Achievement

Report Karongwe October 2015

Report Title
Night drives

Objective
Awareness: Making volunteers aware of the smaller and less well known animals and their
importance

Summary
Over the past month we have been taking the volunteers on one to two night drives a week in order
to try and see some of South Africas lesser known, nocturnal animals.

Report

These drives have been very successful and we have managed to see all sorts of rare and exciting
nocturnal animals including African wild cats, honey badgers, porcupines, chameleons, genets, civ-
ets, owls and snakes.

Seeing these animals have given the staff a chance to teach the volunteers about animals that they
may not have seen before and the volunteers have really enjoyed this. The excitement in the air
when we head out on the night drives is tangible, as it really is very difficult to predict what we will
see. A lot of the animals that we have seen on this drive, volunteers have not even heard of before,
so it has been great to make them aware of new species.

We plan to continue these drives and to hopefully get to a point where we can consistently manage
two a week, we will then be able to have one of these as an intern specific drive and one for volun-
teers. They are a great educational tool, and have also allowed us to collect more data on the
movements and behavior of some rare species such as honey badgers and white tailed mongoose.

GVI.2014.2