Life only gets better!

Firstly apologies for the delay in the blog, the past two weeks have been pretty much non-stop. But I won't bore you with the detail and just pick out the highlights from what has been the most incredible two weeks. And you are probably thinking how does it get any better than releasing leopards, sand boarding in the desert and cuddling baby leopards.

Well lets start there I guess, yes can you believe it we have 4 baby leopards, the cutest cubs in the world. They are 8 weeks old now and just the most adorable bundles of joy you could imagine. 3 males and 1 female and about the size of 2 bags of sugar. At the moment the volunteers are on leopard interaction rotations but us lucky co-ordinators get to spend time with them when we want which is pretty awesome. It has been amazing to watch them grow up over the past 7 weeks. They already have really sharp claws and teeth, not quite drawing blood yet but it wont be long before the monsters become trouble!

We also had an incredibly sad day last week as the time came to say goodbye to the greatest cheetah that ever lived. Goeters was 24 years old and had spent most of his life on Harnas from the day when Frikkie picked him up on the side of the road as a cub 24 years ago. Over the past few weeks his quality of life massively deteriorated and it became increasingly hard for him to stand up, walk, eat and in the end even breathe. The family took the very tough decision to put him to sleep and it really was felt that this was the right decision. We had a beautiful memorial and burial for him which Frikkie led and the family attended. Marieta's tears were the trigger for most of us to start crying too, just seeing how much he had meant to her was heartbreaking. But we all knew he would go to a better place.

The very same day a baby cheetah arrived, 1 month old and named Athena. She is adorable and very tame so people can spend time with her. It is strange how the world works that on the same day we loose Goeters a new baby cheetah arrives.

The other major highlight of last week was when schalk called me on my radio and asked me to meet him at the hanger. A little strange I thought but hey this is the CEO of Harnas I should probably do as he says! So i met him at the hanger, where the Gyrocopter (very small helicopter) was sitting and Schalk says get in. To put this into perspective hardly anyone gets to go up in the gyro with schalk just randomly. Normally volunteers pay huge sums of money in donations to be able to go up in it with him. So I felt pretty damn lucky to be able to go. He wanted to test the telemetry on Pride's (cheetah we released last year) VHF collar. so in we got to the tiniest hair dryer of a machiene and off we went, it was so so awesome to see the farm from above, i was a little hesitant at first mainly because this thing doesnt have doors! we flew over the village and the outside enclosures and then to the lifeline to look for pride, my job was to listen to the beeps of the telemetry to work out when we were close to her location. 10 -15 mins in and I spotted her from the air only about 30 - 40 meters below us. Awesome to see her running free and from a gyrocopter! Then we flew around the perimeter of the farm and spotted tons of animals; Eland, springbok, Oryx, Impala, Kudu, Vultures and even a brown hyena! It was one of those moments when you realise just how lucky and fortunate you are. I said to schalk through our head sets "how much would you like to see your lions running free out here" Schalk is a man of few words but he did say "more than anything else, that is my dream". Hopefully one day his dream will come true.

Right when I didnt think my week could get any better we had a phone call from a local farmer saying he had caught a wild cheetah in a trap and could we pick it up. This was awesome news for many reasons, the first being that the farmers are educated enough to phone us and ask us to take the cheetah away from killing his livestock but also it means we have a wild cheetah to release in Bushmanland so we can continue to build on our release project up there. So Pattrick, Hannah and I set off to rescue the cheetah not really knowing what to expect. When we got there there it was a massive male cheetah in a box trap, really beautiful but very stressed out with the situation so we had to act fast to minimise the damage he would do to himself in the trap. We put our box up against the trap and opened both doors he was pretty aggressive and charged at us a few times, thankfully the trap was in the way! He took a bit of persuasion but eventually we got him to move into our box and back in the rescue car.

Once back at Harnas we darted him and Erin carried out a medical check up, we were also supposed to put a GPS collar on him but after a very stressful couple of hours we just couldnt get the collar to give out a signal. So we didnt want to take the risk of putting a collar on him that might not work. In the meantime I got to name him Samar (named after Jo and Schalks son). We took the decision that we  wouldnt release him the next day and instead wait until the collar was working correctly. Luckily on Friday a new time release collar arrived and we could now release Samar on Sunday.  This collar is the collar that we bought with the money raised from my London fundraiser last year so I had a pretty strong connection to the cheetah already from rescuing it and now from the collar. There were 7 spaces in the car going to release the cheetah and they would be auctioned off to the volunteers to raise money for the next collar to release another cheetah. Schalk yet again made my week and told me that one of the seats in the car was mine! So saturday night we auction off the seats in the car and raised N$ 12,200!! (£1200). Incredible! We darted the cheetah once again to fit the collar, Schalk called me to the clinic and asked me if I would fit the GPS collar as it was my blood sweat and tears that had resulted in this cheetah running free. On Sunday morning we left early and arrived at Tsumkwe at about 10.30am we met up with the bushmanland group and drove for another hour into the Nyae Nyae conservancy to the pans where there is huge lakes of water right in the middle of a very very dry area of Namibia. It was an awesome location and after unloading Samar, we opened the door and hoped that he would run free. It wasn't quite as easy as that and it took 45 minutes and a lot of persuasion to get him to leave the box and run free. But it eventually happened and Samar ran across the open plains and into the bush to start his new life! An incredible moment and very rewarding. Now we just had to hope that he stays safe in his new environment. I have been tracking him these past couple of days and he had walked about 10km south so far, its awesome that the cheetah can be 500kms north of us and I can still see where he is on the computer. So there we were in the north of Namibia, cheetah released and ready to return back to Harnas when we stopped for Diesel. But this is Africa and it was a sunday whcih means no Diesel anywhere and not enough in the tank to get home! New plan was to stay overnight but we had nothing with us, no sleeping bags or mattresses, no food and very little warm clothing. So we were in for a rough night, luckily we were with the bushmanland group so we could share their food and share their bedding. We lit a fire, had a braai and settled down for a pretty chilly night. It was actually not too bad and awesome to be out in the bush. Expect the Unexpected became true once again! Monday morning and we headed back to Harnas 6 hour drive back stopped at a massive Baobab tree and arrived back at about 3pm.

Oh and of course in the middle of all of that I did the induction for 17 newbies and continued my job as volunteer mum!

so thats my news what have ya'll been up to hey?

hope all is good with you guys, sorry i havent been able to reply to your mails yet I will find time!

xx