Where's Katie?

EDIT: I usually don't like referring to myself in the third person, but I thought it was appropriate for the picture I put up in this post.

Hi hi,

How’s everyone at home?  I hope your summers are going well.

I am now halfway through my second week here at Gorongosa.  So I thought I’d do a quick recap of things that have happened this week.

On Monday morning, Jen and I went out to the floodplain to try out some different things with doing behavioral observations of waterbuck.  The animals were pretty skittish, in that they remained relatively vigilant the whole time we were anywhere close and didn't go back to normal foraging/resting behavior after their initial startle at seeing us.  So I’m not sure how continuing behavior observations will work.  But that’s something I’m thinking about and I’ll speak more with Jen about.  I know I said this in my last post, but there are so many of them out on the floodplain.  It’s crazy.

In the afternoon, Jen and I went out with Kaitlyn (a grad student from Berkley doing work here) and Greg (Carr, who’s the heart of the Gorongosa Restoration Project.  Cool article in The New Yorker about him here).  We were looking for fresh buffalo dung, and it took us nearly two hours of driving around, following trampled areas and older piles of scat to find some individuals so we could collect their poop.  We did, which was awesome.  And the whole drive around the park looking for dung was a lot of fun too.  We saw a civet, a serval, a group of elephants and two individual males, and a bunch of the antelope that are common here (waterbuck, kudu, bushbuck, etc.).  We drove really close to the second male elephant we saw, kind of accidentally because we didn't see him.  After we were past him, he turned around and roared at us.

The sun was setting just as we actually collected our sample, so we stopped on the way back for a ‘sun-goner.’  We also stopped after it had gotten dark enough to see the stars to look at them and see which constellations/planets/etc. were visible.  We saw Sirius, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, the Southern Cross, Gemini, and some others.  Oh, and the Big Dipper.  But it was upside down!  Which was so bizarre.  

Yesterday morning and this afternoon I went out with Josh and tried out some of his methodologies for his next project.  Which also involved me learning some plant names, which is always a good thing.  I also haven't been feeling so hot for the past few days, so I took some rest time yesterday afternoon and this morning.   

Where's Katie? Tee hee.  This is an example of a termite mound at Gorongosa.  It's pretty raised and more densely covered in vegetation than the surrounding matrix.  (I'm the bright orange spot on top of the mound, in case you didn't see me)

A seed I found today.  The red was so bright that it stood out very strongly from the surrounding plants.

Look at how the trunk kind of balloons out at the bottom and then goes back in.  I thought that was cool.

The view out from the top of a termite mound. 

That's about it from here for now.  I'm heading to dinner shortly and then I might do some more reading before bed.

Bye!