Day 10: Golden Wildebeest at Mountain View

 Another early departure for an overnight 4 hours from our base. We arrived at a beautiful property and promptly started darting golden wildebeest. There were 20 in all to be darted and moved; they were divided into 4 separate herds, and were out in the open, enabling us to dart 2-3 at a time and have the retrieval team pick them up behind us. By the end of the morning, we had 12 in the truck.

We returned to the main lodge building, where toasted cheese sandwiches with either tomato or bacon were waiting for us, along with fresh juice. They tasted SO good! Then back to darting.

Retrieval crew ready to pick up darted animals

Rita darting golden wildebeest

Loading wildebeest onto the transport truck

Transferring wildebeest into the lorrie

Supporting and monitoring in the bed of the pickup

Holding the head of a darted wildebeest

2 ‘beest in a truck

Holding heads and monitoring

Aren’t they pretty?!

Of course, there were other things to see on our way to the wildebeest. We worked around this mother and calf several times. Totally distracting!

The baby was so new that the umbilical cord was still attached—estimated age 4-5 days.

Ostrich male. There were at least 2 males and a female on this ranch.

A new sable calf, center, with his dam (left) and a bill (right)

More sable in trucks!

Offloading

Injections of vitamins and dewormer given before animals transferred into the large truck

Pulling a stretcher into the truck. Wildebeest can be heavy!

Positioned in the large truck before reversing the sedation

The view from our lunch spot

A springbok, South Africa’s National team mascot 

After darting about 16 animals, the herds became too spooky to continue to dart them successfully. So although it was only about 4:00, we were given our rooms here at the ranch. We had a chance to rest, play pool and ping pong, and catch up a bit. It’s really the first downtime we’ve had since day 2! They are keeping us nice and busy doing what we came here to do!

After a nice break, we had supper: Fresh salad, spaghetti with meat and/or cheese sauce, and a variation on our favorite pumpkin fritters. 

There was more time after supper for games and relaxing by the fire with the resident German Shorthair Pointer dogs. 



Tomorrow we meet up at 7:00 to continue to dart wildebeest. We are living the life!



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