Assessment Drive

I passed my assessment drive on Wednesday! Now I am one step closer to becoming a full-fledged field guide. I thought it went quite well and Ruth, who was my tracker, agreed it was awesome. The assessment drive is not difficult in the fact that we have more than enough knowledge to pass. What makes it difficult is that we start the drive from camp and not from the reserve and we have to stop and talk about things we see on the side of the road leading to the reserve never quite making it into Makalali. Basically it means we won’t see any mammals but have to incorporate them into our assessment in some way. As you all know my driving skills are not the best so I choose to do a short little walk around our tree path here in the camp. This helped me pass my exam as I was able to point out tons of little things like insects and tracks and get my “guests” involved by showing them butterfly eggs, and let them smell the scent of the Tamboti tree. There was also a beehive on the path and my assessor, Mark, was impressed with my knowledge about the bees. Bees when coming back from collecting pollen will dance out their route to the other bees shaking their abdomen and emitting pheromones so the other bees know where to go. Some bees will raid other hives of their honey by pretending to fly the same way as the bees they are raiding in order to get past the guards protecting the honey.

As we went on the road a vehicle passed us pulling a horse trailer. Mark knew the guy driving and asked me to pull over. The guy was transporting a Sable (type of antelope) to a hunting lodge. We don’t have sable on our reserve so we all got to climb on top the trailer and look at it from over head. They are beautiful animals with long curved horns.

After that the drive was pretty much over and we headed back to the camp where Mark interviewed me on things I was not able to cover such as astronomy and gave me feed back about the drive. He said my knowledge was good and I knew my bird and bird calls very well but I needed more practice on my driving, knowing when to change gears and things like that but I already knew about it so was quite pleased.

Next step the FGASA Level 1 Exam on November 20.

Picture of a Grey Go-Away Bird.