The Great Goat Roast

So this was an awesome weekend.  Last night there was a goat roast down at the river camp.  The river camp is about 10 minutes away from the center, and pretty much exactly what it sounds like—a camp with tents right by the river.  But the tents are more secure than what you think about with camping at home.  I wasn’t sure how I felt about going to the goat roast because I wasn’t sure how I felt about actually watching a goat roast.  But after talking to some people beforehand, I realized that it was very much like going to a barbecue at home, but instead of there being burgers and hot dogs on the grill, there were pieces of goat. 

Right when we got there, there was a giraffe off in the distance.  So the view was just a river with some yellow fever trees on its banks, and then hills off in the distance.  With a giraffe.  It was incredible. Kathy and I wandered around for a bit, and then much of the rest of the evening was just hanging out around this giant campfire.  Tyler and I had brought food over from the center to have in addition to the goat, which was really good.  “Paddy and the Dik-Diks” (a few of the researchers/grad students here, with 2 guitars and a harmonica) played throughout the evening.  It was very easy for me to avoid the actual goat roasting, which was great.  I had an excellent time.  It was pretty cloudy right when we got there, but when it cleared up the sky was amazing with stars.  There were even a few shooting stars near the end of the night.

The view right when we got there.  The giraffe is toward the back on the right. 

The sunset on the river.

The fire.  Matt used "magic" to make it turn pretty colors. 

Around the campfire. 

We went into Nanyuki this morning, and Alex and I tackled the curio shops together.  I am not a huge fan of bargain shopping, but we stayed together and it was fine.  We also got lunch in town at Dormans, which is a coffee shop that also has food and really delicious milkshakes.  All in all, a great weekend.  It’s dinner time now, and then another busy field week coming up.  

A few of the curio/bead shops that we went to

Dormans

Back to School

Hi everyone!

So it's been a little while since my last post.  This week was very busy with field work.  Monday and Tuesday, we were working with Barleria, adding a treatment to the experiment.  This treatment is another way of looking at the effects of shading and herbivory on the plant.  Also on Monday, we saw (and heard) a group of wild dogs by where we were working, which was really cool.  Wednesday and Thursday, we were out collecting data from an experiment that Tyler had set up last summer, looking at the effects of elephant damage (like the picture from one of my earlier posts) on understory plants.  Then Friday morning was spent camera trap photo-ing.  I finally saw an aardvark in one of the pictures, which was really cool. 

Yesterday (Friday) afternoon I went to the Mpala School with Alex.  Her internship is working with the Northern Kenya Conservation Clubs, so she (and a few other students, some of whom have already gone home) goes to the various schools throughout the week and teaches them lessons.  Yesterday's first lesson was a computer lesson (so not strictly conservation).  We worked with the kids on their Excel skills.  The school has four laptops and a desktop computer, so the kids worked in groups and Alex taught them how to make graphs in Excel.  I am so used to using computers in general and Excel specifically in my everyday life (especially now with camera trap photos--we enter all the data into one giant spreadsheet), so it was different for me to think about kids who aren't used to that.  I feel like even little ones at home are growing up now using their parents' (or their) iPhones and computers.  There was also the language barrier to overcome.  Their English was infinitely better than my Swahili, but it was still kind of hard to get some of the concepts across to them.  A really cool lesson to be a part of, but certainly challenging. 

After the computer lesson, we had the club activity for the week.  We were broadly looking at evolution, and specifically looking at bird beak adaptations.  Alex started off with a powerpoint, in which she introduced Charles Darwin and his ideas, and then asked the kids to give her four examples of birds they were familiar with.  She asked them several questions about those birds: color, diet, relative size, does it fly?, is its nest on the ground or in a tree?, and then if they knew anything else about the bird.  She then asked them to think about why some of those features are the way they are.  For example, why are ostriches the only birds we thought about that don't fly?  Their answer: because they're too heavy.  Why are they also the only birds whose nests are on the ground? Because they don't fly.  Why do vultures have no neck or head feathers? Because they would get dirty when they eat.  It was cool to watch the kids thinking about these questions.

