Water, water nowhere

We are in the middle of a fairly significant drought here. It hasn’t rained more than a couple of milliliters in almost a month, and this region of Kruger is well below the yearly average for rainfall right now. The bush looks terrible – everything is so brown you would swear it was the dry season not the middle of the rainy season. Fortunately, February is supposed to be the wettest month each year, but Mother Nature has a lot of catch-up to do. Its looking more and more like this field season will be pretty light on good data and that is a little stressful.

At least the experiments are working. For the most part, the different herbivores are staying out of the places they are supposed to stay out of. Although I did see a baby giraffe inside one of the no giraffe exclosures the other day. It was bouncing around like a pinball trying to get out. Eventually it almost closelined itself before flipping underneath the fence. Funny for me, probably not so much for the giraffe.

Its also bloody hot here. If it doesn’t rain, which it doesn’t, then the temp easily gets over 100 degrees. That’s fine. I don’t mind the heat so much. But weeks on end of 100 plus days does get old. When you live in a tent, there is really no escaping it. The fan we have just blows hot air on days like that and it actually makes you feel hotter. The pool here for the tourists is almost like bathwater its so warm so no relief there. The little staff pool is usually pea soup green so you are risking some nasty ear infection there. I usually just stand in the shower to cool off when I can’t stand it any more. I would rather be out in the field during the heat since you can at least take your mind off of it by working, and usually come up with some excuse to go drive around in the air conditioned truck when it tops 106.

It feels strange do be so dependant on the weather. Living in the States, the weather is usually just something we worry about going from the car to our office door. It may impact how we dress for the day or whether or not we grab the umbrella, but I would say the weather’s impact on the average American is fairly minimal each day. We can escape the weather in our air conditioned/centrally-heated houses that don’t leak when it rains and don’t make so much noise when the wind blows that you can’t sleep. There is no luxury like that here. The weather here determines a lot of what you do and when you do it. It gets hot early so we work earlier – starting at 5AM a lot of the time and ending our work day a little after lunch time. My afternoons are free to write or read, but the heat is often so bad that the last thing I can do is string a few coherent sentences together or hold a thought in my head for very long. So productivity here is below average. That said, I rather like being dependant on the weather for the daily routine. It’s a connection with nature that most people don’t get the luxury of having in our modern world. I appreciate that and am trying not to lose sight that perspective when it gets to 111.6 degrees.

Living Simple(r)

Life here in Kruger is pretty straightforward. Live in a tent, wake up when its light, go to bed when its dark, cook simple meals. The change from living in the middle of 4 million people in Atlanta is very welcome. I wouldn’t exactly call it simple living, but its much simpler than most of what I’m used to, and it will be tough when I have to go back to America later in the year. Tough getting back into more hectic life where any convenience you want is right at your finger tips and its easy to live with much more than you really need.

That said, we obviously have some modern conveniences here in the camp or you wouldn’t be reading my blog and I wouldn’t be emailing people. The internet connection (slow dial-up over the cell phone network) is nice so that I can keep up with family and friends, read about the World Series (GO CARDS!!!), gloat over the mid-term elections (GO DEMS!), and even submit manuscripts for publication. But there are times when it really is an intrusion that I would rather not have. Emailing someone whilst sitting hear listening to lions roar is kind of a strange thing.

Cell phones also are everywhere here as well. Luckily the reception doesn’t go much beyond a 7km radius around the camp, but it is still strange be out in the bush watching zebra or elephant and you get a text message. It definitely detracts from the wildness of this place when you can email home and check your voicemail from your tent. Plus, any time I am feeling short on coffee I can pop by the restaurant next to the shop where we buy food and have an espresso or cappuccino (not that I drink fru-fru coffee) or whatever. While that convenience is nice and really seems to play to the European tourist crowd here, I would really rather not have that. If anything, I would rather be able to get some good Mexican food and a margarita, which, incidentally, is my first meal when I get back to the States. I’ve had that planned for a long time.

So I guess my point is that Kruger is a bundle of contradictions (aren’t we all?). You can get chased by an elephant at 8AM and have your latte while reliving the event at 10AM and then email your family about it at lunch time. Don’t get me wrong, this is definitely African wildness. So says the lion that mock-charged us at the lion capture last night. But there are definitely some rough edges that have been smoothed considerably for the sake of the tourists. I guess its tougher to fund your national park without being able to serve white wine spritzers.

Why am I here anyway?

