Leopard!

Feb 11

The dung beetle group got to sleep in today which was really nice. At around 9 we went to go check out the main store and I got a coke zero (mmm) and this litchi (this is just how Kirsty told me to spell it) flavored ice thing. There were monkeys all over the place outside the store and you could walk right up to them, it was so cute. Then we came back and started putting together parcels of elephant poo. There were huge sticks and whole fruits in the poo, so the elephant clearly wasn’t tasting all of his food. Also, I had to empty out some of the rhino poo packets from the previous day. So Alan told me to dump them by this camp site. So it basically looks like a rhino just pooped right inside the camp, so people are going to think there’s a hole in the gate where a rhino got through. I hope it doesn’t cause too many problems! Later I went swimming in the pool for the first time which was so nice, and then we went out to the field. We started collecting our dung beetles and setting out the fresh dung and there were so many beetles and many were very small so it was difficult to scoop them out. It took me a while to be able to reach my hand into a bucket of dead beetles but by the end of it I was quite a pro. Sort of. But the coolest thing of the day happened in between beetle collecting sites. We saw a leopard. It was absolutely beautiful and we could see its head perfectly as it stuck out of the tall grasses. At one point it started moving and we were able to see its whole body which of course I loved because I obviously love leopard print. It was so amazing. And then we saw this herd of impala nearby and we thought we might see a kill, but we had to move on to keep collecting and resetting. We also saw tons of baboons, etc. and a couple of kudu.