13th February
by Drs Tapendra Saini & Jullia De Pinho Borba
Hii everyone
It is Jullia and Tapendra here! We are excited to share with you all about our 5th at the IWAH course. We started the day early due to the activities to be done at the Sariska Tiger Reserve. First we had introduction to pop estimation by doing line transect with Dr Bilal. All the students were divided in 5 different groups and it is the first time me and Tapendra are working together – students are randomly divided in different groups for each activity which it is a great opportunity to learn and share moments with different students. After the introduction- I was freezing by then – we started the activity which basically consisted of walking in a line for 2 km and record animals that were found on the way. It sounds easy, doesn’t it? But actually we were collecting not just the presence of the animal itself, but also the coordinates, perpendicular distance, time, compass bearing (animal and walk), angular, species and demographic info. I was very lost at the beginning as it is a new thing for me but thankfully my team was very patience to go through the process 100 times until I understood. By the time we finished we waited at the entrance of the park and we had some Chai prepared especially for our group by the lovely forest staff- it was my first time – and a great way to understand more about indian culture and cuisine, some rhesus macaques and babblers were there with us. As proper wildlife veterinarians we were doing visual inspections in a macaque that presented limping ( possibly old fracture on the wrist) and alopecia. Arriving back at the resort, we had an amazing breakfast and we continued with lectures, learning about data analysis and interpretation of the observations collected in the field. After lunch, which fulfilled our souls with smiles and warm, we learned about different technologies that can be applied for wildlife monitoring, such as use of collars and radiotelemetry. We were then divided in two groups and we practiced what it was taught in the classroom. Our groups were tracking two collared tigers that we thought were real for most of the time. We finished the day with two lectures about spatially explicit capture-recapture by Dr Raj and Mammal Behaviour by Dr Bilal. Finally we had an amazing dinner and finished the night hanging out with new friends.
