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!