On Fire

Happy weekend!

On Thursday, I went out with Josh and Fredrik (another undergrad doing his senior thesis work who just got here, from Dartmouth) to look at a recently burned site.  Josh thought that it had been burned in the last week or so.  It was kind of crazy to see what had burned and what had not burned.  A lot of the grasses were ash on the ground, but many trees and things bigger than seedling-size either didn't seem to be too affected or only looked dried out.  You could see clear separations where, for some reason, the fire had reached a certain point and then not gone farther.  Sometimes that seemed to be random, but we also saw that most of the termite mounds had not burned, so there was a line of black-not black around their bases.  

One of the fire's boundaries.  You can kind of see that it's totally black on the far left of the photo, and the line of fire-no fire is somewhere in the middle. 

New growth coming up, even after only maybe a week.

One area that was pretty well burned

We were driving out along the Urema Road, which runs along the Urema River.  (The river feeds into the lake of the same name).  We heard some elephants as we were driving, and because that particular road does not provide many easy places to get out of the way if the eles decide to charge you, we turned around and went back to camp. 

Along the river

On Friday, Jen and I went out in the morning and collected fecal samples on the floodplain.  I know I've said at least twice now that there are so many waterbuck on the floodplain, but I finally got a picture that kind of captures what we've been seeing. 

So many waterbuck

In the afternoon, we went out with a group looking at grasses in different vegetation types in the park.

Our field site for the afternoon

#fieldwork

The sunset on the way home was beautiful

Yesterday evening there was another bush dinner.  It was in the same location as the first one, and completely as nice.  I'm getting much closer to figuring out more of what I'm going to be doing for my project this summer, so hopefully I'll be able to start collecting data soon.  We'll see. 

Have a great weekend!

P.S. One of the species that is commonly seen inside the camp is vervet monkeys.  They are certainly not as pesky as the baboons that are here as well, and their babies are super cute.  I finally took my camera out yesterday and got some pictures of a vervet, so here's one of them.  I tried to get a baby picture, but those didn't come out as well so I'll post one if I get a good one.  

Story about the baboons: they are really obnoxious around the kitchen tent, and it's only a matter of time before they figure out how to open the door and then we're all in trouble.  But I was eating lunch outside the tent with Josh the other day, and there is one baboon in particular that is always skulking around trying to get food.  Josh threw a rock at him (not to hurt him, but to get him away from the tent), and he tried to catch it.  Which was pretty funny to see.