All good things come to an end

Nothing lasts. I'm moving on again, to Capetown next week and then back to Canada in March. It is terribly sad to leave all the people I have met here but it is time. I have been here longer than anyone else in the barn. People have gotten the idea that I know what's going on and sometimes I actually do: I know the best places to swim, how to light the water heater, what is jumping on the roof (bushbabies have the night shift, and samangoes take over during the day with a little help from the baboons), and how to bake on a gas camping stove. I am hoping to get some decent baboon pictures before I go, but these are the best so far.

One of the samangoes. Whenever monkeys sit like this, I have a cartoonish urge to pull their tails.

Sadly, one of my favourite baboons has probably died. Klink was the oldest male in the troop and looked ancient and frail for years, so it was not unexpected. I never saw him pick a fight, unusual in a baboon, and he was so old and harmless that none of the other males bothered to threaten him. We saw him one day, feeding and keeping up with the others, and then we didn't see him the next day. It has been four days now so we don't expect to see him again. Our baboons actually have pretty good lives here: very few predators bother them and there is so much food that they all have little pot bellies.

I think this is Knight, one of the older juvenile males.

I have been very busy with following baboons, looking for jobs, packing, and training my replacements. There were three new people to replace me, but one of them quit already because she was scared of snakes. It's a good thing she wasn't with me this morning, because I saw the biggest snake I have seen here yet. It was at least 3m long, so it must have been a black mamba because they are the only snake here that gets that big. I don't know for certain that it was even alive, because it did not react at all and I got within 2m before I saw it. I think it was alive though, and just lying in the sun to get warm after a cold night. 

I liked the symmetry of the two grooming pairs here. In the background you can see the brai area (South African BBQ) and an early prototype of the baboon weighing platform (the triangular thing).

I am organizing a treasure hunt. Monday I got some toys in town and yesterday I hid them while I was out with the baboons. I'm going to give everyone the GPS coordinates and see how long it takes them to find the prizes. I tried to put the treasures near pretty views or interesting rock formations. Only the baboon people ever go off the trails so this will be a good opportunity for everyone else to see some new territory. 

Samangoes are territorial and try to drive the baboons away. Baboons are much bigger and not territorial, and they interpret the samangoes' threats as an invitation to play. The one on the left is a samango, on the right is a very young baboon, and I'm not sure what the one at the top is.

Meet the New Baby!

We have new people! We have been collecting the new bunch of people over the last few weeks and there are about a dozen of us after the four we picked up in town yesterday. Two more are coming tomorrow, and they will be replacing me on the baboon project. I have to help train them, so I hope they will be keen to scramble up cliffs after the baboons. It is always interesting when you get new people at a field station and everyone has to get to know each other again. We are planning a big welcome party on Saturday, with a limbo contest and drinks in coconuts. Katy is going to show me how to open a coconut the proper way, with a machete.

The youngest member of our Lajuma family is also the cutest. Her name is Mally, or something I can never remember, and she is a baby dormouse. We suspect the cat killed the mother dormouse while she was moving her nest. Adult dormice are pests because they attract snakes, and the cat is here to control them, but the baby has become a pet. Her eyes are almost beginning to open and she has soft grey fur. She can crawl around pretty well and likes to nuzzle against people. Rodents are usually very fearful but this one is too young to be afraid of us. She is tiny enough to sit in a teaspoon and possibly the cutest thing I have ever seen. She lives in a box with a hot water bottle and gets baby formula from a syringe every two hours. Camilla was embarassed about buying the formula, and gave the cashier a rambling explanation that it was for a dormouse, not a baby.

 Here I am with one of the samango monkeys. He is the barn troop male, and his name is Nelson or Shitbag, depending who you ask. He has been known to come inside houses and steal food. 

I am still looking for something to do after this. I have sent out a bunch of applications and had quite a few interviews so hopefully I will get some good news soon. It doesn't help when somebody throws a toad at you during an interview while you're trying to sound competent and professional. (To be fair, she was just trying to remove it from the house and it escaped). We have lots of red toads in the house, but at least they have not been taking shelter in my boots at night anymore.

