I arrived on Tuesday afternoon and honestly, I’m as happy as a pig in mud! What a fantastic start to another adventure.
I’ve teamed up with Christian, a great 21-year-old young man, and we’re getting along famously. We’ve decided that language lessons are a two-way street. I’m teaching him English, while he’s teaching me Spanish and Guaraní. Let’s just say there’s been plenty of laughter, a few interesting interpretations and probably some very questionable pronunciation!
There was no time for settling in on Tuesday afternoon. It was straight into chopping pumpkins for the Tagua and Peccaries, followed by feeding time, changing their water and observing their initial reaction to a complete stranger.
And what a surprise! I was expecting something a little more boisterous, but these animals are incredibly gentle, polite and rather stand-offish. They certainly weren’t rushing over to welcome the new girl who was about to feed them.
Today was a much more technical affair. We set up nine night-vision cameras, eight inside the different pens to observe the behaviour of the young mums, their family interactions and what’s happening in the pen of one elderly Tagua. The ninth camera was positioned along a pathway used by wild animals heading towards the water reserve.
Unfortunately, the water reserve has dried up, so today we also installed portable water troughs to give the wildlife somewhere to drink.
Last week, camera footage captured a puma mum with her cub and an anteater carrying her baby on her back. How wonderful is that! We’re now hoping for a little rain tonight or tomorrow so the wildlife will start moving around again and hopefully give us some more exciting footage.
And did I mention the temperature? A scorching 45 degrees today!
Between pumpkin chopping, feeding animals, setting up cameras, learning languages and trying to keep cool, it’s certainly been a busy couple of days.
I’m absolutely loving it here.
