Catwoman's Weblog What part of MEOW don't you understand :)

I'm back from my CHEETAH adventure...

I'm back from Namibia, Africa with all of my fingers and toes intact...if you are interested, read on for the highlights of my trip, otherwise, get back to work :)

It was a long two days to get from NYC to Namibia Africa but I stayed overnight in Windhoek at a wonderful hotel called the Hotel Heinitzburg. It's basically a castle which was commissioned back in 1914 overlooking the city of Windhoek. They treated me very nicely there which was important given that I'd be staying in a thatched hut like place when we got to the Cheetah Conservation Fund on Sunday the 9th of Sept with shared bathrooms that we had to walk to as needed. Talk about being scary at night and making you thankful that your bathroom at home is just down the hall!

Our first weekday was basically ORIENTATION day....learned the rules for working so closely with the cheetahs, learned what to watch out for in the field (namely, big nasty poisonous snakes!!) etc.

And from that day, we worked from 8 am to 5 pm on weekdays and 8 - 1 on Saturday (we visited Etosha National Wildlife Refuge and the local town on the Sundays we had off). We had to make our own breakfasts but they fed us very well for lunch (1 pm) and dinner (7 pm). Since the CCF runs on generator power, we would lose our lights around 10:45 pm every night and wouldn't get them back until about 7:15 in the morning. I ended up showering every night instead of in the mornings so that I'd go to bed fairly clean. And what I mean about this is that you really could never get fully clean due to the red dust and dirt of Namibia. Oh well, I knew going into it that it wouldn't be like a country club :)

We cleaned cheetah and dog pens (the CCF raises Anatolian Shepherd Guard Dogs, a turkish breed of guard dogs, that they give out for free to the local farmers to guard their herds in the hopes of keeping the farmers from killing cheetahs). We fed the 40+ captive cheetahs that the CCF houses on the ranch. These are all cheetahs that either lost their mothers before they learned to hunt on their own or were abandoned as cubs. We would help with crowd control when they would do the morning Cheetah Runs to exercise some of the cheetahs. They basically set up a system like they use with greyhounds...the cats chase a lure (which is just a torn up t-shirt with no scent or blood on it) around a set squared course. To see those cheetahs run was just breathtaking...and these ones weren't even going at their top speeds! For the cheetahs that were farther out on the ranch property, we'd also feed and exercise them but to exercise them, we'd drive a pickup truck and they would have to chase it before they got their big chunk of "meat" as their reward. There's nothing like having 7 or so cheetahs running in a pack behind you as you throw meat out of the back of a pickup truck to them.

Highlights of the trip:

Meeting Chewbaaka (the 12 year old CCF ambassador cheetah who was handraised by Dr. Laurie Marker, the CCF's Executive Director, from about 3 weeks old) and getting to pet him and have our picture taken with him.

Meeting "Little C" (a three month old cub whose mom and sibling was killed by dogs) and watching him play.

Meeting "Kanini" (who came to the CCF in Feb2006)....her name means "Little One" and in my opinion, she was one of the most beautiful cheetahs at the CCF.

Watching a litter of Anatolian puppies being born (but sadly, they lost the runt of the litter one night later).

Being able to watch as the CCF did a scientific workup on a HUGE (150 lbs +) male adult leopard they caught in one of their traps.

Going out in the field tracking animal prints...we found leopard, cheetah, porcuipine and baboon tracks.

Doing game counts...they use this data to estimate how the big cat population could be doing in the wild.

Visiting the Etosha National Wildlife Preserve and seeing elephants, giraffes, zebras, ostriches and jackals out in the wild at the local watering hole.

Shopping at the CCF Gift Shop for gifts to take home with me....

Low lights of the trip:

Getting sick for 3 1/2 days....Cipro was my friend :)

Finding out that there was a spitting cobra in a tree near my little thatched hut (and let's not forget about the 6 foot Black Mamba, the most deadly snake in Africa, that a CCF employee ran over on the ranch).

Having tree rats in the kitchen and peeping tom geckos and large spiders in the bathrooms.

Having my "Amarula" (a South African liquor made from the Marula tree, a favorite of African elephants) confiscated at the Paris airport!!

Having to sit in the plane at the Paris airport for three hours while they tracked down a part for the engine....

I'm still working on the pictures to get the right set (I took well over 400 pictures while I was there) for the Tan website. When I get them all set, I'll post here with the URL.

( Oct 01 2007, 11:28:31 AM PDT ) Permalink