Elephants and relatives

We continue our journey through Tarangire National Park, still on day one of the safari (only a couple of hours past the entry gate, in fact!). And we come upon two very different looking creatures, who are in fact quite closely related (genetically and evolutionarily, at least): The elephant and the hyrax. I'm hoping I don't need to point out which is which in the above photos.

We saw our first elephants near a riverbed. We had a mediocre view past a herd of zebra (of whom we had a terrific view), but then we drove up onto a bluff overlooking the riverbed, and had a great view of the family of elephants. They were digging around on the side of the river, and sucking up water from the holes.

Later in the day we got to our tent camp (luxury tent camp, really), which was also situated on a rocky bluff, overlooking the forest, and in the distance, a lake. Scurrying around on the rocks, and in the trees, were many of these rock hyrax. They are the size of marmots, or large guinea pigs, and equally skittish. They are quite skilled climbers, though, and it was funny to walk up the trail between our bedroom and the dining hall, and see these small trees (12' tall, maybe?) with several hyrax weighing down the branches.

Identify Your Antelopes

We saw lots of antelopes throughout our journey, and it was sometimes difficult to remember which type was which, so here's a quick primer for you to refer to when viewing all the pictures. Impalas (above, left) have curved lyre shaped horns which bend both right/left and forward/back, while gazelles (above right) have straighter ones. We saw two types of gazelles, the smaller Thomson's Gazelles, and the larger Grant's Gazelle. The picture above shows a Grant's Gazelle, whose horns are curved more than the Thomson's. Thomson's Gazelles have a characteristic black stripe on their sides, which isn't found on the impalas, but is sometimes found on the Grant's Gazelles. The Grant's Gazelles, which don't always have the stripe, have a white rump which extends up beyond the tail. Additionally, female gazelles have horns, while female impala do not. Now, based on what you've just learned, what is this:




Yes, it's a bit confusing, as its got no stripe, but the white on the rump stops at the tail, and the horns are straight. My best guess is that this is a young male impala, whose horns haven't taken on their full adult shape yet. I make this guess from additional knowledge of the pictures taken at the same time, showing a bunch of females without horns, which must be impalas (I think).

Easier to tell apart are the Eland (below right, standing amidst the zebras), the largest antelope, and the Dik-dik (below left), the smallest of the antelopes.

The Birds

You have all been waiting so patiently, and I know you really want to see the big 5: the elephants, buffalos, lions, leopards, and rhinocerous, as well as the other big mammals: giraffes, hippos, cheetah, etc. I'll get to them all, and somewhat soon, I promise. But today I want to focus on some of the animals we weren't expecting to be so impressed by, the birds. There were lots of them and they were super: super big, super colorful, super funny looking, etc. Here's a sample. Above you have a vulture of some sort (sorry, I am not a birder so I don't know exactly which... if you know, post it in the comments). Below left is an ostrich, and below right is one of many colorful chaps, the lilac breasted roller. We saw all of these within our first hour in Tarangire National Park. It's an amazing place, much less visited than Ngorongoro or Serengeti, though still popular among people with more than 3 days for their safari.
Tomorrow I'll show some of the bigger game we saw.

Modern

Oops. Apparently I've let another month slip by without posting anything to the blog. For shame, for shame. Well, I've been keeping myself busy with trips (Santa Fe in early September) and visitors, plus lots and lots and lots of yardwork. I've also been taking some pictures, though certainly not at the rate I was shooting them during the Africa trip. Sometimes I bring the camera out and about the town, other times I do the exceptionally lazy thing of not even getting up from my computer desk to shoot the pictures. I still think the results are interesting. Don't you? I think this one might need to get printed with a nice matte finish.

I need this like I need a hole in the head

It's the last night of my summer school, and I've spent the last day and a half working on a project using the software tools and data available through the national virtual observatory. I was working with one other guy, and we got some basic results, but mostly we've been learning how to use the tools, and which ones work better than the others. Now I've got to write it all up in a 12 minute talk which I'll present in the morning. At least that's the plan. But I have this bottle of bourbon which needs to get finished before I fly out tomorrow, and it will be a tough decision which one to work on first...

The picture above is from Tarangire national park. There is a large resident herd of elephants there, and they get thirsty in the dry season. The baobab trees store water in their trunks, and the elephants get jealous, so they use their tusks to gouge out holes in the baobab, and drink the water which comes out. After drinking a bottle of bourbon, I might have that same desire tomorrow morning...

The Safari Starts!

I've been at a conference for the past week here in Santa Fe, NM. It runs through tomorrow. I took so many pictures during the safari trip that I don't have space to store them all on my laptop. I've got the full resolution images on my external hard drive, and thumbnails on the laptop so that I can still organize and tag all the images even when the external disk isn't attached. But to upload pictures to the blog, I need to have the full res version (well, something bigger than just my thumbnails). Realizing this, I uploaded a bunch of pictures last Friday, while the hard drive was attached, intending to write up accompanying text later in the day. Well, day turned to night turned to day turned to another week and here it is wednesday with no text written. Yet. Let me quick change that, for this first batch of pictures at least.

We started our journey on Saturday afternoon, flying from various parts of the U.S. to London. We continued on Monday morning with a flight to Nairobi, and then on Tuesday with a bus ride to Arusha. Finally it was Wednesday, day five of the trip, but day one of the safari, and we were itching to get started. It didn't take long. We drove out of town, away from the moist, runny slopes of Mt. Meru which encompass Arusha, and into the dryer lands south and west. After a quick stop at the grocery store for supplies (water, gin, rum, chocolate), and a two hour drive, we got to the entry station for Tarangire National Park. We got out of the cars to stretch our legs, and to pay the park entry fee. There were some really colorful birds in the parking lot, including the multi-hued starling which is sort of the local version of a pigeon: plentiful in number and typically found creeping up on you at the picnic table while you are eating lunch. Speaking of which, while we were itching to get started, our guides told us it was time for lunch, so we had to eat that before we could start looking for animals, and we thought, "how much longer is it going to be before we finally see something?" Well, not long at all. We finished our lunch and went back to the landcruisers to discover that we were going topless (for one. Loosely topped for the other vehicle). We hopped in, drove through the park gate and one minute later came across a herd of zebra & wildebeest, and ten seconds further down the road passes a monkey, and we realized, Wow, this is going to be an amazing trip.

Monkeying Around

That first afternoon & evening in Arusha, we were all pretty tired from the travelling. Some people wanted to nap, others wanted to... also nap. I wanted to explore, so while Jaime settled in for a snooze, I grabbed my camera and walked to hotel grounds trying to get a picture of a massive ant trail I had crossed earlier. On my way to the ants, I got distracted by a bird, and since I was excited to use my brand new super telephoto zoom lens, I tried to follow the bird up into the tree as it hopped higher and higher on the branches. I lost the bird, scanned around a bit, and was surprised to see something much bigger looking back at me: this monkey. That was a very exciting first find, and I knew I had to go up to the room right then and wake Jaime up to show it to her. Luckily I was right, and I didn't get yelped at for waking her, and she was even more excited to see the monkey than I was. We proceeded to follow it all the way across the hotel grounds, the monkey hopping from tree limb to tree limb and the two of us walking along the various garden paths, until the tree limbs stretched further than the garden paths, and we lost track. Great fun, though, and a precursor to what was to come.