Catch up (Part 1)

Sorry guys! The internet has been acting funny, so I haven't been able to post anything lately:(

Friday, February 27, 2009

Today we got to go on another field excursion for Wildlife ecology. We spent 3 quality hours bird-watching. I pretty much see a bird and think, "Oh what a nice bird" and then go on my way. That’s not the case in Kenya. Everybody LOVES birds here. We even stop classes sometimes to look at a bird. And I’m not talking about a pretty parrot or an eagle in attack mode…I’m talking a sparrow-like bird. However, today I had a pretty neat bird experience. We saw a Superb Starling attacking a field mouse. Since, starlings do not eat meat this was a bit weird...but a bit cool. So we just stood there watching this bird go to town on the tiny field mouse. My professor was so funny. He kept saying, “What the hell is this bird doing? Doesn’t he know that he doesn’t eat meet? That mouse is too big for him to eat anyway.” In the end it realized it couldn't even carry the mouse much less eat it. My professor just shook his head and kept saying, “So wasteful!”

We also happened across lots of animals on our walk. We saw a dik-dik, gazelles (Grants and Thomsons), impala, and a warthog. At the end of our walk, we happened across a family of elephants. They are huge! On our way back to camp we saw a poor wildebeest that looked like it was dying from starvation and dehydration. I don’t really know why, but apparently it’s quite normal for little kids from around the area to come and slash the wildebeest, and the earlybird gets the tail. It seemed kind of cruel to me to tease a poor defenseless creature, but again I don’t really understand a lot of things about African culture yet so I think I will research this incident further.

Thursday, February 26, 2009

So I feel like I should tell you about my first experience with a scorpion. I was up at the bathrooms would by bandamate brushing and flossing before I turned in for the night. I was looking around and spotted a scorpion. I was like "Oh cool! A scorpion!" and my bandmate was like, "Gross it looks like someone stepped on it." So she moved it with her bott and nothing happened. Then one of our fellow students came to the bathroom to brush and floss his teeth and we were both like, "Oooo Mike come look at this scorpion. It's dead, but it's still kinda cool." So Mike came over and we all 3 bent our faces down to it and IT STARTED RUNNING AROUND! Well Mike started screaming, which got me screaming, and Anna was just standing there laughing with toothpaste dripping out of the side of her mouth. She finally came to the rescue and squashed it...CRUNCH.

Today we learned how to throw our Maasai spears with the help of our Maasai professor Daniel. He, of course, is awesome at it. I, of course, am not. We each got two supervised throws with Daniel. The first one was terrible and the second one was only bad. Afterwards we had some "free-throw" time (under supervision of course). It was kinda scary standing there with 20 other people throwing spears around you, so I went to a secluded area and continued to be bad at throwing my spear in private. Well you can't be good at everything.

Tonight was our first night walk. It was really neat because the night really does have eyes. Everywhere I turned there was a pair of glowing orange eyes staring out at me from the trees. We must have seen 5 bushbabies...they are so cute. We also saw a really pretty owl:)