21st February
by Drs Jess Li and Atuman Yakubu
The day started at 6am where we set off to Hell’s Gate National Park with our packed breakfast for a distance sampling survey practical. We were divided into six groups, each performing a 2-kilometre line transect across different sites of the park. We followed the transect through the plains and bushes, whilst carefully trying not to deviate from the route by using our compasses, as well as spotting animals and estimating the distance between us with the RangeFinder. Wildebeest, buffaloes, zebras, giraffes, impalas and elands were amongst the many animals that our groups were able to stop.
The highlight had to be when the transect line of our group went through a herd of buffaloes of 55 animals – they all ran in the opposite direction as we approached to count them (phew!) The bonus was when we saw a pair of Ruppells’ vultures resting on the cliffs pointed out by Dr. Raj Amin, but unfortunately their distance was a bit too far for the RangeFinder to detect. Still very cool though!
We spent the rest of the morning and the afternoon receiving lectures from Dr. Bilal Habib on field line transect sampling and data collection for occupancy sampling. We also took the time to analyse the line transect data as a class, compiling all the data collected by every group to estimate the detection probability of the animals, and trying to fit the distance data to a model. After a few attempts and a few rounds of heated discussions, we finally managed to create a plot that best represented our data.
Overall, it was a hectic day with the perfect combination of field work, lectures and data analysis.