On an unrelated note, here is a rhino from Kruger National Park. You can tell it is a white rhino because it has a square lip and it is grazing. Black rhinos have a narrow hooked lip and usually browse. I still don't have any really good baboon pictures, but here are two I took the other day.

 Here are two baboons in a hurry, and one of the younger juveniles stuffing his face. I wish I had cheek pouches like a monkey. Am I the only one who thinks it would be convenient to be able to just stuff breakfast in your mouth and chew it later during a boring part of your commute?

My baboons are getting wet!

Hi everyone,
It's been a while, but I've been busy. I have to leave Lajuma pretty soon and looking for another job takes up a lot of my time. I've got a bunch of applications pending, so wish me luck!

We have been having a bit of a drought here. It is supposed to be the rainy season but we had weeks without any rain. Plants were wilting in the forest and some of the streams dried up. There were distant thunderstorms almost daily but they always rumbled their way around the mountain without touching us. Then the other day a group from the University of Venda came to work on invertebrates. Their study requires dry weather, so naturally it started raining the day they arrived and hasn't stopped since. At least the baboons will be happy: it was so dry they had to resort to digging up grass corms like they do in winter. They do hate getting wet though. They also bite through the water pipes to get a drink, and I think at least one may have figured out how to turn on the outdoor tap. I saw about six of them queueing to drink from the tap. They queue baboon-style, from largest to smallest not by who has been waiting longest.

Babooning has not been going very well. The troop keeps going much farther than they used to, so I keep seeing new places. I have been most of the way up several of the peaks in the area, sometimes more than one in a day. Baboons don't need any sissy trails since they can move easily through thick undergrowth. They can also climb cliffs that I won't attempt without ropes, and move as fast vertically as they could on flat ground. I guess it helps that they are insanely tough and if they fall 10 m onto pointy rocks they just run right back up. In their usual home range I know all the shortcuts so I can go around the worst of the cliffs and thickets, but if they go someplace new it gets tougher. I lose them a lot, and that means patrolling around trying to find them again. You would think it would be easy to find 80-odd large noisy animals, but they could be anywhere in their 2000 ha home range and there are several other troops that use the same area. I had to leave them yesterday morning because there was a thunderstorm and they headed for the highest ground around (you never hear about baboons being hit by lightning though). We tried to find them all afternoon but failed, so I have the morning off. We will look again this afternoon if it isn't raining too much.

One nice thing happening now is stemfruit season. Most of the foods baboons eat are distinctly unpalatable to people, like grass and green figs, but stemfruit tastes great, sweet and a bit tangy. They look and taste a bit like litchis, but with smooth skin and pink flesh. It is fun to forage along with the baboons, but I don't take too many because the monkeys need them more. I can just buy exotic fruits in town. Litchis and pineapples and mangoes are ridiculously cheap here, and the more usual fruits like plums are very fresh and sweet.

On that note, I think I will have fruit for lunch, and maybe make some pancakes too.

Merry (Late) Christmas to All!

Lajuma has gotten pretty quiet over the holidays so there were only five of us celebrating Christmas on the mountain. We all pitched in and made ourselves a lovely feast, and ate our way through a warm sunny afternoon. I made a roast chicken, which isn't in the picture but it looked much like other roast chickens you may have seen. There were potatoes and squash and veggies amd stuffing and lots of good stuff. The last of the Halloween pumpkins met its fate as pie, and there was lots of chocolate and booze too. 

Pete and I wanted to get up early on Christmas morning to go see the baboons, but we didn't know where they slept the night before, so we slept in instead. We got lucky though: the troop strolled past while we were eating dinner, chasing butterflies and looking adorable. I wanted to get them a present, but there is really nothing we could give them that they wouldn't be better off without. I still think they would look cute in little Christmas sweaters though. 