I’ve had several people request an explanation of why I am actually in South Africa living in a tent. I probably should have explained this long ago, but better late than never. (For those of you that know why I’m here…talk amongst yourselves…I’ll give you a topic…Barbara Streisand…discuss.)

So my research revolves around how feeding by herbivores (plant eaters) affects the plants that grow in an area (how many, what kind, how big, etc.). But, I’m not just interested in herbivores in general, but how different sized herbivores affect the plant differently. So to test how the different sized herbivores have different effects, I’ve built a ton of fenced in areas that selectively let in herbivores depending on how tall they are. So there are fences that don’t allow in any herbivores (full exclosures), fences that only exclude the largest herbivores such as elephant and giraffe but let in rhino, wildebeest, zebra, impala, warthog, etc, and fences that exclude large and medium sized herbivores such as elephant, rhino, wildebeest, and zebra but let in the smaller herbivores such as impala, warthog, and smaller antelopes.

The reason behind identifying what different sized herbivores do to the plant communities is that when humans start to encroach on natural areas it is usually the biggest animals that are driven (or killed) out of areas first leaving progressively smaller herbivores behind as the human impact increases. What I am trying to learn is how this loss of consumers trickles down to affect the plant communities which can have a large feedback on the health of the ecosystem.

Right now I am spending lots of time counting the plants that are inside the different fences to see if the different sized herbivores are starting to have different effects on the plant communities. It’s hot, muggy, sometimes boring work, but it’s necessary to answer the questions I want to answer. Actually a lot of science is like that - short bursts of fun, exciting work interspersed with long bouts of tedious data collection. That is the nature of the beast however – the price to pay for getting to come to Africa and play around in the wilderness.

My Lion

Well, I hope my loyal reader(s) had a good Christmas and New Year’s. Sorry I haven’t posted in a while – I’ll try to be a little more consistent in the New Year. It was definitely different being away from family and friends and in 100 degree heat during the holidays. Not having to brace yourself against the cold for a Christmas Day walk is totally new, and I was definitely wishing for a nice cold snap for my Christmas present. But we had fun cooking out, drinking beer and playing Risk (yes we are dorky scientists) over the holidays. On New Year’s eve/morning, we partied with some German tourists that just happened to be camping next to us. We heard them singing German drinking songs just after midnight so we decided to go join in the party. They were an older group so only a few of them spoke English well, but luckily my German is flawless after a couple of beers (or more likely was that my pidgin German/English was at least understandable) so we had a rousing good time. We were already full of beer and wine from our New Year’s feast but the Deutschers insisted upon feeding us whiskey and Amarula cream (a cream liquer) so one member of our group (not me) ended up conversing by just raising their glass and saying “HEY!” I think their hangover ended on January 2nd.

Anyway, I wanted to finish my tales of lion captures. Just before the Christmas we went on a year-end lion capture with Craig (the lion researcher). This capture was different than all the others in that we just staked out a spot, circled the wagons (trucks), and waited for the lions to come to us instead of going after the lions using their radio collar signals. We had a nice cookout and drank beer and brandy while waiting for the lions to come to the bait – nicely dulling the motor skills before you deal with potentially man-eating animals - definitely the way to capture lions. The bait this time was a male zebra that we shot (well Marius the game capture guy shot it). After he killed the zebra, we gutted it and then tied it to the back of the truck and dragged it about 5 kilometers back to the lion capture setup to leave a nicely smelly trail for the lions to follow. We then shackled the zebra to a sturdy fence so that the lions could feed off the zebra close to our site and the vets could dart the lions we needed. Unfortunately the lions would have nothing to do with the free meal. They looked fat and happy like they had fed recently and obviously knew something was up with this too-easy meal.
The next step was to go “fishing” - fishing for lions that is. Once we had hacked of one leg of the zebra and tied it to the back of Craig’s truck, off we drove into the bush to tempt the lions. I was in the truck with the vets ready to dart the first lion that latched onto the zebra leg on Craig’s truck. The willing participant was a huge male lion who held onto the zebra leg so tightly it actually stopped Craig’s truck from moving forward. Once darted the male bounded into the riverine vegetation making him hard to find. Undaunted, we careened through the bush almost driving over the passed-out male before we saw him. It took eight of us to load him into the back of the truck to move him back to the processing station inside the circle of trucks. The vets processed the lion – weight, condition, blood samples, etc. Then I got to collar this big chap. What a great experience being face to face with a 450 pound lion and strapping a collar onto him. Once the collar was secured, the vets gave him the antidote to the drug and the male walked off ignoring the rest of the free zebra. So now I have my very own lion in Africa.