Random bits

It's rained more recently than in the past several months combined. The rain is more than welcomed as it’s been very dry the past few weeks and the bush has been looking dry and brown in spots. For the most part, our region of Kruger is still behind on rainfall for the wet season, but we must be catching up fast. Most of this recent storm was spawned by the remnants of a tropical cyclone (hurricane) that rolled through Mozambique earlier. It feels strange now to be rooting for cyclones to bring us rain since for the last several years I would have done anything in my power to prevent hurricanes from reaching my field sites in Florida. During hurricane season, I would powerlessly watch every hurricane track to see if it would come anywhere near the Florida Keys. I would have tried any juju possible to keep hurricanes away from my experiments (I had two hurricanes in two seasons of working on the reefs in Florida). Now, I relish the rain they bring.

Just thought I’d pass along a couple of happenings in the past few weeks.

- In the span of two days I almost stepped on a puff adder and a Mozambique spitting cobra while in the field. Both are beautiful snakes much better appreciated from several feet away.

- While walking to one of our field sites we almost ran into a black rhino. We were about 30m away before the guy in front saw it lying under a tree having a snooze. Black rhinos are very grumpy buggers (very endangered as their horns make great dagger handles and there are only about 350 in the whole of Kruger), and it would have made a bad end to the short day if we would have actually surprised him. Luckily we were downwind of it and it never knew we were there. On the way back to our vehicle, we got to watch it browse plants and it was never the wiser.

- We have started doing surveys at night of the herbivores that are using the different plots in our experiment. The night surveys are great as we are the only ones driving around Kruger then (the tourists have to be in at 6PM), and the bush really changes at night when the predators come out. At the end of the last survey, we followed a big male lion on the tar road for over 2km. He would stop periodically and scent mark a bush then carry on walking, and once he took far too much pleasure in rolling in a pile of buffalo poop. As he rolled he let out these purrs of ecstasy just like a house cat. At one point, we had pulled up to about 10m from him (he honestly couldn’t have cared less that we were there) and he let out a huge roar, calling to his buddies. A lion’s roar is not the MGM lion roar you see on movies. After a couple of loud growls, it builds to a crescendo of huge roars followed by several seconds of low grunting. Its so powerful that it just reverberates through your body. On still nights the roars carry for miles.