June 11-14

Sorry about the goat post that was kinda nasty. Anyways, we went on a hike near the Ngorongoro Crater on Sunday and visited a few elephant caves, which are actually deep indentations in the rocks made by elephants.  The place where we hiked to actually serves as a gateway between the Ngorongoro Conservation Area and the Lake Manyara National Park, where elephants travel back and forth between the parks.  The soil in this area is extremely vitamin-rich, so when they travel through the gateway, they gnaw at the rocks and dig up the soil creating the caves.  We had a lecture here as well, discussing the importance of these gateways- as inbreeding between elephant species would occur if the gateways didn’t exist.  We also talked about similar issues in our travelling lecture yesterday, as we learned about the effects of local land uses on wildlife conservation. We had class on top of a hill looking over Lake Manyara it was beautt.  Today was actually really cool as well we did interviews of local farmers (with the help of a translator) – asking them about the effects of wildlife on their crops, what methods they use to stop this, how effective these methods are, and how the damage done by wildlife effects their views on wildlife conservation efforts. A boy who starting walking with us, was holding a baby goat, and it was literally 3 weeks old and the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. It still had its umbilical cord and everything- so precious. I have to go finish a project now, about olive baboon activity patterns and their feeding ecology- based on research we did in the Lake Manyara National Park on Saturday. We also went there on Friday, but we did a different field exercise of large mammal (anything bigger than a dikdik haha) counting/ looking at their population dynamics, etc.  We saw elephants, giraffes, hippos, zebras… a lot of baboons haha. It was awesome, although I really wish I had found my camera charger by then (couldn’t find it for about a week).  On Saturday though, we tracked groups of olive baboons in different cars, and followed/ made notes of their behaviors, activities, and feeding details for about an hour and a halfà following up every 5 minutes. It might seem boring, but they’re constantly fighting/copulating/playing, etc. that it never got tiring. Ok I have to go but I’ll follow up later. Adios