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STORIES
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I arrived in Nairobi on Tuesday, July 27, 1993 and checked in at the Fairview Hotel. There I met the first two of my EarthWatch expedition friends: Carole B. and Carolyn E. We immediately took a tour of the nearby Kenya National Park and got my first look at wild African animals: giraffe, zebra, hardebeest, baboons, various birds, wildebeest, ostrich, some river turtles, and at the Nairobi Orphan Zoo: cheetah, lions, hyena, leopards hanging in trees, and even a pair of tigers that never came from Africa! The rest of Team III eventually joined up followed by our scientist leaders. From Nairobi we began the drive northwest to Lake Naivasha, located 1 degree below the equator. We arrived at the Elsamere Conservation Centre at Lake Naivasha and assigned roommates (of the 3 male volunteers, David & I were single so that was easily decided) and shown our place to stay. Elsamere is like a little hotel with several buildings containing 2 to 4 guest rooms each! We got outside to Elsamere's large yard where they serve tea and cake to visitors and are lucky to be greeted by the area's Colubus monkeys . After we had settled in, we were shown the sub-projects and their team leaders and schedule. We, the volunteers, determined which sub-projects were of interest to us and we created our teams thereafter. We were also shown what non-project activities were being planned, some during the week, some during our weekends. We had a choice for some of those, too! Twas indeed going to be a fun and adventuresome next three weeks!
My first project was with Dr. Ros Boar . Her objective was to collect biomass samples of the papyrus that ringed the lake in order to add to the current data that tracked the papyrus growth throughout the years. Papyrus growth actually is receding which is a cause of concern as the papyrus acts as the lake's filtration system, cleansing the water coming from the rivers and the farms and plantations. My teammates included Karen G. and Carolyn E. We took a boat out on Lake Naivasha and marked off areas for later teams and began with our survey, hacking out papyrus stalk samples beginning from the lakeshore all the way out to where the papyrus finally thinned out. Afterwards, we brought our samples back to Elsamere and began the task of stripping, cutting, and determining the wet-weight of the mass collected. This was a fun project that got everyone wet and muddy and really introduced us to the magical properties and wildlife of the lake.
Patrick Loki's Crayfish Project This crayfish drawing shows the types of data we were gathering for Patrick Loki's crayfish population tracking project. We were sampling the carapace length to help determine an average size for the season. This, along with other data collected by his organization from past samplings, tracked the efficiency of the crayfish industry. In addition, we marked a claw or the carapace to prevent repeat measurements as well as measure distance traveled for crayfish that were recaptured. By the way, this was the Procamuurus Clarkii , also known as the Louisiana Crayfish. Lake Naivasha is a relatively young lake, being only a few hundred years old, and was stocked with this species of American crayfish many decades ago. Here's a scanned photo of a pair of these crawdads . The crayfish industry here is mostly exported as the Kenyan population around the lake did not normally eat crustaceans.
I got involved a little bit with Philip Raburu's worm study. The tasks were to dredge up mud from the bottom of Lake Naivasha, weigh the mud sample, sift it for worms, identify and count the different worms found. The objective was to determine an average worm count per cubic volume of mud and relate that to the various crayfish and fish populations. Here's a collage of two pictures - Philip Raburu & Dee and the samples of worms
The Hell's Gate National Park Trip Our first break from the research & data collection being done at Elsamere was a drive through nearby Hell's Gate National Park .
Another of our breaks was a drive to Lake Nakuru. Here's a colour waterbrush illustration of a Warthog I saw there.
This was the plane that flew Karen G., Carole B., and myself to the Maasai Mara. In Kenya, this time of year is Winter, so the animals were migrating into the Maasai Mara from the now dry Serengeti. I apologize for not remembering the name of the pilot...
A favorite for many of my teammates. Here are my illustrations of them.
Encounter with a Hippo or Watch Out, Congo! In Swahili, the word for hippo is "kiboko ". I was told never to wander alone from my quarters in the dark evening as kibokos grazed on the lawn. If you got between them and the lake or a baby hippo, they would charge you thereby risking the possibility of getting cut in half by their huge incisors. If you had to, there were guards or "haskari" armed with spears and shields that would escort you. Well, one night I decided to go to the main lodge and stepped out. An haskari was waving at me from the main lodge which I interpreted as, "Hey, coast is clear - come on over." WRONGO-BONGO! He meant, "Get back, jack!" As I rounded my building, there to my left was a kiboko - dark as night and imposing in the moonlight! I was between the kiboko and the lake so I immediately backwalked. Luckily, I must've startled the kiboko as well and it also backpedaled. I swear we must've been as close as 5 feet! Whew! The nearest I've ever been into becoming a Flip sandwich!
Here's the original sketch I made of hippos I saw at Hippo Point , Lake Naivasha.
Being a Filipino when lost in Nairobi helps! It helps a lot!
I did! At the end of the trip, the volunteers and scientists went to a Nairobi restaurant called "Karnivore" specializing in all-meat barbecue dishes. Yes, there was a vegetarian dish, but I went for the whole shebang meaty meal that not only included the traditional chicken, beef, goat, and pork, but also had zebra, hardebeest, water buffalo, and crocodile. They were out of giraffe and kibokos. The zebra tasted tangy, the hardebeest very gamey, and the crocodile intensely fishy. Every time I go to a zoo here in the U.S. I can point out certain animals and say, "Uy! Been there - ate that! Yummy!"
An Apple Macintosh PowerBook Story On the flight back from Nairobi to London, I sat beside a woman who told me she had just spent six months in the field in Kenya. I noticed she carried a PowerBook 170 and asked her how she used it. She said she used it for updating her thesis, using a spreadsheet to enter in the data she had been collecting and seeing what trends came from that. What was most interesting was that she lived in a small thatch hut and that her method for recharging the PowerBook batteries was having the battery recharger interfaced to her car battery which was attached to a solar panel. Pretty cool, eh?
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