We planned to have a fire after dinner but got too into playing board games instead and then went to bed still stuffed. The fire has been postponed to tonight, which is probably better because we can cook food on it instead of being too full to eat.

As you can see I have found a way to get photos onto a computer so I can post them. Here are some of the best Kruger pictures...

We saw lots of wildlife within an hour of our arrival in Kruger Park: impalas, jackals, zebras, buffalo, and elephants. This big one walked right across the road in front of us. We also saw a cheetah the first night, which is rare. There are no pictures though because it was about 50m away through the bushes, and we only saw a bit of its back. We knew it was a cheetah not a leopard because the spots were individual, not arranged in rosettes.

Here is a kudu, because they are awesome. This is a male with big beautiful horns. 

This bird was one of the animals I really wanted to see, just because of its name: the grey go-away bird. Their call really does sound like a whiny "go-WAAAAY". We saw lots, especially around the camps.

This giraffe was actually in Hluhluwe-Imfoluzi Park, not Kruger. You can see the oxpecker bird on his horn.

Now that I've figured out the pictures I will keep working on it. Hope everyone's Christmas was as good as mine, and have a great Boxing Day too!

Home again, sort of...

Just letting you know I'm still alive and back at Lajuma. It's good to be home, as much of a home as I have right now. We had a great time but it was the kind of vacation where you need a vacation afterwards. I sunburned my legs snorkeling at Cape Vidal and it is very hard to move. I used sunscreen but my legs were pasty white and the sun is really strong here.

A lot of people have left Lajuma and more will be leaving next week. We will be six for Christmas and we have to get organized about food. So far we have lots of cake but forgot ingredients for stuffing. A turkey won't fit in the freezer so we have to get it sooner to the time.

Anyways, it's late so I have to say goodnight!

St Lucia

I am in St Lucia now, which is a little resort town on the Indian Ocean. It is busy but not unpleasantly so. People come for the beach and the fishing and boating, and a lot of them come from within South Africa. The ocean is very warm but the waves are the biggest I've ever been in and it's a little scary. I couldn't really swim in the surf but I managed to get out to where it was about a meter deep and body surf. By then the waves were breaking higher than my head and very powerful so I drank quite a lot of seawater. It doesn't taste any better in Africa. I'm not confident enough to go out beyond the breakers, especially since I haven't seen anyone else doing it. The beach is nice white sand and there is lots of it, not very crowded so it is great for just being lazy. There are no interesting seashells because they all get broken.

Our campsite is so close to the beach that I fell asleep last night to the sound of the waves. Then I woke up around midnight to the sound of the rain, and was glad I put the rain fly on my tent. I am always tempted not to, because it is cooler with just the inner mosquito net layer, but it often rains at night and I don't want to fight with the tent in the rain in the dark. It would be about a 2 minute walk to the beach except that there is a fence in the way, so it is about ten minutes. I am glad of the fence though because it keeps out the hippos and crocodiles. It doesn't keep out the smaller critters, like the 2m spitting cobra I found in the shower yesterday. The security guard chased it out. Now every time I go in the bathroom I have to check for snakes, but today it has been pleasantly cobra-free. The trash cans have no lids, making them into a convenient central food depot for the vervet monkeys and making a mockery of all the signs about not feeding the monkeys. They are fearless and I'm glad they are vervets and not baboons. Vervets are little so they scavange and beg and sneakily grab food, but baboons are big enough to really hurt somebody if you had something they wanted. It is nice to see the little baby vervets though. They are very cute and I can see why people are tempted to feed them.

Several people have told me that hippos regularly roam around the center of town at night, and I would like to see that. The oddest thing I have seen in town was a pig. It's not even livestock: there is a tourist family here with their pets, four large dogs and their pig, on leashes. I just saw the man lift it into the back of the pickup truck. I guess it can't jump in like the dogs can. The dogs bark a bit at people walking past and the pig grunts at them. It's really bizarre: I can see them out the window and I can't stop staring.

