Everyone's a winner | The Australian
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The Australian The Weekend Australian Magazine
Everyone's a winner by: Catherine Marshall From: The Australian October 15, 2011 12:00AM
Voluntourism travellers Cara Munro, 31, Dave & Christine Cloughley, 61 & 52, and Ben Coleridge, 22. Source: Supplied THE midday sun is pouring down onto the winter-dry hills of Namibia, and we're busily collecting animal poo. Matt, a student from America, is loping through the bush, scouring the ground. He stops, crouches down, lifts his head excitedly and calls out that he's found "predator scat" - excrement deposited by a leopard, perhaps, or a caracal or brown hyena. We gather round as he crumbles the powdery black substance between thumb and forefinger. Inside it he locates a mandible so small one almost needs a magnifying glass to see it. We lean in to get a closer look at this tiny miracle of nature embedded incongruously in the dry lump in Matt's hand, and sigh with contentment. It's for moments like this that we've all taken annual leave and come to volunteer on a leopard conservation project at a Biosphere Expeditions base just north of the Namibian capital, Windhoek. With farmers steadily converting from stock farming to game ranching, researchers are keen to work out ways in which both leopards and their valuable prey - kudu, oryx, springbok and other antelope - might be preserved. We'll spend our holidays counting game, checking camera traps, tracking collared leopards and collecting data on animal populations. Not for us the passivity of beach resort holidays, languid cruises and sightseeing tours.
24/10/2011 13:36