May 14-17

May 14, 2010
Loooong day. Breakfast at 6am; out in groups at 6:30. This was my first day doing the population surveys and vegetation sample plots. It was very tedious and took a while; plus, the sun was out today so it was slightly miserable and very difficult. We did see some leopard prints (apparently it's very rare to actually spot the buggers). And we saw a giraffe from afar on the crest of a hill. They assure us that the animals are much more numerous in the next place we're going and spotting them will happen much more often. But anyway, today was absolutely exhausting, and my legs feel like jelly from hiking, and now we're going to have two lectures by Dr. Bowers about the fossil record and evolution of primates...ughhh...



May 15, 2010
Today was a great day; we had a pleasant surprise when Shawn told us we were going on a game drive before work for the day. So we spent two hours driving through the park and we spotted giraffe, impala, kudu, zebra, and warthogs. Also a wildabeast and enough rhino poop to fill a kiddy pool.

After two hours' blissful escape from vegetation plots, we started another transept into a donga. After half of it, someone noticed a baboon on the other side of the ravine, so we stopped and tried to get a population survey and more baboons appeared; then, all of a sudden, there was a BLOWOUT--National Geographic style. A bunch of big ol' males started screaming and fighting and running down the cliff after one of them who had what looked like a vervet in its mouth. It was a definite shit show.
We all sat down on a rock and observed them for another hour or so. They calmed down, no sign of vervet lunch, and they went back to feeding and grooming. The alpha male kept giving us warning hoots to remind us we were close to his territory, but they were calm because the donga was obviously impassable for us. We were at the perfect viewing spot. Both groups were at about the same hight on our respective hills, so we could look across the 60m distance and watch the baboons interacting without them fearing us.
After they'd moved off to better trees, we finished our transect and did a vegetation plot while Shawn radioed Brandi the news about her beloved vervets' loss. Since the group with her probably couldn't do much primate data (the monkeys would not welcome visitors right after one of their own had been just picked off)we went to meet them at the road to figure out what to do.
To our pleasant surprise, Brandi and Shawn decided we'd go to a pub in town that had a pool. On the way there they kept warning us of how redneck the guys there would be, saying they'd be sure to make racist jokes or hit on us easy, wild, American girls.
It was fine though, and nice to sit with a (non-alcoholic!) drink by a small pool and just chat with everyone. Shawn told me I did good work today as the compass girl, blazing the trail with everyone walking single file behind me; i got the worst of the thorn damage!!
For dinner we had a braai (a South African barbeque) and had toasted marshmallows around the campfire. Eventful day overall!

May 16, 2010
Another day of hellish vegetation plots. At least we started with another, less successful, game drive. I think everyone was just about done with doing veggie plots; it was especially difficult today since Brandi was ill and therefore all 15 of us were using three tree i.d. books in an 10x10m plot...you know how that goes.
Dinner was followed by a genetics lecture by Dr. Bowers (yes, again), then a few of us sat around the fire pit, staying up til 10 (oooh! rebels!) since tomorrow we're doing NOTHING! Yay for a free day!

May 17, 2010
A blissful day of sleeping in (only until 7am, since we're so used to waking up at 5:30 now), lounging around and just getting shit done, like studying for our tests or reading articles and preparing for our presentations. Some of the people who hadn't gone in the monkey groups spent the morning hiking the dongas looking for them but with no luck. I spent some time chatting with Dr. Bowers about my research paper topic.

Dr. Bowers must have given her blessing for a few alcoholic beverages because Andrew took orders for a booze store run. I pitched in on some rum and had two rum 'n cokes with our braai dinner. It was our last night in Loskop so several of us stayed up late (10:30!!) to play some games and laugh around the campfire. Tomorrow: bye, Loskop, Hello Lajuma!

May 10-13

May 10, 2010
Finally in Africa! It was so awesome to meet the group at the airport; I feel like we all got along right off the bat. The plane ride was SO long, it was great to finally arrive. I kind of wish we had arrived to drive to Pretoria in daylight, but I guess we'll end up seeing plenty! Great meal, some introductions, now off to bed because I got maybe two hours of sleep on the plane!


