UWEC Day 13

More carnivores:

He sat pretty for his first shot

Ok, round 2 of carnivore health checks. Today we started Kibonge, the 16 year old lion. As we were preparing everything in the holding pen, Hameed proceeded to dart him. Unfortunately, as this can sometimes happen, the dart did not penetrate into his muscle. The mere force of the dart expelled it right away from his body without discharging any of the drug. This got him very excited and worked up. So we had to wait a while until he calmed down, otherwise trying to dart him in that state would be pointless; the adrenaline running through his blood would essentially counter the sedative effects of the drug. Hameed finally darted him and he eventually went down. We went in and got him on the scale (he was 110kg), then pulled him onto the ground to start working on him. I managed to get a decent blood sample from him; he had really nice veins to work with! I got a heart and respiratory rate on him and gave him all his required injections: dewormer, antibiotic and multivitamin. Finally, I gave the reversal agent to wake him up. Alright, onto the next big cat!

Making my assessment 

Checking for a good vein

Got it!

We needed to cool him down, was getting a little hot

On the scale

Being silly as he was waking up

Beautiful

We were to do Vin, the African leopard, next. He was hand raised in captivity and brought from South Africa when he was about 3 months old. So he was quite a friendly cat. Actually a big suck. You go up to the fence and he would rub his head and make a REALLY loud "purr". He would also jump up with his front paws onto the fence if you encouraged him too. Because he was such a good cat we could hand inject him through the fence. He just laid down and went to sleep. The thing about leopards though that we had to be careful about was that they can be very sketchy under anesthesia. It would not take much to wake him back up. As such, we were limited to the time we could work on him, so the standard health check procedure was done. We were literally in and out of there.

Such a suck...

Last was Zara, the other lioness. She was pretty friendly too. I attempted to hand inject her but she did not stay still enough for me to get the drug in. She thankfully did not get stressed from that, however, she would not come up to the cage again for another attempt. So, Hameed just darted her. She was also a pretty big female, about 145kg. It was harder to get blood on her for me because of the position she was in, so Barbara just got some. She was quite light under anesthesia so we had limited time to work as well. I gave her what injections she needed and got out of there. I was the last one in the holding pen to give the reversal.

Almost had her!

Also, very heavy...

After lunch we were going to work on the sick python, but Barbara had not gotten back from her day trip to Kampala. Traffic as usual was really bad. So we were going to leave that till the next day.

I was to meet with Maria and Katja, the chimp researchers at Anna's Corner again for dinner. It was Katja's last day on the main land so I wanted to see her before she left. We had some REALLY nice burgers from there. very well prepared and bursting with different flavours. Maria and I also shared a bottle of wine because it was so cheap. I will say though that for an Italian red, it was very, very sweet. Nonetheless, we still drank it. Afterwards we went to the Trap to meet up with Pete and James Musinguzi, the Executive Director of UWEC. After a few drinks and some conversation, I was getting pretty tired and James was ready to leave. He very nicely offered me a ride back to my banda. If I wanted to be alert for the next day I definitely needed to get some much needed sleep.