On my way out

Goodbye Africa.



This time tomorrow I'll be on my way to London. Not sure what I'll do there quite yet, but I'm guessing that'll figure itself out.

So it's been 2.5 months since I first arrived in Africa, and spending the past day on my own in Windhoek has really helped the whole experience sink in. When I first got here I honestly had no idea what to expect, both from the country and from CCF. I felt like I'd done plenty of work since moving to DC two years ago, so I was fine with almost any outcome. Even if it was just an African vacation I'd have been fine with it.

As it turned out that was far from the case. I worked 6 or 7 days each week, usually for 10+ hours. I helped run an international course in predator/livestock management, organized a lot of the research done on the farm, and met a bunch of great people. It was definitely worth it.

Now I need to get back to business as usual. School starts on the 31st. The grad student government has been waiting on me to start allocating funding for student groups. Discussion sections will be meeting soon, too.

I'll try to post at least once from London, and I'll also start the photo-posting process soon. Expect a post sometime next week with a photo link dump.

One more week...

Somehow the summer has managed to fly by already. Next Sunday I'll be on my way to Windhoek again, then off to London for a few days and finally back to DC. I've been working 6-7 days every week so I guess it just hasn't sunk in yet. It's been an action-packed couple of months (not that you could by my infrequent updates) but I'm feeling alright that it's coming to a close. I haven't been homesick yet, but I do feel ready to get back to my normal routine. I'm ready for classes and teaching, and to get back into my various other activities. It'll also be really nice to make phone calls and use the Internet on a regular basis!

I've been tracking rhinos for 12 days straight now. They've finally started to settle down so we've set up some camera traps along the roads they use. That should provide some good evidence of their physical condition...unless they decide to break the cameras. The transmitter on one our females has gone very weak (we haven't been able to track her in 6 days) so I spent most of yesterday climbing the Waterberg Plateau to try and get a better signal. I couldn't find her, but I did climb a lot of rocks and got some nice pics. It's possible that next week I'll be going up in a small plane to track from the air. I'll keep you posted.

That's about all for now. I wish I had more time to edit these things, but if I did it'd take even longer to post than it does now. Hopefully the "stream of consciousness" approach I'm using now works just as well.

Rhino Tracking

I may not have mentioned this in earlier posts, but CCF owns eight farms (covering about 50,000 hectares) here, with lots of wildlife including leopard, cheetah, and plenty of antelope of various species. We've also been reintroducing black rhinos, a species which was hunted out over the last 50 years.

We received our first two rhinos in November, and they've been hanging out deep in the bush near the Waterberg Plateau. I know this because we track them using radio signals. This past week we received two more males and two females, bringing us to six. They're still settling in, so I've been out every day tracking their movements. It's a nice gig, the country is beautiful and occasionally I see some cool stuff.

Our youngest male has recently escaped from our fenced in reserve (which protects them from poachers) so I've been out tracking/trying to push him back onto our property. Most of the time this has meant driving around in trucks, but I've also been close to him on foot. The area is very densely vegetated, so I haven't been too close (and I haven't been charged). I did find a black mamba skin, which was pretty awesome.

So far I haven't seen too much of the rhinos, with the exception of the releases when we let them out of their crates. I have seen our biggest male each of the last two days though, and I have some good pics that I'll pass along soon. It's been pretty exciting.

PS - The BBC and MSNBC will be filming here over the next two weeks, so yours truly might be shepherding film people around. Word on the street is Jeff Corwin will be here, too.

Seatbelts Save Lives

**NOTE: I don't want anyone to worry as they read, so I'm playing
spoiler. Everyone walked away from this accident. I'm still
amazed.**

I'm also sorry this has taken so long to post. Last week was very
busy, followed by a weekend in Swakopmund (the beach), and this week
we reintroduced some rhinos. One broke through several fences and I've
been out tracking him through the bush for a couple of days.
Anyway...

This past weekend (July 8-19) was our annual Gala fundraiser in
Windhoek, so yours truly and most of the CCF staff had been there to
mingle/work on raising money. We returned on Sunday afternoon. I had
ridden down in our Quantum (a minivan), but on the return trip I
hopped in one of our bakkies (a truck) to come back early. More
specifically, I was riding in a 2007 Toyota Hilux crew cab, which
looks like a Tundra. Our cheetah keepers, Matt and Kate, were up
front and Rob (our IT guy) and Leigh (Laurie Marker's assistant, among
other things) were in back with me.

About a half hour north of Windhoek we had finally gotten away from
most development and were driving the speed limit - 120km/h (~75 mph).
Leigh and I had drifted off so I didn't see much of what happened.
Suddenly Matt is yelling "Oh, SHIT!" and we're swerving right into the
opposite lane. We drive on the left side of the road here.