May 11, 2010
Today was the first day of lectures--and there were a LOT of them. At times it was interesting, but other times it was just repeat for some of us from ANTH B200 or too quick to absorb anything and take notes to study and a lot of information (8 lectures at once!) being thrown at us. I'm glad we got it out of the way though.
It was nice to go to the mall--a bit more of a cultural experience than we've had so far. It was also a good opportunity to have lunch with the group and bond a bit more. By the end of that though I was exhausted and was eager for a nap that we didn't have time for before more lectures!
I'm super excited for Loskop Dam tomorrow. Seeing how I cope in a tent for five nights will be interesting!

May 12, 2010
This is sooooo cool! I'm in a sleeping bag, in a tent, at a research camp, at Loskop Dam in South Africa. Supposedly warthogs and baboons pass through this clearing on their way down the mountain; and earlier I saw a bushbaby--the first primate sighting! By me!
So the day started off with three quizzes on the material we learned yesterday (yes, we had just one overnight to study) then two lectures on measuring behavior and doing vegetation plots. After those we set off for Loskop Damn, about three hours from Oppi Steopp.
It took us forever to set up tents, and we finished right before dark. The whole time all the girls were squealing over a spider the size of my hand dangling above us (a golden orb web weaver, fyi).
The camp is decent; there's a converted garage with three beds that our group is rotating through in the next five nights (the camp only really houses 12, but there's our three leaders, their two research assistants, and two British girls, Vicky and Vicky, here to study giraffes, hence we're staying in tents behind the camp). Tomorrow I'm getting up early to help with breakfast and lunch sack prep.

May 13, 2010
Today was super awesome. We started with some introductions to tree and shrub identification, which was tedious, but a necessary start to the day. Funny story: we were pointed to a very thorny tree and told to identify it with the help of our books. The way a book identifies it is by taking you through a matrix of questions until it leads you to the right species. One question asked about the quality of the branches, and I said they looked very "robust". Shawn looked at me funny and I repeated it, not knowing what I said that merited the funny look. Turns out the tree was an Acacia robusta.
So then we split up into our groups for the day. Each day, three people would go with Brandi to observe the vervets and the rest would go with Shawn to do vegetation plots and population samples. Since I volunteered to do morning setup/clean up, Erica, Austin, and I got to go out today with Brandi.
We drove up to the first Donga (ravine) and hiked along it, looking for the group. We planned to search three dongas that this particular vervet group uses regularly until we came across them. We tried the three, hiking all morning, until Shawn radioed that the other students had spotted them across the road from where we were hiking. So after we finally found our monkeys, we had lunch and got the low-down about what we were supposed to be doing. We were each assigned to a monkey to follow in 10-minute intervals. I was assigned to Xena, the alpha female, distinguishable by a notch in the center of her left ear.
It was SO hard to follow the monkeys as they darted around, or keeping track of which was Xena (because looking through shaky binoculars waiting for the little bastard to turn her head and check the ear was tedious as heck). So when it got too hard we just did practice follows on random group members. I followed Punkey, the lowest ranking female with a head tilt, Pam, her daughter, Barfight (who looks like he's been in a barfight), and Xylo, Xena's subadult son who looks full-grown but his electric blue balls are still tucked up there :P We were supposed to record the start/stop times of behaviors such as feeding, grooming, self-grooming, mating, playing, and resting. We definitely got within about 15 feet of the monkeys; they were very habituated to researchers' presence.
We did that until about 4:30 then got back in time to beat the other group to the showers. Very early to bed (7:30!!) but my legs feel like jelly and if all days are this long, I'll need all the sleep I can get!

South Africa

So I'm totally back from South Africa and it was an amazing experience. Tried lots of new things, and I'm super glad I went. Since it's hard to describe three weeks of Africa in one go, I'm going to just type up the journal that I wrote while I was there, so y'all can get an idea of what precisely went on and what the hell I was doing over there. Will probably post a few entries at a time. So keep a lookout if you're interested!!