Awesome Camera Sales (Gabby)

Happy Thanksgiving!
Gary Farber of Hunt's Photo has just sent over some Black Friday specials for Thanksgiving. Gary is one of our top supporters and I wanted to send along these deals. There are some incredible specials, so check it out for holiday shopping!

http://wbhunt.com/blackfriday

Best,
Gabby

Adventures in the Bush (Gabby)

I have not written in a few weeks, because schoolwork has become both challenging and overwhelming. When we returned from the Western Cape almost two weeks ago we were greeted with independent projects, final exams, insect and plant collections, and final presentations. All of these projects have led to interesting discovery and some events that confirm the often used acronym TIA (This is Africa) to explain away odd and crazy things that happen everyday.


Our independent project consists of five days of field research, two days of planning, and four days of writing. I decided to work on a project dealing with fire in the savanna ecosystem because fire is one of the most important drivers of diversity in this part of the world. While I was not able to light fires, I was able to study the effects of variability in fire regime on structural and floristic diversity of savanna vegetation. The park currently works under the assumption that pyrodiversity begets biodiversity. Basically, a site which burns in regimented increments will be less diverse than a site that burns sporadically and goes for long periods without fire before burning again. This involved 16 100 x 50 m plots and identifying all the trees within them to species and size class. All in all, a group of five identified 5,547 trees in four days. I believe that I personally identified around 2,000 as I was in charge of identification instead of recording. This project, along with the plant collection that I am working has opened me up to the world of botany. While I have previously been ignorant of plants, I now find them fascinating and am considering graduate work in plant life history strategies and competition between species.

Now for the exciting part . . . on our third day in the field we went down a dirt road early in the morning and happened across an abandoned vehicle with the keys still in the ignition. There should not be any empty vehicles in Kruger unless they have research stickers on the side. People should not be out of their cars when lions are out and about. This struck our game guard, Stevie, as odd. He called in the license plate and we continued to our site. When we arrived at the site we heard noises after a few minutes and saw a lion close by that was stalking us. The lion was scared away although we stayed close together. Steve had a rifle, which made us all more comfortable, but we were still looking around for trees to climb at each turn. About 15 minutes later we heard more noises, which Stevie quickly identified as a black rhino. While white rhinos are dangerous, they can be thrown off your course easily. Black rhinos, on the other hand, are like homing pigeons. They lock on you and you are toast. So, we keep an eye out for the rhino as Stevie circles us with the gun and we continue identifying trees. Five minutes after that we see helicopters flying in to the place where the abandoned car was on the road. This struck a note, because while an abandoned cars are a bad sign, the calvary is not usually called in at once.

We survived the black rhino and made our way out to the road to find it swarming with police cars. Stevie drove up to inquire and heard the story in Tsonga, a native language. He laughed along with the police officers after hearing the story and we were confused as to what could be so funny. He translated the following story: the previous night the manager of one of the park picnic sites (who has the keys to the cash register) was kidnapped by two men who stole his car and drove to this spot to leave the car and cross the river to get out the park. The picnic manager was still missing and they were trying to find him. We were welcome to continue our research in the area, but could we please keep an eye out for a body. Stevie then proceeded to joke that his rifle would not hold up against the AK47s of the criminals. We worked on one more field site in the area, did not find a body, and emerged unscathed. It was by far the most exciting fieldwork I have done to date!

In other news, I have had two encounters with wild dogs and pups. They were both brief and it was too dark to get good images, but very neat! Moths and other insects are emerging and the sky is filled with winged termites at night. The bathrooms look like insect graveyards because they are attracted to the lights and meet their death in the night.

I have included an image of a moth that is vibrating its wings and a picture of a chameleon from the Western Cape.

More soon!

Gabby

Frogs (Gabby)

The rains have started here and the frogs are popping up everywhere! I am in the middle of writing a long research paper and will send an update soon, for now here are some new pictures!

- Gabby

Fynbos and Fish Parasites

We have been staying at De Hoop Nature Reserve for the past week for our last round of Faculty Field Projects (FFPs). De Hoop is in the Western Cape and about 5 hours from Cape Town. We are still in a fynbos habitat where proteas, ericas, and restios abound. Unfortunately, there is very little flowering at the moment, but the species that are flowering are quite spectacular.
For the FFPs, we worked on restoration ecology with Dr. Sue Milton and fish parasitology with two professors from University of Cape Town. The first project focused on the restoration of fynbos and karoo vegetation after alien species invasion. Fynbos is domianted by short shrubs and any trees in this environment are non-native. We looked at sites where non-native trees have been cleared to allow the regrowth of fynbos vegetation and how ant communities and soils differ between undisturbed sites and sites disturbed at different time intervals. My job was to take soil samples and test soil pH. This involved digging under leaf litter to characterize soils and evaluating the density of leaf litter.
For the other project, we went fishing! Using large and small nets we caught 20 indigenous fish and 20 non-native fish. Using a dissection kit and microscopes, we looked on the outside and inside of the fish for different species of parasites. Sometimes parasites can only be seen with a microscope and sometimes large colonies of worms spilled out of organs as we sliced into the fish. One of the more amusing moments came when we caught a few extra fish for dinner on the first day before we proceeded to dissect the fish. After seeing the parasites, most of the students requested a vegetarian dish.
I have been hiking each day across the mountains behind the environmental center where we are staying. There is a colony of Cape vultures that nests on the cliffs and while they are not easy to photograph I can make them out with my binoculars. There are also a number of neat lizard species here with brilliantly colored bellies that they flash during mating displays.
Yesterday we had our day off and ventured to Cape Agulhas, the southermost point of Africa. We climbed out onto the rocks and explored for a few minutes before climbing back into the car and visiting the beach. Tomorrow we return to Cape Town and from there will fly to Johannesburg for the last leg of our trip. Kruger will be green when we return and will be dramatically different from the park that we left. I am looking forward to getting back and seeing all of the baby animals that should arrive as spring progresses.
More soon!
Gabby

The landscape images are from Cape Point and the second image of ostriches is from the ostrich farms surrounding De Hoop.