Apparently someone in a small truck had decided to pull off the
shoulder and into our lane about 50m ahead. I seriously doubt they
checked their mirrors. Kate swerved to avoid him, and honestly saved
our lives. We would have caught the truck broadside, and at the very
least Matt, Kate and Leigh (who was in the back but only had a lap
belt) would have been in serious trouble. The other driver would have
been killed on the spot.

As we started the swerve I glanced out the windshield and saw a ravine
and an 8 foot game fence straight ahead. Fortunately Kate turned us
back to the left. It was an overcorrection, but there was no way we
could have stayed on the road at this point. I'm glad we missed that
fence and ravine.

I doubt we slowed much when we dropped off the shoulder. I remember
the truck had spun almost 180 degrees by the time we did, and I was
staring out the windshield watching us tip. I don't remember any
noise until we landed on our side, then there was hammering all around
us. The change in kinetic energy (or at least my perception of it)
was the craziest thing. One second all I felt was sliding, then we
were spinning like mad. Dust was all over. I could see the daylight
out the windows spin around the truck three times before we stopped,
upside down.

A cattle fence had stopped us. We didn't know this at the time, but
about two and a quarter rolls in the roof of the truck hit a wire
fence. The tension of the wires acted a bit like a net. The best
analogy I've been able to come up with is the scene from 'Dumbo' where
the little elephant lands on the telephone wires and bends them almost
to the ground. Imagine that, only horizontal. We bent the metal
poles supporting the fence, but missed them both (luck?). The wires
actually bent the frame along the windshield down to the steering
wheel.

So there we were, inverted in a rolled truck. We checked we each
other...somehow all of us were OK. I wanted out to assess the
situation and had the absolutely brilliant idea of using both hands to
undo my belt. I dropped straight off the seat and landed on my head,
sustaining a bump/cut that was probably my worst injury of the
accident. I crawled out the window and helped get Leigh out. Rob and
Matt made it out on their own. Kate was shaken up but we got her out
as well.

The scene looked worse than it was. The fibreglass camper shell broke
apart and all of our gala stuff flew out. Leigh's purse was ejected
from the car, but when we found it the laptop still worked. Even the
picture frames (which were packed quite well) survived. All we lost
was one camera and a laptop.

I have so much more to say about this, but very little time. Perhaps
later. The important thing is that we all survived, even if it has
been a bit hard to drive. Hope you're all doing well. I'll update
soon, but now I need to grab some radio tracking gear and head back
out to herd a 3 year old black rhino back onto our property!

Cheetah Cubs!

The big news around CCF this weekend is the arrival of four orphan
cheetah cubs. A couple of our staff trapped them two nights ago about
100km south of our farms. Their mother was caught in a fence and
died. Fortunately for the cubs she was wearing a CCF satellite collar
and the farmer whose property she had been living on noticed she was
with cubs not long before her death.

The cubs (3 males, 1 female) are about 3 months old and weigh about
10-12lbs. They arrived this morning and I've spent most of the day
helping with their work-ups, which include vaccinations, blood work
and an IV drip to combat dehydration. They were out on their own for
5 days, but they still had plenty of fight left. An angry baby
cheetah is actually way more intimidating than any of our adult cats.
I've got some decent photos but I was also taking video for the CCF
website so I may need to post the link if any of my clips end up
online. I may also be writing the blog entries for this, I'll post
that as well. One of the males had a huge open laceration on his
chest, so we needed to clean and stitch him up as well. Lots of
not-so-cute pics of that, too.

In other news, I found out that the cubs' nursery is right next to my
desk, so expect plenty of baby pics when I get back! I know you're
excited...

NOTE: I've noticed my latest entries have had some weird
formatting...I'm assuming that's due to gmail. I'm not sure if I can
send it in a different format since I'm working with the most basic
version of email at the moment, but I'll try.

Tier the Jack Russell

I wanted to share a short story about a dog I met while working the
International Course on Integrated Livestock and Predator Management
in June. A husband and wife who lead safaris in the Okavango region
were course participants and they brought their terrier along. He is
four years old and has to be the toughest dog I've ever met. As a
puppy his right eye was ripped out by a bull mastiff. Not long after
he was run over by a truck, breaking his back legs. Once he could run
again he was stepped on by a zebra, and beat up in a fight with a
honey badger.

This should be the end for most dogs, but the story gets better. He
was riding in a Land Rover, saw a springbok next to the road and gave
chase. He fell out of the car and was run over...again. Finally (if
I'm remembering everything) he was mauled by a leopard a few months
ago. The cat grabbed him by the back of the neck, dislocating one of
his vertebrae but not severing the spinal cord before his owners saved
him. He now has a limp on his right side and apparently no feeling in
his right front paw (when you squeeze it nothing happens).

