Collecting of Specimens

THE COLLECTING OF SPECIMENS

When collecting Specimens from the veld no matter if it is plant nor animal nor insect you have to be super care full with what you do and how you do it so that you don't damage the specimen that your taken and in that way you can use it for many years to come.

Specimens are taken from nature for a few reason which includes research and education, you can put them in a museum tipe of room at your facility or school for futher learners, workers to have the opertunity of seeing your work and learning from it!

Veld specimens of both plants and animals can be collected,they can be part of, or the complete plant nor animal. Veld specimens require careful documentation. the following should be recorded:

• Name of Specimen
• Location
• Habitat
• Frequency of occurrence
• Habit
• Collector
• Date of collection
• Weather Conditions

When Collecting plant specimen you should have:

• A pair of secateurs to cut branches
• A small pick to loosen the ground around the plant
• A small hand spade to remove loosened soil
• Plastic bags as temporary storage for plants.
• A note book
• A pencil

This is just a few of things that you will require when going out to get specimens. There is alot of different methods ass well as to collecting insect specimens.

• Bait
• Light
• Pitfall trap
• Sweeping
• Beating
• Visual search
• Litter sampling

So starting from the top im going to tel you a little bit more about each of the top mentioned metods.

1. Bait- Is a mixture of rotten fruit and foods put out to a place to attract flies, ants ect.
2. Light-Is when a light is put on at night to attract all night insects
3. Pitfall trap-Is when you make a whole in the ground put a container in the whole with the top level with te ground
4. Sweeping-This is were you would make use of your net that you made and sweep it through a vegetation where you would like to collect your specimen
5. Beating-Is were you take a branch and start beating on a bush or shake a buch to see what kind of insects you can find there
6. Visual search-Is when you walk and crawl and see what kind of insects you can catch
7. Litter Sampling-Is where you take a bunch of leafes and shake it to see what you can find. This leafes will be from a dump site.

there you go that is Veld specimens in a nut shell

Making of the bicycle trails

Making bicycle trails on Sondela

Once a year on Sondela we have a bicycle ride day for the whole family. This is a nice bonding time for familys and for parents to do have fun with there kids!

And believe me it was a great day and even better weekend. We were full in the caravan park and the family's had lots of fun. We had give and take a little round about 260 people joing in on the fun and we had a 2km, 20km and a huge 40km.

Now everybody enjoyed the wonderfull weekend nobody really knows what went on behind the scenes. So im going to give you a little bit of information and a watch of behind the scenes for a whole week before the fun started.

We as students were asighned the work of making the trails for the bicycles to be able to drive. It was a long and hard week but worth it becouse now we are all able to go into a veld and re-construcked an old road that has been grown almost closed of trees and grass and make it a bicycle trail for people to enjoy.

We where diveded into groups each on with there own leader which was a second year student. In this groups we were working on deferent pieces of the road. Starting early and finnishing late. On the working of the roads we used the following:

• Spade
• rake
• pang
• Saw

With the making of the trails we learned how to start a trail and how to make a trail according to managers orders and to make it a health and safety trail witch means it is safe for cyclers to cycle on!

The trails were a huge sucess and the cyclers enjoyed the weekend with us!

Catching of Giraffe

The Catching of Giraffe that went through the fench

There were one of our giraffes that broke through our fence to the next door farm we as students were called to go help fix the fench and try to catch the giraffe that has broken through.

We were unable to get a hold of the giraffe that broke through but managed to fix the fench really quickly as we worked together as a team with the help of some of the conservation workers and some of the wild life centre staff.

Fixing the fence we were required to do the following:

• Bending of droppers
• cutting of some of the broken wire
• putting new wire on
• tightning of the fench

After the fixing of the fench we were driving up and down the fench to have a look if we could find any sighn of a youngster or another giraffe. Our search were un sucessfull and we heard that the giraffe that went through were a full grown male and Sieg our manager went into the next door farm to see if he can find the giraffe and yes he found him and walked behind him all the way to see if he can get him to the gate we opend for him. While this was happening we were sitting not far away to watch that there is no other animals that would go through the open gate. The giraffe got away from Sieg through the buches and we were sent back to work on Sondela seeing that there was no way that we were gona catch that giraffe anyway!