Quick update from the field

HI – have been a very busy few days.

Last night we had nine new puppies – five males and four females. The dam is Penda and the sire is Amos.  She is one of the females that was bitten by a puff adder about two weeks ago.  These future livestock guarding dogs are very cute!

The puppies timing was great because we have a French film crew here from One Planet. They will be here until Thursday filming for a series called SOS (Sauvons les Orphelins Sauvages) in French, that means “Save the Wild Orphans”.  The documentary is presented by journalist Olivia Mokiejewski . We did a lot of filming and more tomorrow.

 

Our international course participants are here – they arrived on Saturday afternoon. Sunday we had presentations all day, getting to know about each of them and them about us and CCF.  There are 14 so far from Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Niger, southern Sudan, Namibia, and Brazil – we have students still coming from Ethiopia, but their visas were held up due to new regulations coming through South Africa due to the World Cup.

We have many visitors and new arrivals, like one of our Namibian Board members who won last year’s auction for the Babson House at our CCF Gala.  My parents are also here and have been meeting an greeting volunteers, international students, and visitors. Some of these include three EarthWatchers that arrived last night and two US summer interns: an engineer  from U of Pacific and a vet student from Cornell. Our other three students who have already been here for the past week have settled in very well. And today we had a group of students from University of Arizona.  Many of them came to my talk when I was in Tucson a few weeks ago.  

The cheetahs are all doing great. Tiny cheetah Rohini Tallala is very cute; she is living with the four “Scars”.  As for Chewbaaka, he has lost weight, but overall is looking good…just a bit wobbly in his walking. He went to his play tree yesterday with our international course participants and was very happy marking his territory.  For the past couple days Anne, Bruce and I have been giving him sub Q fluids each evening. He purrs as we are doing this. Fortunately he does not really know what we are doing except my petting him.  

OK – that’s about it – ofcourse there is always more.

Laurie