Limpopo Valley Carnivores

Category: Cheetah, Snoopy and Barclay | Date: Jul 27 2009 | By: limpopocarnivores

With the arrival of a shipment of much needed camera traps, I am finally able to start using Snoopy in another way to help with the carnivore census. Instead of simply collecting the scats for analysis, I have now set up some cameras at places where Cheetahs have been deposiiting scats and are likely to return. Cheetahs make use of so called play trees to mark their territory, so when we have found these, we can set up remote sensing cameras and wait for them to come back. This method of data collection is very non-invasive and leaves the wild animals to their own devices with no outside interference. We try to limit our impact on our study animals as much as possible, and when collecting scats, we only take a sample and leave the rest of the “signpost” in place.