Then it was time for a game: Birdie Breakfast.  Alex finished up the powerpoint with pictures of different birds and their beaks, and asked the kids what the birds eat and why their beaks might be shaped in a certain way.  She had also brought "beaks" with her.  For example, a secretary bird that eats snakes has a strong beak that can grab the snakes.  That "beak" was a pair of metal tongs.  Birds that eat nectar need to be able to get their beaks into long skinny flowers and suck up the nectar, so she had an eye dropper for that.  For the game, the kids split up into two teams (boys vs. girls, of course).  They were all playing the part of birds, and Alex presented their "breakfast" at each round.  The kids had to decide which "beak" was best to use to eat the food, and send one person from their team to go up and use that beak to grab as many pieces of food as they could.  The team with the most food at the end of the round won.  One breakfast item she had was a water bottle with water ("nectar") in it that the kids needed to use the eye dropper for.  Another was a bunch of small rocks ("beetles") that the pair of pliers was the best option for.    The kids got really into the game, and had a lot of fun with it. 

On their way to use eye droppers to get "nectar" (water)

The kids using pliers to grab "worms" (dry spaghetti)

The boys (and their teacher) watching intently

Not from the game, but a drawing of a jackal one of the kids had done.  Notice what it says: "It looks better in real life"

We got to take the school bus back, which was a lot of fun.  I sat next to two little ones.

                             

                             

  They seemed pretty happy to be sitting next to me: they liked to poke my arm and press the buttons on my watch.  Then one of them (the one in the green sweater) noticed that I had my camera with me.  He wanted me to take a picture of him, and so did the other little one.  He then spent the rest of the ride with his hands on my camera, pointing it in the direction he wanted to take a picture.  I kept my hand on the camera as well, and just pressed the button when he decided what he wanted to photograph.  We ended up with some interesting pictures.   

                                       

Like this one

And this one

I'm pretty sure I took the camera for this one     

Last night Alex and I went on a game drive with a group that's here from Scotland.  We saw a few hyenas and a whole group of buffalo.  We also saw something that none of us could definitively identify, but my guess was a was a white tailed mongoose.  This morning we went back out into the field to finish up the Barleria treatment we'd started.  

Other notes about this week: 

Although it has been mostly very dry here, this week we had several rainstorms, or almost rainstorms (when we saw and heard the storm, but it didn't rain over the center).  On Sunday when I was doing my laundry, I looked up and saw this:

View from our porch area

I pretty much just stopped what I was doing and grabbed my camera to get a picture.  Then on Monday when we'd finished for the day, I looked up and saw this:

                               

...and also grabbed my camera for a picture. 

On Sunday night at dinner, Alex and I made ugali truffles.  We took the ugali ("maize flour cooked with water to a porridge- or dough-like consistency") and mixed it with peanut butter in about a one to one ratio.  We rolled that mixture into little balls and then took some of the chocolate chips I'd brought (thanks, Mom!) and stuck them in.  Then we rolled the whole thing in the Cadbury drinking chocolate powder (basically hot chocolate powder).  They were surprisingly really good--kind of like a mix between cookie dough and the inside of a Reese's.

Ugali truffles--nom nom nom

Discovery Day

Saturday was a big day here at Mpala: Discovery Day.  Everyone is welcome to come, and this usually includes researchers, school children, community members, and of course, the interns who are here for the summer.  Everyone who's doing research here is invited to give a 5 minute presentation about their work.  I was around for about half of the presentations, and it was really cool to hear from the people I'm used to eating with and hanging out with what it is that they're actually working on while here.

Matt talked about his work with hippos. 

