Of mice and museums

The past week has seen me back at the Iziko South African museum in Company's Garden in town. It was a rat-run, pun intended. In my previous trips I was working with Graham Avery on identifying bird and larger mammal bones. This time around I met with his wife, Margaret Avery, who is an expert on …

When predator becomes urban caracal prey

I've been sorting out the caracal kills database over the last few weeks, filling in missing information and looking through photos of kills that never made it to the freezer for closer inspection. It can be tricky identifying a half-eaten prey item when you have it right in front of you, but this becomes much more …

“Oh look, another cape cormorant”: some trips to the museum

The last few weeks have been spent preparing samples for further identification by bone. This involved carefully sorting through each cleaned and dried scat sample to pick out the hard bits (i.e. bones, teeth, claws and nails) and package them separately. This makes it easier for comparison to reference skeletal material. Next, I decided to …

Two killer kitties’ favourite snacks

First, to introduce the main cat characters. Protea is one of the adult female caracals and the 24th cat to be captured on the Urban Caracal Project. Her territory stretches along the white, sandy beaches on the wild, west coast from the Cape of Good Hope lighthouse through to Kommetjie, which she uses as a …

Project milestone

The scat washing is now complete! This means that each and every scat found in the field has been scraped for DNA, aged, weighed, bagged, colour-coded, soaked, sieved under water, separated into constituent parts, dried, bones and teeth separated and, finally, packeted and labelled. Along this production line the prey items in the scat are …

Caracal necropsy paintings

I've been doing oil painting for about a year now and this was the first time I painted just for the sake of it, as all my previous works have been commissions. I took Visual Arts in Matric, but quickly moved away from acrylic to ink and mixed-media works, and only recently discovered painting in …

A few more caracal lunches, and some mystery claws!

Ongoing student protests at UCT have really slowed things down, as many of my student volunteers have been unable to come to campus. It has been a very tumultuous time, with anxiety levels high. As a result I have not managed to process many samples. Nevertheless, there have been a few interesting ones! One of …