As his owner Chris says, "They build them smarter, but they don't
build them tougher." I have to agree. Chris, by the way, lost his
left arm and the biceps of his right arm to a crocodile in Kruger
National Park in 1994. It's funny how much dogs and their owners
resemble each other, I guess.

Anyway, Tier is also the father of five and he sings when you say the
name of the mother of his pups. It's a little too cute if you ask me.
So that's the story of the toughest dog I've ever met, if he lives to
be eight I'll be interested in seeing how many more scars he's got.

Fourth of July

Happy birthday, America!!

Namibia is like Nevada...with giraffes

Or maybe Arizona. When I first flew into Windhoek, the capital, the
only thing I could think about was how big and empty this country is.
From altitude it looks like the American Southwest -- huge, flat, dry,
with the occasional ridge or plateau rising up from the plains. On
the ground the only difference is that the tress are larger and
termite mounds are everywhere. Instead of junipers there are acacia
trees, but the shrubs look just like the sagebrush, rabbitbush and
bitter bush back in the Great Basin.

For those of you who don't know much about where in the world I am
right now, and I don't blame you if you don't, Namibia is located in
the southwest corner of Africa, along the Atlantic coast just north of
South Africa. It is a new country, just over 19 years old.
Originally the area was home to a number of groups, including the
Herrero, the Damara and the San bushmen. The last two groups include
clicks in their language (think of the film, "The Gods Must Be
Crazy"). In the late 1800s the Germans claimed ownership of the land,
a title they lost after the Great War when the British annexed it.
South Africa kept it as a colony after their independence and Namibia
was finally freed in 1990. Of course there are plenty of embarrassing
stories of colonial oppression as there are in the rest of Africa. If
you're interested in learning more I recommend the Namibia Wikipedia
page.

Present day Namibia is still very rural. The country is the size of
Texas and Louisiana and has 2.2 million people, most of whom live very
close to the Angola border in the north. I'm in central Namibia, and
there's hardly anyone around. Windhoek is the largest city by far
(and the capital) and its population does not surpass 300,000. The
coast is mostly sand dunes with some penguin and fur seal colonies and
holds the ominous title of the Skeleton Coast, due to the large number
of shipwrecks. The interior is mostly desert, with the exception of
the northeast, which is part of the Okavango watershed. Most of the
country is divided into farms for cattle and small stock, a subject I
hope to get into later.

I'm working on a series of eight large farms, totaling over 50,000
hectares in size. The CCF Centre where I live is located on the farm
Elandsvreugde, which is an Afrikaans word meaning "eland's joy".
Eland are the world's largest antelope. This farm has a 1500ha open
pasture that has been creatively named The Big Field. I drive safaris
out there to count game including eland, oryx, greater kudu, red
hartebeest, warthog and cheetah. Not a bad gig. I should also
mention that there are several leopards living within 100 yards of my
room, and a black mamba killed one of our goats today. Welcome to
Africa.

Our other farms are just about as interesting. Due to some scheduled
changes, I've lived on three farms so far, the other two being Boskop,
where we keep the donkeys and horses that feed our 46 captive
cheetahs, and Cheetah View, which also has leopards but few cheetahs.
The latter farm also only had power for a few hours each day and I had
to build a fire every morning for hot water. The showers were
outdoors and it is winter. I'm pretty glad I moved.

I won't mention much about the other farms except that two of them
recently received some black rhinos which I will be tracking using
radio transmitters, and another is our fenced in farm where our
giraffe and zebra live. I believe it's also where we do trophy hunts.
I've been on each of our properties setting up a camera trap study to
estimate cheetah population sizes...more on this in an upcoming post.

Anyway, that's a much delayed intro into where I am. Up next -- the
international course on integrated livestock/predator management that
I helped run at the beginning of June.

Catching up

I've been in Namibia for over three weeks now and I've got a long list of blog entries scribbled down and ready for typing.  The process will probably take me a few days (more like a week or two) to catch up on, so before I begin I want to spend a little time letting you all know where I'm at and what I'm doing.  I'm living in north central Namibia, 44km east of a town called Otjiwarongo (pronounced oh-chee-var-ohngo).  It's not far from the middle of nowhere, the farm we're based on is just below the Waterberg Plateau, a national park and generally impressive pile of rock.  There's lots of wildlife, including cheetahs and leopards...I'll post more on this later.

 

About what I do - we have a saying here that staff at CCF (Cheetah Conservation Fund) wear many hats.  This means I work 6-7 days a week doing things that were never mentioned in my job description.  I came here to be the Volunteer Coordinator and to look at some land management/biofuel policies.  I spent the first two weeks helping run an international livestock/predator management course, and since that time I've helped entertain donors, fix fences and move cheetahs.  Busy, busy, busy.

 

I'll try to sneak in another entry later today (hoping for a half day...I miss weekends).  Hope all of you are doing well!

