Trip report: Spanish adventures in ecotoxicology

The caracal samples finally arrived on the 10th May 2019! I was so relieved when Pablo (the fantastic lab technician at IREC) handed me the box. We immediately unpacked the samples and set to testing the  clean-up methods we'd been practicing on three caracal samples. Looking at the results of these tests we found the …

Urban Caracal Project goes to Spain!

Last year my supervisors and I worked hard on securing funding to get my samples tested for exposure to environmental pollutants. In June 2018 we were delighted to hear we got it! The Table Mountain Fund granted us the full funding for the testing... However, I still needed to arrange my own personal funding in …

Starting that stable isotope stuff (finally)

I'm excited to say that I've managed to get going on my third chapter's data collection! We're planning to use stable isotope analysis (SIA) to explore longer-term, integrative trends in Cape Peninsula caracal feeding ecology. Essentially what this means for me is that I'm spending a lot of time with minuscule pieces of hair (again). …

URBIO Conference 2018

Last week I attended the 10th International URBIO conference that was conveniently held in Woodstock, Cape Town. My supervisors Laurel Serieys and Justin O'Riain were also in attendance, and it was great to have such a strong iCWild contingent there. URBIO (International Network for Urban Biodiversity and Design) describe themselves as "an open worldwide network …

The big ‘upgrade’

It looks like I'll be working on urban caracals for a bit longer! As my project developed my supervisors and I made the decision, about 6 months ago, that it had the scope to be upgraded to a PhD. I knew I wanted to do my doctorate but I needed to decide whether I wanted …

More morbid necropsy art

We recently did another "necropsy day" for some of the roadkill collected on the project. There were two caracals and a genet. We were lucky enough to have Dorothy Breed there to help - she's the Cape Town city wildlife vet. She came to help with one of the caracals which had been hit by …

SatRday Cape Town 2018

This past weekend I attended a local conference on the programming language R. I was fortunate enough to receive a free ticket courtesy of RStudio (thanks, RStudio!). As a relative beginner in R I was impressed by the scope and possibilities that it afforded, and was introduced to a couple of new packages that I'm …

SAWMA symposium 2017

This year the South African Wildlife Management Association symposium was held in the Western Cape, at Goudini Spa in the Boland. This was great for the Urban Caracal Project, as it was a short drive from Cape Town. I presented some of the early diet results and spoke about some of the management implications. These …

Impressions: hair identification

Another milestone reached: all the identifications are done! Of course, there are still some elusive kills and scat which I'll never be 100% sure on, but not from lack of trying. The last step for identifying species once all other methods had failed was looking at hair cuticle scale patterns. This requires making an impression …