  

Wendy originally worked on the Wild Dog project during the last research project which was focussing on the provisioning of puppies by adults. The data was hard to collect for just one person and so Wendy came on board to help with that. The data collection for that project has now finished and is being written up, so Wendy was able to come across to the Carnivore Census Project and share her excellent knowledge of the reserve and the wildlife with us.  

As Snoopy was my dog before the project began and lived alone with me, he is very much a one person dog and is reluctant to work for anyone else. I want to avoid this pitfall with Barclay due to it being more useful to have a dog that can be worked by one of a number of handlers, and so Wendy is going to be working with Barclay as well. We hope to be able to use the dogs on projects elsewhere and it will be ideal if at least one of them is not dependent on my presence to perform. As long as we are consistent in our commands and praise, I think Barclay will have no problem in working for different handlers.

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