Collecting of speciments at Sondela heritage site

On 17August2010 we went up to the water punt koppies to do specimen collection of the cultural heritage site at Sondela. When we arrived there we were briefed on the different stone and iron ages and what tools they used to make their life easier. We then looked for the different artefact's and we filled in a specimen collectors form to show the location, what it was and who found it because we can't take the specimens off the site otherwise the heritage goes lost.

We found different artefact's such as flint(hand axes,shearers, spear and arrow heads), metal slag,pottery shards and grinding stones. All these artefact's were used as tools for all their different needs.

Flints: Middle and late stone age, used for hand axes,shearers, spear and arrow heads.(Tools were a bit smaller and flints were a very hard stone, most of it you could almost see through).

Pottery shards: Late stone age, used to carry water and other stuff

Grinding stones: Stone age, used to mole food, herbs and plants for medicine.

Metal slag: Iron age, proof that they made tools out of metal.

GAME CAPTURE

On the 26July we started with game capture. We started on Monday morning 06:00 with a pre-briefing from our conservation manager, where he told us about all the safety aspects and why we are doing the game capture.

After the briefing we started to unpack the truck and sorted all the poles so that we can erect the boma.The boma is built in a funnel form. We then laid out the cable and cleaned the pathway before we could put up the poles that keeps the cables tight. The cables are there for the sails to hang on, to open and close. There are two cables, one at the bottom and one at the top to hold the sails. Extra poles are put up at the point from where the sails are been closed. The reason for the extra poles are to put up camouflage with branches with leaves that nicely cover the sales when they are open. At each camouflage point there is two people that hides in there and wait for their alarm so they can close the sales ones the animals are in the boma. They have sails in the middle that closes as the animals move forward where the boma becomes thinner. At the end of the boma,there is a ramp where the animals will walk up into the truck and the truck also has different compartments that closes as the animals walk in so that we can keep the animals apart so they won't hurt each other. It is also important that the people does not smoke or urine anywhere near the boma area because the animals have a very strong sense of smell and that smell will scare them and prevent them from coming into the boma area.

When the boma was finished, we had the manager of the game capture check if everything was correct. after everything was checked the manager climbed into his chopper and started looking for the animals that we decided to catch at first. The animals we were catching firstly was Kudu's, primarily bulls. He started chasing the Kudu's towards the boma with his chopper. As the chopper gets closer it makes a beeping sound to warn the people that they must hide in their camouflage and be quiet. when the animals are in the boma he will let the first siren go and then all the people at the outside sails will close, trapping the Kudu's in the boma. Then he will chase them in the direction of the truck and as they get closer he will let the second siren go and they will close the first middle piece with the sails. He will then chase them into the last section and let the third siren go. When the animals are in the truck he will let the last siren go to let everybody know that they can open the sails again. When the animals are in the truck, they get sprayed with a stress reliever like stressenol to relax them for the transportation so that they won't stress out. We did the same with the Eland,Blesbok and Blue wildebeest we captured. All the baby kudu's were darted and taken to the rehabilitation centre to be looked after.

This was an amazing experience.