Appreciation post

This project has challenged me in many ways so far, not least because I took it on so late in the year. I feel under constant time pressure with so much to catch up on and get done. Thankfully, I have a team of wonderful student volunteers who are passionate about carnivore biology and conservation! They have helped so much with processing my samples in their breaks between lectures and practicals, fitting it all into their busy schedules. So thanks guys!

The people who have helped me out so far are: Alveena Aziz, Caton Schutte, Clara Steyn, Dayna Hegarty, Kaelin Stemmet, Katherine Chaplin, Kyra McKellar, Lindsay Powell, Megan Pockalny, Michelle Pretorius, Shakirah Rylan, Tara van Ryneveld and Vivienne Coetzee. Thanks also go to some of the UCP interns who have become involved.

Gabi Leighton

SAWMA symposium 2016

I was fortunate enough to attend the annual South African Wildlife Management Association symposium in Tzaneen, Limpopo last month.

I presented some of the preliminary findings on the Cape Town caracals’ diet, focusing on the differences between two methods (kills found at GPS clusters and scat). We had to make a poster and also give a 5 minute speed-presentation of our work.

This was a really valuable few days of interesting talks and people. Very glad that I went and was super pleased to win the prize for the best student poster!

Preview of the poster I presented at the symposium

Preview of the poster I presented at the symposium

I think the next symposium will be in the Western Cape, so hopefully I can go again, and this time do a longer talk about my work!

Gabi Leighton

Some (very) preliminary diet findings

Here are a few of the more interesting prey items found in the scat analysis so far. Most of the samples contain mammalian prey items (i.e. composed mainly of hair), and of those, most seem to be rodent. I still need to go through all those with hair and look at cross-sections under the microscope to identify the species (or at least to genus level). Nevertheless, these are the more exciting ones:

Hope you enjoy the photos!

Gabi Leighton

Caracal diet field trips

I was lucky enough to join in on some field work action earlier this year… This involves setting traps to catch the cats (much trickier than it sounds!) and investigating GPS clusters (i.e. points where the cats have been hanging out for a while) to find evidence of kills and scat, which I’m using for my diet analysis.