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.