Raining season is well upon us in Sierra Leone. The road to Outamba Kilimi National Park turns into a long and muddy slog, and trekking to check the camera traps can turn into wading through the swamps and newly arisen streams and tributaries that all meet again in the Kaba River.
Last raining season we were able to get rain boots for our two community monitors, Abu Bakar and Osman of Kortor village. Now Abu Bakar and Osman have taken on new responsibilities for the Pan Verus Project and our team has grown to include new community monitors from several nearby communities and to include our new support and training officers. We now find our need for rain boots and waterproofs has grown!
We’re excited to need so many new sets of boots. With the rains brings tall grass that is favoured for its cover by many cryptic animals, and to have the opportunity to keep up such a high number of camera traps throughout the raining season will certainly bring with it many new discoveries. We would like to purchase 10 pairs of rain boots and 10 rain suits to keep our team safe and dry, so they can continue putting their new conservation and research skills to work!
(PS our new point and shoot cameras for the team was just shipped out, so we’ll be able to provide much better research team pictures soon!)
How is the rest of the project doing?
We’re so happy you asked! Our new office and skills training centre in our central partner community is almost finished, we’ve trained three new community monitors in camera trap maintenance, and sewing classes and IT courses are on-going! In addition to this our team members have been working with the local communities to collect local knowledge about the animals who are exhibiting interesting behaviours on the camera traps. We are learning so much through local knowledge and regular monitoring of keystone species in Outamba!
Once the building is complete we will start looking for local Sierra Leonean artists to come and decorate the centre with murals, we hope that when that times we can count on your support again to continue celebrating everything we love about Sierra Leone!
