Hey everyone! A lot has happened since the last time I posted...

I'm now at Mashatu and it's amazing. I'm living in a small cabin (one room, two beds and a bathroom) on the property. I eat meals with the staff and guests and the food is INCREDIBLE. I can't even explain. I'm so lucky. I'm also spending a lot of time with the three researchers here. Mark works with the elephants, Dewald works with the wild dogs and Andrei works with the predators (predominantly big cats). All three of them are from South Africa.

Unfortunately, Mark left for SA on the 11th and won't return until the 23rd and, since I really wanted to work with elephants, that's a huge bummer. On the up side, I have been spending a lot of time with Dewald (who is also my next door neighbor) and Andrei. In fact, the other day, we caught a leopard. Yeah. That happened. SO COOL. Andrei came and knocked on my door and said "Hey Jess, wanna catch a leopard?" DUH.

So, we headed out to one of the bait sites that Andrei set and, sure enough, there was a mature male leopard in the cage. Andrei mixed the drugs for the dart and then tranquilized him. After he was down, Andrei, Dewald and I hopped out of the truck and pulled the leopard out of the cage. I helped (and took photos, as I was assigned picture duty) the boys take measurements (head, neck, paws, legs, testicles, length, weight, etc). Then, we each got photos taken with the cat before we put the tracking collar on.

After we were done, we had to hang around and wait for the drugs to wear off to be sure the leopard could walk on his own (if we had left him hyenas or some other predator might have taken advantage of his weakened state and attacked him). While we were waiting, a SECOND leopard showed up. This one was a female that was clearly in heat and wanted to mate with our drugged out male. Poor girl was clearly unsuccessful (and thoroughly displeased with his lack of attention).

Today, I went out on a game drive (my first since I've been here) and I've noticed the game drives here are quite different than they are on Chobe. In Chobe, there were animals at every turn- elephants, giraffes, etc- but it began to feel routine. Here, there will be nothing but a few impala and suddenly, we'll see something AMAZING. For example, on the drive today we saw a leopard. Now, I was thinking "I just CAUGHT a leopard the other day. This is cool, but not nearly as cool as that." Then all of a sudden, we see something run past and the leopard went after it. It turned out to be a very lucky African Wild Cat that managed to escape the leopard. Pretty cool. The leopard then climbed a tree and we hung around a bit taking photos. Then, we headed out and again, saw very little, UNTIL we came upon a female lion nursing her three four-month old cubs. I know, it doesn't even sound real. But it was real and it was SO CUTE. The cubs were all playing together and none of the lions payed any attention to us. The mother even walked up super close to our truck. Very exciting experience.

So, yeah. That's my life (pretty rough, eh?). Now, I've got to get some sleep as it is FAR past my usual bedtime here.

Hope all is well state-side!

-Jess