Corina talked about the modeling she's been working on of the ecosystem patterns you see around here.  With the models, she can try to predict what will happen in an ecosystem with less and less rainfall.  The models predict a certain point of low rainfall at which the amount of vegetation drops dramatically.  They also predict that the presence of termite mounds can soften this effect and lower the amount of rainfall at which this catastrophic shift occurs. 

Hilary talked about her work in ecohydrology (the study of how the ecosystem--so pretty much all living things--and the water cycle interact).  One of the things she's looking at this summer is how drought affects Acacia mellifera.

Pat talked about his work studying big headed ants, an invasive species here.  His work deals a lot with dung at the moment, looking at how the presence or absence of this invasive species affects decomposers. 

Rob talked about what eats what.  You can kind of make it out in the picture: what's on the screen is a giant web connecting a whole bunch of herbivores to all of the different plants that they eat. 

After the talks, Tyler, Ben and I went out with Rob and Corina to the KLEE plots and farther north to look at the termite mounds there.  

Soil cracks in the black cotton soil.

Acacia drepanolobium.  It looked like a monoculture in some areas where we were. 

Some of the areas we visited had been burned, which made it look like all the trees were dead.  But when you took a closer look, you saw regrowth coming up from the base (like it is here) or sometimes from the branches. 

I'm not sure what this caterpillar will grow up to be, but it has very Princeton coloring. 

Saturday evening Rob and Corina invited Tyler, Ben, Renata and me to dinner at their house, which was lovely.  I'm writing this post on Sunday morning, and it looks like today's going to be pretty calm.  There's the possibility of a game drive later, which would be awesome, but other than that it should just be a lazy Sunday.  A bunch of people (including Kate and Colleen, whom I traveled here with, and Helen and Dayton, who have also been here working on the education/conservation stuff) are heading home today, and it's going to feel very empty without them. 

Hope everyone's having a great weekend!

The Many Sharp Things of Mpala

Hi guys!

So the week finished up pretty well.  Thursday was another day of mostly camera trap photo-ing, and Friday was a field day to survey Barleria.  We moved quickly through our work on Friday, so I had some time to take pictures of some of the spiny/thorny things we see every day in the field.

A euphorb (that's the genus of plants).  They kind of look like cacti, but they're not.  They have a white sticky sort of sap on the inside that's latex and is apparently really harmful to your eyes if it comes into contact with them. 

Close up of the euphorb; you can see the thorns. 

Barleria!  Those spines are super sharp, and they like to jab into fingers while you're working.  This is a small Barleria plant.

A bigger Barleria plant.  You can see the white flowers.

Acacia mellifera.  The thorns are small, so you'd think they might be less annoying.  But you'd be wrong.  Those thorns get stuck to your clothing and your skin and do not let go. 

Not sharp at all, but a very common thing to run into in the field.  This is elephant dung, with my hand in the photo for size comparison. 

Happy Hump-day!

Happy Wednesday everybody!

(posted on Thursday morning here, sorry!)

Quick recap of the week so far.

Lots of camera trap photo-ing on Monday.  Tyler and Ben went into town in the morning, but I decided to stay here and work.  Yesterday morning we went up to the Uhuru North exclosure plot to work with more Barleria spines.  Which were still very sharp, and my fingers (unfortunately) had not developed calluses since Friday.  As far as I understand it, these plots are very similar in the way they're set up to the KLEE plots, except the Uhuru plots are on red soil (and the KLEE plots are on black cotton soil).  Uhuru means "peace, harmony" in Swahili.  It is also the name of one of the major highways in Nairobi, and the first name of the fourth and current president of Kenya.  It also stands for "Ungulate Herbivory Under Rainfall Uncertainty."  I believe the plot we were working in yesterday excluded everything.  Which meant that although there were elephants tearing away at the acacia trees right outside where we were, we were safe.  This is what elephant damage to an acacia tree looks like (this would have happened a while ago; you can tell because the branch that's broken off is pretty much dead):

Poor tree :(

After lunch was a different story because we were done with our work inside the plot.  There was a group of elephants right where we wanted to be working, and we were hesitant to get too close to them (they'll charge you if they decide you shouldn't be there, as Tyler and Ben found out before I got here).  So we decided to call it a day and prep our stuff for Wednesday.  It was the last night here for Jazz, who's been here for nearly a year, so there was a sundowner last night.  We went to Beculi Dam (not actually a dam--no water).

