Matt Snider - Letters from South Africa - Part V

Part I - Part II - Part III - Part IV - Part V - Home

Hello Folks,
News from the bush, again. Life has been busy busy busy as I've come into my new responsibilities as an intern. No longer a volunteer or "expedition member" I now have to help grease the wheels to make sure the operation continues to run smoothly. It's kind of strange with people now expecting me to know what's happening. The new batch of volunteers has arrived and it has been exciting to see their first impressions of the bush. While we sat around the fire at the fire pit next to the house everyone had to introduce themselves, where they were from and a short blurb about why they were here and what they were looking to do in the future. About halfway through the introductions, the bats that live in our roof woke up and began streaming out, their exit being right above the fire pit. Within the span of about two minutes all thirty or so bats came careening out of the hole, diving down towards the fire pit to gain some speed before opening their wings and flapping wildly into the night. The staff just sat and smiled. The volunteers screamed for their lives and threw themselves backwards out of the chairs. The poor bats probably went deaf. Altogether, it was pretty entertaining. After the volunteers had regained their composure (kind of) we continued with the introductions. Staff did the last introductions and after a few stories from my colleagues about them being raised in the bush by gorillas or failing their start-up businesses as pet detectives, I did my entire introduction in a heavy Southern drawl, saying I was from South Carolina and I came out to the bush to "find myself".

Eventually we let them know we weren't quite as crazy as we seemed and the ball got rolling on training them in techniques to conduct in field research. They received intensive lectures in animal identification and behavior, research strategies and techniques, and health and safety. I have been conducting a few lectures for the volunteers, most of them being about the importance of properly compiled data and how to enter into our databases correctly. It seems a little dry at times so I've taken to mixing in a few really scary pictures into my slide shows to make sure they are paying attention. While the volunteers are getting trained, it falls on the interns to clean the house and cook when not conducting lectures. Now that training week is over the cleaning duties are now delegated to the volunteers, which I am so devastated by.

There have been a few hiccups in the research but altogether things are going well. One of the hiccups is that one of our research focus animals somehow managed to ditch her collar. We walked in on the signal expecting to find a female cheetah and her two cubs and only found a collar with a broken clasp next to a termite mound. Now we are going to have to schedule a Vet to come in to safely dart her to put the collar back on. This is complicated by the fact that we will also have to dart her two cubs (who are now bigger than she is) because they are not going to take kindly to our darting of their mother. For the time being we are giving her a bit of a vacation from the collar but we will have to re-collar her in the not distant future or their will be a conspicuous gap in the continuity of our behavioral data. Another speed bump we have encountered is that a few of our pieces of research equipment are reaching the end of their effective lives. As a result we have had to place orders for replacement equipment but most of it is custom made and is therefore expensive and slow to get. Operator skill has become much more important as the Telem apparatuses become harder to use. It's not all bad news on the research front though. We have finally found the new Hyena den. It has taken us some time because they abandon their last home pretty quickly for no apparent reason (I blame the real estate prices). Their new home is a long way away which is part of the reason it took us so long to find it. Now we have been able to re-establish regular Hyena behavior watches to make sure everyone is healthy and accounted for. In response, they have started visiting the house again and pooing on our lawn as if to say, "Yeah, we know where you live too." The ironic thing is that we are currently collecting feces samples for a researcher at the Queen's University in Dublin studying parasite loads in various species. The fact that they poo on our lawn makes collection so much easier. This does little to reassure the volunteers who get to collect it.

But the animals continue to do their thing. One of the male Cheetahs sprained his ankle very badly and was unable to hunt at all because he wasn't even able to put his foot down to bear weight. Fortunately, he was half of a male Cheetah coalition and his brother did the hunting until he was able to recover. Another example of advantageous evolutionary behavior. If the brothers were not a coalition that sprain would have proven fatal because Cheetahs need to be in top condition to hunt and evade other predators effectively. As it was the healthy brother picked up the slack in hunting for the pair and served as a deterrent if a Leopard considered attacking the injured brother. In the last two and a half weeks the sprain has healed and they are able to pair hunt again. Our Lions have been active as well. They have increased their roaming and Zero, our big resident male, has made a habit of sitting on our eastern fence line looking over the road into the adjacent reserve. He has started having staring matches with the big male Lion named Kalahari from next door and they frequently spend hours sizing each other up. Sometimes they have gotten vocal and while I don't quite understand Lion yet (still working on it) it sounds like they are shouting "Your Momma" insults across the fences. I don't really have the guts to join in because there is never a fence separating me from the Lion on my side and he really likes his momma. Life here continues to be a blast. Every day is different not just in work but in play as well. I actually decided to go for a run yesterday morning (yeah, yeah, you can pick your jaws up off the floor) and was about halfway down the driveway when one of my co-workers leaned out the window and shouted that I should get my butt back here. Thinking that he just wanted me to take the trash out so he wouldn't have too I gave him a laugh and kept going. He kept shouting at me and I was about eight or nine strides further down the road when I faintly heard him yell something about Elephants. Now I perked up. I trotted back and he said of all the days I could decide to go for a run I did it the day the Elephant herd was in the river, about 50 meters south of the house. Looks like a sign, no more running for me. I mean it would have been cool to see the Eles but when I go out for a run I'm not usually planning on running for my life. Maybe next time.

Don't get me wrong though, I have been getting plenty of exercise. I recently found out about pick-up soccer games and volleyball matches at the reserve adjacent to ours and have become a frequent player. The soccer is with a bunch of the reserve staff so I have loved playing with Africans. I can't understand a word they are saying but the game and goodwill is international. They play so differently than I am used to. I have always played a disciplined style where maintaining positions and formations are critical to provide the most balanced offense and defense. Here they play without a care to positions and coverage which means the game appears wildly disorganized but is so fluid without people being limited to certain spaces on the field. It reminds me more of ocean waves, crashing madly in one direction then sweeping quickly in the other. Where I am used to a tightly controlled defense facing a well planned offense, the way they play here results in a maddening combination of breakaways and one on one face offs. I look forward to playing more.

I've gotten to know the volunteer groups from most of the surrounding reserves as well which has been spectacular! Everyone is about the same age and has uniform interest in being out in the bush and having a great time. On Saturday nights the place to be is Mahlahla (try pronouncing that one. Can't get it? It's Ma-shlaw-shlaw). It's a local lodge that opens its pub for all the volunteers in the area. There are usually over three dozen countries represented and it has been a blast getting to know people from backgrounds that seem so similar at times but so different at others. I have gotten a lot better at shooting pool over debates ranging from capitalism's impact on government foreign policy to Nutella vs Peanut Butter. I made the mistake of getting into that last debate with a half French half-Swedish girl and she pushed me in the pool when I wouldn't budge on my commitment to Peanut Butter. The camaraderie here is quite strong after hanging out with each other so much and having so much in common. We see each other during the week out on the drives through the reserve or picking up supplies in town and share a friendly backslap and "Y'ebo, Howzit!" The resulting networking is phenomenal. It's not unusual to visit each others' base camps for interviews with project bosses that were set up over a burger on Saturday night.

I hope all of you are having fun too. Let me know where life has taken you. Unless it has taken you to air conditioning. Then I don't want to hear about it.

Peace,
Matt