Team Oribi

Hello!

Happy Fourth of July!  And happy belated birthdays to both of my parents--I love you both and can't wait to celebrate when I get home :)

I haven't posted in a bit, so I figured I'd get some of the photos from the last two weeks up on here.  And give a quick recap of that time.  I'll do another post soon, covering what we did today. 

Last week started with putting camera traps up in the floodplain.  Then Jen and I worked for the next six days on setting up our clipping experiment.  Clipping experiments basically try to mimic grazing on the plants in an area and see what the response is.  Obviously, there's more to grazing than simply the removal of biomass/leaves (like trampling and spreading saliva), but these experiments are generally a good way to get some idea of what's going on.  One of the treatments was 'light herbivory,' which we think might mimic what a small grazer does when eating on the floodplain.  One such small grazer is an oribi, so we all channeled our inner oribi when working on that treatment (hence Team Oribi).  

After finishing setting up the clippings, we spent a few days scouting sites for a project Jen's going to be starting and collecting fecal samples for analysis.  The plan is for me to get back to some behavioral observations soon.

We saw elephants on our way back from setting up camera traps!  They were running away.  Elephants here aren't super rare, but they also aren't very habituated to humans, so running into them can be dangerous. 

There are law enforcement officials working at the park, who are able to arrest any poachers found hunting within the park and collect their supplies.  This is a truck full of confiscated snares. 

The impala lily.  We drove by it and I thought it was really pretty. 

Out on the floodplain, seeing how the vegetation changes as you go from the road toward the lake.  It's very much not a clean/easy to understand gradation, and there are a bunch of edges between vegetation types. 

I hope everyone is enjoying the holiday weekend.  Please watch some fireworks and go swimming for me! (I technically could be swimming here, but the pool is super super tiny)

Good night!