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