The group

The view

Pretty :)

It was a gorgeous location for the sundowner, and we all just hung out talking and eating popcorn.  After dinner it was time for Disney Movie Tuesday!  This week was The Little Mermaid, which is one of my favorites from when I was little.  So it was especially fun to watch.  

We spent most of the day back up near the Uhuru North plot again today, playing with more spines.  Today was our last day for that, though, for which my fingers are very grateful.  We shared our work space with giraffes, Plain's zebras, hartebeests, and of course, elephants.  The elephants were relatively close when we started and again when we were just about done, but they never seemed to walk toward us at all.  But just to be safe, Tyler drove the truck off the road so that it was pretty close to where we were working.  

Do you see the elephant?

There it is!
(I'm really bad at estimating distances, but this one was not too far away)

 Tyler's also interested in what exactly is eating Barleria, so we set up some stuff to look at that.  Back at the center, there was time for a nap and a workout with Alex before dinner.  Apparently there's going to be a Star Wars viewing tonight, which I will probably join while working on camera trap photos. So that's my week so far, and we're out for another full day tomorrow (packed lunches and all), but I'm not sure what we're doing.  Good night everyone!

   

  

Is that a rock?

Another quick post about this afternoon.

Also, I just realized I've probably mentioned Alex before but not actually explained who she is.  She is one of my best friends from school, a fellow EEB person (even though I'm not technically EEB--Ecology and Evolutionary Biology), a varsity athlete (she plays basketball), and an all around awesome person.  She's also blogging while here, check her out here. 

So after lunch, Alex and I went over to the library and hung out for a while.  Then it was time to work out.  She has a workout plan for the summer from her coaches, and I asked if she was ok with me joining her, which she is.  So we went on the ring road (which is where I go running) for a sprint workout.  Two noteworthy things about that: one, that I was in fact doing said sprint basketball workout and two, that there were elephants less than a football field away from us.  Right when we got down there, I looked over and saw something big and grey and I asked Alex if it was a rock.  But then it moved, and we knew it wasn't a rock. By the end of the workout, we could see at least five elephants not very far away, which was really cool.    

I'm not actually sure what the plan is for tomorrow, but we'll see.  Hope everything's good at home :)

This is Alex.  She's not actually an alcoholic, she just got a lot of alcohol requests from people for our trip into town yesterday (none of that is for her)

We found Nala!

It's been a great weekend.  Lots going on, but all good stuff.

Yesterday morning, I gave the camera trap photos some more time before heading into Nanyuki with the conservation/education group here.  We were still here for tea time (which I almost always miss), and there was mandazi! Mandazi is a Kenyan dessert, basically like sweet fried dough (so the Kenyan version of a beignet/fritter type thing).  It is not actually super exciting by itself, but when I was here in January I only had mandazi from the airport (which was packaged and cold), and yesterday's was warm and fresh.  So I was super excited to be able to try it, and it was pretty good. 

Our first stop in Nanyuki was the bank for cash, and then Josphat and Jackson (our drivers--they usually drive the conservation/education group to the schools where they work during the week) took us to a spinners and weavers co-op.  All the workers there are single others.  A woman named Mary showed us the process of going from wool to a rug, which includes carding the wool, spinning it, making skeins, washing the skeins, dyeing the skeins, and then weaving it.  We went through to their showroom at the end, and they had some beautiful rugs and shawls. 

