Volunteering work can be enjoyable but a lot of the time it really is work. Take Thursday and Friday, for example. Part of our weekly agenda always includes removal of invasive species, which is a fancy way of saying weeding. There are a few different kinds of plants that our program focuses on, and on Thursday it was lantana.
We drove to one of the private game reserves nearby to report to duty. I am familiar with lantana since it is sold in Arizona as a landscaping plant, but yes, it is technically a weed. The lantana in the reserve was more like giant bushes or small trees than the small flowering shrubs that I am used to, meaning that this was going to be no easy task. And what were our tools for this chore? Machetes. That's it, along with grit and manpower. I'd never used a machete before, so I wasn't quite sure how best to tackle the plants. But it turned out that machetes are pretty easy to get the hang of. Just hack away!
It was super hot outside, but I figured it best to wear long sleeves and pants to protect myself from bugs and the sun.
The lantana bushes were mostly wrapped around other plants, so our job was to cut the lantana down and pull it out from where it had twisted up. But first, we had to find the lantana. Some areas had a lot and it was sparse in other areas. There also was another plant that looked a lot like lantana, so to be sure we were chopping down the right plant we rubbed the leaves to be sure it had a harsh, minty smell. We broke into groups of two, partly for safety (we were in a game reserve with wild animals, you know) and partly since this was a big job for one person to do alone. We worked for about 2.5 hours with a break in the middle. My partner and I tackled at least 10 lantana bushes, but I wasn't keeping count. Though it was tough, dirty work, it felt good to free the other plants from these space hogs.
Afterward, we drove around the reserve for a while to check on some photo traps that the program had placed there. (Side note: The photo traps have motion sensors and take photos when an animal moves past them.) This reserve was the same one that we visited on my first day, and I couldn't believe it. Monday's ride was fairly flat and kind of leisurely. This time however, it was like we were driving in mountains. We kept going up and down, rocking this way and that way. Halfway through the ride, I decided that I would never visit this reserve again without first taking Dramamine.
The ride made me queasy, but at least we did see some animals.
Thankfully, after tiring activities like this, we are given some time to rest before the next activity begins. That afternoon's task was project work. This means office-type work related to the data we've collected. My Mexican roommate and I chose earlier that week to focus on elephant projects. Specifically, we were tasked to look through photos of elephants that us volunteers had taken on our recent game drives and compare them to existing photos to try to identify them. We weeded through photo after photo and found this task to be impossible! Either we were looking at photos of a herd that was not previously identified or our elephant identification skills are terrible. We will tackle this task again next week and hopefully will have better luck.
On Friday morning, us volunteers went to a local reptile center. They are open to the public and have on display various reptiles that were rescued after being found in places where they don't belong or that were given up as pets. I was expecting a pretty basic facility, but the center was actually quite nice. Our program helps out at the center about once a week. This time we had a choice of 3 tasks: removing bamboo from a crocodile enclosure, changing the water in another crocodile enclosure, or weeding a vegetable garden.
I chose the bamboo project for no particular reason. Little did I know that this was another "hack at stuff with a machete" activity. The bamboo was being removed because the root system was cracking the foundation of the cement pool inside the enclosure. We literally had to work inside the enclosure. One of the staff members told us that the crocodiles would just remain in the water and not bother us, and I guess we just had to take his word for it that this was true.
Dangerous?
The bamboo was a lot smaller than most of the bamboo that I have seen before so I figured this would end up being a fairly easy task. I was wrong. Somehow, I found the bamboo to be even harder to chop through than the Lantana was, and the thinner stalks seemed to be worse than the thicker ones. I couldn't wait for this task to be over. It has definitely been my least favorite so far.
By the time the 6 of us were done, all of the bamboo was chopped down. Yay us!
Oh, and if you're wondering, those crocodiles did in fact stay in the water and not bother us, so that's good.
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