Leaving Mpala

This is my last morning at Mpala... I leave in about an hour to head to Nairobi for the night. This trip really has flown by. I can't believe it has been 9 weeks already. Blair was telling me that last year when she came for 2 months it felt like forever, and then this year 3 months really felt like forever. I have not felt that at all. I definitely could have stayed awhile longer. While a project still has to be decided on, I will probably come back for 3 months next summer. And then the year after that, maybe 6 months? Dan mentioned to me the other day that he likes his grad students to stay for 6-9 months at a time (although it seems none of them do currently- the average is 3 months I think).


Yesterday, I went around with some of the local field assistants to a couple of the communities around this area. It was really interesting to see. We went to a Masaai village where everyone still lives as pastoralists. There is no road to their bomas- we were driving through the bush for a little bit. The boma consists of a couple of tiny huts made out of sticks and thatch and a pen for their goats and sheep, all circled by a ring wall of sticks to prevent the lions from getting to their livestock at night. The one family we went to see was a man and his three wives (polygamy is still very common) and something like 9 children. They herd their sheep around during the day to graze and then bring them back into the boma at night- and that is their whole livelihood. There is no toilet of any kind- they just go in the bush. Their house was a good 500 meters from the next boma, so when I say village it is more of just a community where all the members are from the same tribe, but their homes are pretty spread out.




And now for some photos: Two nights ago the elephants were up by the research center again. There was a big group of them and they broke the water pipe again to get at the water. (So we didn't have running water for most of yesterday while the pipe was fixed). One youngish one was not afraid of us at all and came right up to the research center and I got some really good pictures.











(While taking the last photo, the elephant decided I had gotten too close and acted like she was going to charge for a minute... but I ran back up onto the porch and she went back to grazing)

Grazing experiment

So for the past 5 days I have been working with Dan on this grazing experiment. It invloved laying out plots in the grass, having donkeys graze a third of them, having slashers cut a third of them and leaving the other third as controls. Then the next day we brought in cows to graze all of them. (I was excited because I kind of love donkeys). We measured the vegetation before everything, after the donkeys/slashers, and then again after the cows. So I had one full day of donkey wrangling, one full day of cow wrangling, and this morning we finished up the vegetation sampling.

Here are some photos of donkey wrangling, a donkeys and her baby in one of our plots, and my cows in one of the plots.