Next we went to the equator.  It's just marked by a sign on the side of the road, but it's super cool.  You can stand there, with half of your body in the Northern Hemisphere and half in the Southern Hemisphere.  There were a bunch of shops right by the sign.  They all had nice stuff and super aggressive shop owners.  From there we went to lunch.  Everyone wanted to eat Kenyan food for lunch, so we went to a place that had food set out buffet style, and you just went up and said what you wanted on your plate.  I tried pretty much everything that was vegetarian, and it was all delicious.  I got to try taro root for the first time, which was interesting.  There were also cooked bananas.  A full plate of food was only 490 Kenyan shillings, which is less than $6.  

The restaurant was a few doors down from Dorman's an Mpala researcher favorite for milkshakes (where I went last weekend).  Dorman's is connected to a souvenir shop that had beautiful items.  They had kangas and kikoys, which are traditional African garments (check out the kanga wikipedia page here), in absolutely gorgeous color combinations.  The patterns were amazing.  We did some more shopping after that in a shop right near Nakumatt (the super market), where there was jewelry and some other small trinkets.  We also stopped at Nakumatt itself, and a few other places on our way out of town to pick up things that people had requested from the center (like latex gloves, for one of the projects going on here).  

I did laundry for the first time while here when we got back.  We only have to wash our undergarments (the rest of our clothing is washed for us), and we do so with a tub, water and soap.  This was the first time I'd ever hand washed so much of my clothing, and it was a bit of an adventure.  After dinner, Tyler was going on a game drive with a few other people, and I got the last spot in the truck.  We went for about an hour, and saw nothing super exciting for the first bit.  And then Taylor saw a pair of eyes (which is pretty much the only way to spot stuff at night, by seeing a light reflect off their eyes) and Tyler backed up.  We went closer, and saw a head.  And realized it was a lion.  A lioness, specifically.  It was so cool.  We followed her around for a few minutes in the truck until we lost her.  She was the first big cat I've seen while here.  

We (kind of a mix of conservation/education people and others) went on a game drive this (Sunday) morning.  We were out for about 4 hours, which was great.  We didn't see too many new mammals; I think the only ones were a steinbuck and what we're pretty sure was a klipspringer.  The theme with many of the animals today seemed to be "Mommy (or Daddy) and me."  There were a of of young animals out there.  I've included pictures of a young baboon, camel and zebra.  The camel and the zebra both seemed to have legs that were way too long for their bodies, and they moved kind of awkwardly.  In terms of birds, we saw some cool ones: secretary birds and a fish eagle (which I've seen before), a Goliath bird and a kingfisher (which I hadn't seen before).  The secretary birds are so called because they have these black almost tube-like things that stick out of their heads, which makes it look like they have pens stuck in their hair.  They're pretty large and they have super strong legs, with which they stomp on snakes to kill them so they can eat them.  Jackson (who was driving us) also took us to the place where two rivers meet, which was a really nice place to just be and listen to the rushing water.  Some of us also got kind of wet there, which felt great.  We were back in time for lunch, which was really yummy today.  So yea, a very nice weekend so far :)    

Mandazi

Mary showing us how they wash the wool--they do it 9 times!

Mary showing us the materials they use to make the different colors

The showroom at the spinners and weavers

At the equator!
(the picture was taken from the Southern Hemisphere, and all of our left feet are in the Northern Hemisphere)

Again, at the equator

The shops at the equator

Ordering lunch in Nanyuki

My lunch: rice with sauce, local greens, taro root and potatoes, green mashed potatoes, and cooked bananas

Baboons (that's a baby on the back of the one on the left)

Secretary bird

Heron in "hop" (not quite flight)

Camels

Mu Kenya
(which means "Little Mount Kenya")

Oryx

Zebras

Ostriches (males on the outside, female in the middle)

Cool rocks we saw on our game drive

Where the rivers meet (you can only see one river here)

Goliath bird

Kingfisher

Kudu

Giraffe