Waterbuck, Waterbuck Everywhere

...but not a drop to drink?

Happy belated Father's Day, Dad!  I hope everyone at home enjoyed the holiday weekend. 

Update from Chitengo:  I am officially going to be looking at various aspects of waterbuck behavior/diet for my senior thesis project.  This weekend I talked with Rob and figured that out, and then Jen and I made up a tentative schedule for the next 6 weeks.  There will be several pieces to my project, with the main one being behavioral observations in the field of waterbuck.  I got out yesterday with Kaitlyn and spent the day testing out different methods for watching waterbuck (which was surprisingly exhausting).  Questions I'm currently thinking about:

- How do you define and count a group of waterbuck?  (If you can see 200 waterbuck at any given point but they're really spread out, is that one big group?  If not, how do you tell which individuals are part of which groups?)

- How long should observation bouts last? (If they're too short, you're not getting a lot of information from each bout, but if they're too long, you can't do that many on any given day and you're not going to get a large enough sample size)

- Should you observe a focal individual during each bout, or try to get information from the whole group? (Focal individual might be a little easier and would probably be more accurate, but focal group would give info about more of the group)

- Should you try to observe each animal continuously, or do point sampling--like every 15 seconds, 30 seconds, minute? (Continuously is probably more precise, but point sampling is probably more accurate)

If anyone has any experience with behavioral studies or thoughts on any of these questions, please feel free to comment here or email me.  It'll be a process getting to a final observation protocol that I'm happy with/that will work and yield good, analyzable data. 

Today, Jen and I are going to start setting up another component of my project: camera traps. 

Waterbuck...running away.  They tended to do that a bunch.

That's pretty much what's going on here.  This weekend I got into Villa, a small town that's about an hour away,  with Kaitlyn and we went to the market.  All of the food was so inexpensive: big avocados were 5Mts (36/37 Mts to the dollar, so less than 16 cents), cucumbers were 10 Mts, loaves of bread were 5 Mts.  It's very nice to have some fresh fruits and veggies around.  

Other stuff from the weekend:

Sundowner on Saturday night.

One of the vehicles had driven through an area with a lot of super tiny frogs, so there were about 17 of them left on the car in the evening.  They were so little!

 Bye!