Over the past few weeks we’ve been walking with the meerkats and learning their mannerisms and individual characters. But all is not as smooth as it seems, and like any community in nature the Meerkat groups also undergo shifts and splits.Let’s quickly focus on the neighbours of the Gosa gang who are known as the [...]
This is my first post as part of the WildEarth team, and it is also my first time in South Africa, so I thought I should introduce myself, and write about my initial experiences here so far.I grew up on a coastal farm in Central Hawkes Bay, New Zealand, so a love of the outdoors [...]
The beer is finished! This is the cold, harsh reality we are now faced with. Until we can find a willing soul to bring in another shipment of this sanity-preserving liquid, we will have to appreciate the twilight hours at Base Camp in the company of a plastic cup of Oros. However, despite this minor [...]
Young Wildebeest at playAnd they call this a desert! We have experienced so much rain here that I am very tempted to swap the Ganda for a hovercraft! Truth be told though, the amount of rainfall here has been way above average. With the rain comes new life and the Kalahari is as green as [...]
During my earlier days of working in the bush, I was crazy-mad about everything. I had to see it, smell it, track it, touch it and possibly engage with it for no reason other than the fact that I could. One thing was missing though. Through my adventures (both on land and underwater) in Botswana, [...]
Working with the meerkats is like courting a young lass; you need to gently sidle up to them, ease into their life and treat them with a lot of respect, otherwise they’ll bolt into the sunset leaving you in a cloud of dust and having to start all over again the next day! Meerkats have [...]
Every morning we wake up early, most days even before the crack of dawn has woken up, and start fumbling about still half asleep while we make coffee and pull on our boots. Now as you may have read in an earlier blog of mine, the Ganda has no windscreen, which means that while cruising [...]
The Kalahari is undeniably a very special place. And watching meerkats go about their daily business of surviving in this environment has to be right up there with the most absorbing experiences one can find in the natural world. Yes, I finally managed to spend some quality time with the Gosa meerkat gang and they [...]
At last it has arrived! Our meerkat camera rig named Tequila Sunrise! The first EVER of its kind, the WildEarth crew are seriously excited about it! Lightweight and complete with monitor, stereo microphone, 3D film cameras, live streaming uplink and a push-to-talk function so that we can talk live to our viewers, the only thing [...]
One of the key objectives of the impending meerkat cam broadcast is that the LIVE Internet viewers will be able to watch the Gosa meerkat gang LIVE 24 hours per day. Now that is far from a straightforward objective.You see the meerkats spend about half their lives underground in their burrows. The Gosa gang has [...]