Email Testing

With any luck this will be my first email post.  Should be much easier to post things once I don't have to load the blogger page.

Technical Difficulties

This should come as no surprise, but I'm a long way from most of the world's bandwidth here in Namibia. We use satellite internet here, which reminds me an awful lot of dial-up. It's slow enough that you can't get much done and so unreliable you want to throw a monitor out the window. T.I.A. (I'll explain later) I'm hoping to set up an email posting system through Gmail soon that will allow me to post more quickly. The pictures may take some time though.

All is well...more to come.

My plane karma makes no sense

So I'm in Namibia now - will post more on this later - but first I'll summarize those 30+ hours of flying and sleeping in airports that were June 4-6.

DC to London was nothing too special, just a redeye flight like any other I've taken. Landing at Heathrow was where things got comical. I was sitting next to a grandmother and her granddaughter from Yorkshire and, as we were taxiing in to the terminal, they pointed out a 747 parked in front of what looked like a maintenance building that was missing pieces of its vertical stabilizer (not sure if I should call it a rudder). Anyway, the plane definitely looked like it might have been on fire some time in the recent past, so I made some clever remark about being glad that wasn't our plane and thought nothing of it.

When I got to the gate for my flight to Johannesburg I noticed there was just a bus, not a jet there. I'm sure you all see where this is going. We boarded the bus and headed off to find our plane, only to find that -- drum roll, please -- it was the ghetto jumbo jet with half a tail. (It really had more than half, but the fact that part of the tail was GONE seems like reason enough to be nervous) So I climbed a long set of stairs onto a 747, absolutely certain that my life was going to end before I crossed the Mediterranean.

Things did get a bit better after that. The flight had only 53 people onboard, not including stewards, so I had my own row...from window to window. That's really helpful if you're looking for some good airplane sleep. It was also clear enough that I had an excellent view of the English Channel, Paris, the Alps, the Tunisian coast/Sahara, and eventually the Congo River before clouds/evening set in.

Spending the night in the Johannesburg airport was not as bad as I thought it would be (thank you, sleepinginairports.com!). I found a nice isolated set of benches to sleep on, then woke up to someone sitting against my feet. Apparently I settled down right in front of a gate with a late night flight, so within an hour of my falling asleep there was now enough of a crowd that the only sitting room were the benches I had rudely claimed for sleep. My bad.

Flying Air Namibia was almost as interesting as that last jumbo jet adventure. At first our boarding was delayed for 15 minutes due to "problems with the airplane." Problems. More than one. What was worse was that after 5 minutes the airline rep got on the mic and said, "Nevermind, we'll board now." Another fine choice of words. When we did board, I was seated at the window behind the exit row, but the seat in front of me was missing. It looked like it should have been there actually, but there was no seat. At first I was a little concerned, then excited because of all that extra leg room, but then the flight crew informed me that I was now responsible for assisting the crew in case of emergency. I was the new exit row because part of the actual exit row was gone. Awesome. What followed was a very thorough explanation of how to handle my responsibilities. I've been seated in exit rows before, and this was way more detailed. In addition, the steward was using phrases like "after we crash" that did not leave me totally convinced in his faith in the pilot or the plane. Maybe you had to be there, but the combination of comments, the missing seat, and my earlier flight didn't do much for my confidence in Air Namibia.

Fortunately for all of us on that plane, my confidence rarely has an impact on the outcome of the commercial flights I board. The ride was fine, the food was actually delicious, and the weather was beautiful. The landing was perfect, the landscape was absolutely impressive. As I got off the plane I couldn't help but smile. I had made it, everything had worked out. No problems at all.

My duffel bag is somewhere between here and London. Crap.

Trekking

At Dulles now waiting for a flight. Heading to London tonight, then off to Johannesburg tomorrow morning (early). I get to Joburg around 8pm local (I think that's 2am on the East Coast) then spend what I'm sure will be a lovely evening sleeping like a hobo in the international terminal. Up early Saturday morning to fly to Windhoek.

Next post won't be for a few days but hopefully the internets are somewhere nearby when I get to Namibia.

It begins...

It's finally June 3, 2009. Tomorrow I begin my three day journey to Otjiwarongo, Namibia, to work for the Cheetah Conservation Fund. I'll be working with their interns (mostly undergraduates from the US and Europe) teaching some field techniques and with the CCF Bush Pty Ltd, a business initiative that focuses on habitat restoration (i.e., cutting brush) to improve cheetah habitat and cattle rangeland in addition to generating fuelwood products and income for local communities.

At least that's what I've been told. I'll know for sure in a couple of days...and hopefully all of you will know soon after that. At the moment I'm not too concerned about it. I still have a ton of stuff to move into the basement for the summer, and I have yet to receive the work visa I need to get into Namibia. We'll see how this goes...