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During the month of May is typically the time of year that we see the greatest change in our seasons. Unlike Canada we have two seasons a wet and dry and we are now moving from our wet season towards our drier months (May,June,July,August,September). This has brought cooler temperatures during the day and night as well as different movement of animals, particularly Elephant. It has made data collection hard as the larger herds of Elephants are not moving through the area and the bull elephants are not in great numbers.
The Camera traps have caught a lot of action at the water holes mainly from Impala (the most common antelope in the area), hyena, lion, and warthogs. There have been two instances in the past in the past 9 days where I have caught Elephants drinking at the water holes. Once at Xinatsi dam around 6pm when one elephant bull came and drank and once at Marula pan where two bulls came and drank around 2.30pm. Surprisingly the two most dominant animals in terms of numbers present throughout the day at the water holes are warthog and impala by day and hyena at night, which could have been suspected.
I do plan to continue this method of data collection, as it is the best way to monitor the activity at the water holes without being there day in day out.The use of camera traps to monitor an individuals behaviour in the wild has been a technique used since the 1980’s. The water holes I have chosen to monitor are non-random points that will be monitored for the presence/absence of elephants which is my response variable. The time of day the elephants drink and the temperature at that specific time will be my predictor values. However through much contemplation I have decided to try and maximize the amount of elephants to be captured on the camera traps by increasing the amount of water holes to monitored to 10 (see below picture). These water holes are spread out over the 15,000 hectares of traversing area that Motswari uses in the Timbavati Private Nature Reserve. Each camera will be placed once at every water hole for 5 days and 5 nights. This will hopefully increase the opportunity to collect data on the elephants drinking habits.
The elephants being highly mobile creatures and with there being no fences to contain them in one general area has made it hard to collect data as they have 3 million hectares to traverse through but hopefully by increasing the study area it will maximize the data I can obtain to get a better understanding of their drinking habits and how that relates to the maximum temperature during the day.
great detail!