A Week in the Life of a Conservation & Photography Volunteer

I am excited to commence my first week as  conservation and photography volunteer in St Lucia. 

I and the rest of the photographers have now moved into the main house which we share with about 25 other people.  Megs and I still get to share a room which is great.  Our meals are cooked for us and our laundry is taken care of so we are quite spoilt.  We both have similar habits and early morning people so we make good room mates!

We have a variety of activities lined up, all of which involve some aspect of conservation and photography.  We will work closely with Sean, our project co-ordinator who is a Canadian volunteering with African Impact and Robyn a local eco tour guide here in St Lucia.

 

While I signed up for this position through Real Gap, the projects are run by their local partner African Impact.  The project managers and coordinators are all volunteers from the west but the staff who look after us are local South Africans.  They cook beautiful meals for us and keep the house and gardens well looked after.

At the end of our month we are required to submit a series of conservation and wild life photographs which will be sent to various organisations such as Green Vision to be used for promoting conservation.  We will obtain these photographs by participating in bush walks, game drives, and other activities, so yes this is a hard gig :)!

We spend Monday morning on a estuary bush walk at the iSimangaliso Wetland Park.   We walk down to the coast which has one of the world’s highest vegetated sand dunes and look for wild flowers, bugs and beetles to photograph.  These creatures are hard to capture but recording the bugs and beetles that are around at certain times of the year is an important aspect of conservation.

We spend the afternoon planning for our first teaching opportunity mid week at a Conservation Club in the local village school.  We plan to work with students who have elected to be in this club because of their interest in the environment.  The club has recently started a recycling program in the school but it has not taken off.  Our work will involve helping get this back on track as well as guiding them in crafting a Charter for the club and setting some goals for the future.

The planning session is very beneficial when we participate in our first club meeting on Wednesday afternoon.  The kids are in their early teens and get involved enthusiastically in the agenda we have put together.  Unfortunately, their goals are quite ambitious and we do have to bring them back to reality and encourage them to set more realistic goals that will actually be achievable in a year.

On Tuesday morning we spend half a day engaged in conservation activities at the local Crocodile Centre.  The centre has all of the African species of crocodiles including the Nile, Long-snouted and Dwarf crocodiles. 

The purpose of the centre is mainly for education but they rehabilitate ‘rogue’ crocodiles from around the country, breed a limited amount of crocs and  perform occasional releases of crocodiles in areas where they are endangered.  We are hopeful that we might be part of a release operation during our stay here as we have missed the time when the eggs hatch!

Working at the centre will be a weekly occurrence for us.  Our first task is to build a path that will take visitors away from the main crocodile enclosures and get them interacting with some of the wild ‘uncaged’ animals in the adjacent bushland.  I help the boys build the path while the rest of the gang  mulch the path we build.  We are quite pleased with our days work and head back to get ready for our Hippo and Crocodile tour, which I will talk about in a separate post.

Wednesday morning sees us back on another bush walk, this time in the forest of iGwala Gwala.  We are in search of birds but it is a windy morning and the birds are high up in the trees, so we don’t get any winners on this walk. 

Robyn our guide gives us a pep talk before we go in the forest.  She was walking alone here a few days ago when she heard the sounds of a leopard in the bush.  She gives us  strict instructions on what to do in the unlikely event we come across one - don’t panic, run or scream but back away slowly.  We are instructed to get each others attention by slapping our thighs and clicking our fingers!  Right, this sounds similar to the instructions we were given in California about the bears - curl up in to a little ball on the trail if a bear approaches.   None of these instructions really work in real life because people panic but you can’t really out run a leopard..and there really isn’t any point in climbing a tree! 

My best photograph of the day is that of a vervet monkey on the way home.  They are found everywhere in our neighbourhood and love getting into the garbage early morning before the daily collection.  There were no leopard to be seen and we survive to photograph another day. 

 “Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever... it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.”  Aaron Siskind