I just went on a hippo and crocodile boat tour. It was more interesting than I expected: we got a very good view of the hippos and crocs and there were a lot of interesting birds. Jacandas are little water birds that look like they are walking on the water but they really just walk on the underwater plants. There were fish eagles and egrets and herons, and the pigmy goose which is tiny like a grebe. We saw the dominant male hippo marking his territory by spraying poop around with his tail. His name is Vincent Van Hippo because he only has one ear.

Tomorrow we will go horseback riding on the beach, and I want to go for a walk as well. Early morning would be the best time, maybe even if it is raining again. It is not quite as hot as Louis Trichardt but it is more humid and can be uncomfortable. We are staying three days in St Lucia, which is a nice change from Kruger where we stayed a different place every night. Kruger National Park was amazing, I will tell you about it another time, but it was one of the coolest things I have ever done. We saw four leopards, wild dogs, elephants really close... Anyway, I should go to dinner now. We are going to the same restaurant as last night because it was really good and cheaper than buying a stove or firewood to cook for ourselves.

More Creatures

It has been a good week for wildlife here at Lajuma. I finally got to see the kudu! I was hiking, listening out for the baboons, when three kudu bounded across the road about 5m in front of me. They are the size of small horses, with huge spiral horns. There were a few more off in the bushes but I couldn't see them very well. They really are majestic and you can hear the hoofbeats when they run. I have also seen a mother warthog with three little wart-piglets. The baboons were trying to play with one of the piglets and it was running away squeaking with a sound like one of those squeaky toys you give to dogs. One of the advantages of being with the baboons is that you see more other wildlife. Other animals are less vigilant because they assume that the baboons will give alarm calls if they see anything dangerous. The baboons are habituated and don't really react to us, so I often see bushbuck or duiker or warthogs looking confused because they see scary humans and the baboons are not running away. I also saw the vervet monkeys, which are not habituated so they are less often seen than the baboons and samangoes.

The rainy season has brought out less desirable wildlife as well, like rain spiders and mosquitoes. There are tiny black ants everywhere. They don't bite people but they crawl on me all the time, and get into any food that is not sealed up. My boots were infested one morning, and there were so many in the kitchen light fixture that it stopped working. They are mighty predators in their tiny insect world: a group of ants will surround and kill much larger moths and beetles and spiders. The geckoes help a bit, sitting on a wall next to a line of ants and picking out the biggest ones with a lightning-fast tongue. Most people have geckoes in their rooms now. My biggest one is about three inches long, plus as much again for the tail. Its name is Howard, I forget why. Pete has a huge one named Godzilla, and the one at the bush camp is Klaus. There are also lots of tiny ones but they don't have names. They look like mini dragons.

The barn, where I'm staying, has plenty of fauna, but bush camp has even more. They don't have a cat, and they have hollow bamboo walls that provide safe little highways for enormous mice, which then attract predators. They had a bit of a surprise the other day. It turned up late at night so I only heard about it the next morning, when they drove up with a box in the back of the truck. There was a big sign taped to the box "Danger: Black Mamba! DO NOT OPEN!" They caught it with a net, and I don't know how they got it into the box without being bitten. They were on the way to take it to Obrecht, the property manager. He is amazingly knowlegable about wildlife and pretty much everything else in southern Africa, and he got his special snake stick, opened the box very carefully, and showed us the snake. It really was a black mamba, a small one less than a metre long. It was remarkably agile and strong, much more active than the garter snakes I play with at home, and a matte greenish black colour. Snakes try to avoid biting people because they need their venom to kill prey. A snake is likely to starve if it wastes all its venom biting a person, not that that's much of a consolation. I see snakes occasionally but I watch out for them and stay far away and they have never bothered me so far. Oh, and at the party at bush camp last night I noticed they have the warning sign taped to the fridge now. That ought to freak out the next bunch of new people staying there.

Tomorrow I leave on a trip to Kruger and Imfuluzi National Parks and Swaziland. I might have a chance to post something and maybe upload photos at some point, but don't count on it. I will be back at Lajuma on the 16th and should be able to write then.