Office Visitors

I guess most people who work in an office occasionally get visits from people, welcome or not, throughout their normal working day. Out here a big part of the work we do takes place in our “office”. This normally involves sifting through thousands and thousands of pictures taken on our camera traps or inputting data from the walks and sightings we’ve had.

We get regular visits from the heard of Nyala that live on the reserve. Originally there were 30+, but the Leopards went to town on them so now there’s only a handful. They’re a medium sized antelope, who show a massive sexual dimorphism, with the males being much larger, with darker coats and relatively long horns. We don’t see “our male” too often because most of the time Nyala bulls are solitary, only interacting with female groups to see if any of the females are in heat. These pictures were only taken on an iPhone, so again, apologies for the low quality.

Our regular visitors are 3 females, a couple of very young babies and a young male who goes by the name of Sammy. Sammy hasn’t yet developed his dark coat or grown his horns out; this only begins to happen when they’re 14 months old. We can just be working away in the office, and if you hear a crunch on the stones than mark out our walkways, the chances are it will be this lot.

Now, they have been coming here for long enough that the guys here have managed to have them literally eating out of their hand!! I had heard about this before I came, but it was still cool to see it happen and to actually feed them myself. Sammy’s a cheeky sod who absolutely dominates this little feeding ritual, and will very quickly push himself to the front of the queue to try and get all the pellets for himself.

They’re very welcome visitors to our office, and when we haven’t seen them for a few days we do wander how they’re doing, especially with a lot of hungry leopards having been seen in the valley recently. The youngest baby made it’s longest appearance to-date around camp yesterday and I managed to quickly get some pictures with it on my phone; it is tiny!!