This is the South Africa that I am used to. The temperature is slowly creeping towards 40 today – that’s Celsius or 104 F. Luckily field work wasn’t of the essence today so I have spent the day reading in the shade, sitting in the pool, and now working on my computer in our little office which now has a portable AC unit. Grated that it is still 85 in here with the AC cranking full blast, but at least its not 104. It makes writing possible because my brain just doesn’t function when it gets this hot. And it pretty much has to function now as I’m churning through job application after application. Yes, it is the academic job season now. All the universities are teasing us with descriptions of fantastic biology and ecology jobs with our names on them. Just like the Christmas season except the academic job season leaves you feeling hollow and disappointed. Well, maybe Christmas leaves you feeling like that too, but that’s a different post. So I’ve spent the last several weeks either in the field repairing damage to our fences from that damnable rhino or writing about the many wonderful experiments I would do at University X if they would only give me the chance and hire me. So far its been a hard process as I’m not the best at selling myself. But it has made me slow down and think about what I want to accomplish in science and how I want to accomplish it.

Field work has been rather routine lately. That is except for the day that my fellow post-doc on the project chased after a rhino. No I don’t have that backwards the rhino didn’t chase him, he chased after the rhino. We were walking out to one of our sites which is a 3km walk into the bush off the fire break road when we cross paths with a male white rhino. Now the set of experiments that we were walking to has been terrorized by a rhino of late with the rhino practically flattening some of our fences. I have been close to throwing in the towel on this site as it is a pain to get to and maintenance has been far greater there than at other places, but we have persisted so far. Anyway, the post-doc sees the rhino, chambers a round into his rifle, and proceeds to run at the rhino screaming and clapping his hands. I think the rhino was even more surprised by this than I was and he tucked tail and ran away from this crazy two-legged creature running at him. I stayed behind wondering what I was going to say to this guy’s girlfriend when the rhino decided that he didn’t like being chased by this puny person. Luckily the rhino went his separate way and my friend returned from the chase and concluded that “Maybe that will scare him off.” I think it probably just pissed him off and he went and took it out on our fences. Oh well.