Week 4: Tarangire Expedition!

Hey guys!

A big part of this week was a four day expedition to Tarangire National Park and some of its surrounding land. However, my week started out on a bit of a sour note. For those of you who know me well, I LOVE NASCAR (and no I am not exaggerating). That being said, Sunday was the Daytona 500 and it started at 3pm ET which is 11pm Tanzania time. Missing my race was not an option, so I stayed up listening to it on MRN radio while occasionally getting a live stream of it. But here's the thing, the race was super long and had two red flags so it didn't end until around 4am. Therefore my Monday started with only 2-3 hours of sleep AND I forgot that I had cook crew in the morning. So I ended up joining cook crew the next morning because I felt bad.

Anyway, back to the exciting stuff!

Monday morning we had another travel lecture for Environmental Policy class. We drove to a primary school that doubled as a tree nursery where we learned about community strategies to help the environment. They have a tree planting initiative where farmers are given free trees to plant every year. They also teach community members about climate change impacts, how to raise trees and how to combat erosion through planting trees. Rainwater harvesting is practiced at the primary school, and while the facility was funded by a foreign investor, after five years it will solely be community-led and supported. We then traveled to a local home that uses biogas (fermented cow dung) as an energy alternative to firewood: firewood is used everywhere here and is becoming harder and harder to find due to the lack of trees. Finally, we visiting a group of brick-makers and observed how they make bricks using this fancy machine. Once again, we were told that building houses out of bricks was a better alternative than wood due to the whole decreasing-wood-supply issue.

Tree Nursery

Brick making

On Monday I was also Mwanafunzi (student) of the day! The other students really liked my reflection which was to take 30 seconds of silence to appreciate and thank all of the people that have helped shape them into the great individuals they are today as well as all the mentors, friends and family that helped them get to this point in their lives. For my "presentation" I had us all play the game "Big Booty" which is basically a rapid-fire number game - so many people came up to me and said that they had a ton of fun playing it!

On Tuesday we had another travel lecture for Environmental Policy class at Selela village. We talked about the village's Participatory Land Use Plan. Since the introduction of the plan, there have been reduced conflicts between livestock keepers fighting over grazing land, and over 18,000 tree seedlings have been planted. A prevalent issue with the current land use plan is funding and resources: the village's only source of income was fines from culprits. The second half of this lecture took place in the village's groundwater forest which has insanely beautiful trees and tons of vervet monkeys! We discussed the debate over whether or not land owners should be able to kill wildlife that kills their crops and livestock - currently this action is illegal unless the wild animal is threatening your life. This whole semester we've discussed human/wildlife conflicts and while solutions like Participatory Land Use Plans are helping, these conflicts seem like they will always be present in these communities.

I was famous AGAIN for the second time in as many weeks: Penn State posted my Kilimanjaro summit picture on their Instagram (last week they posted the same picture on their Facebook page)! It made my day, not to mention getting 5000 likes is a good self-esteem booster.

Wednesday morning was our Swahili quiz which I think went really well. I'm still waiting for the grade as well as the grade from my olive baboon report which I summited what seems like forever ago. The rest of Wednesday wasn't super exciting: I played some volleyball and soccer, walked down to Rhotia with some others to buy snacks at the duka (shop) and packed for the Tarangire expedition. We also fangirled over how Jane Goodall was in Arusha doing a lecture! Arusha is only a 1.5 hour drive from camp.

Tarangire Expedition

Day 1:

Early in the morning we drove from Moyo Hill camp to Tarangire National Park. In the morning we did some elephant counts! We recorded data such as the size of each group and the sex, age group and tusk size/characteristics of each individual. We then had lunch at a picnic area with a stunning view followed by a game drive throughout the National Park. During this game drive we saw tons of wildlife as well as lots of cool trees called Baobab trees (look them up!). Towards the end of the game drive we spotted a female lion on a hunt! Sadly, we had to leave to go to our evening lecture so we couldn't see if the hunt was successful but we still witnessed the lion chasing what appeared to be a warthog. Our evening lecture was at Dr. Kissui's lion research camp within Tarangire National Park (Kissui is our camp director who has been doing lion monitoring and research for 16 years). He talked about how lions are tracked using both radio telemetry and GPS collars. While GPS collars were much more accurate, they cost about $4000 per collar whereas a radio telemetry collar, while more primitive and harder to pinpoint lions, is only $300 per collar. Conservation isn't a cheap process! After the lecture we drove to our campsite which was just outside the park. The camp was a really nice area with flush toilets and showers. The staff provided students with large tents (you could stand up in them) and I roomed with Harrison. We also got served our regular Moyo Hill food since we brought some of the cook staff with us, so really the whole experience was "glamping" more than anything. That night Dr. Theisinger and Dr. Kiffner showed us tiny scorpions that were all around camp that you could only see using black light (pretty freaky huh?!?), then a large group of us laid out on a tarp and looked at the stars...

Me in the safari vehicle!

Day 2:

Today we were in Tarangire National Park again, this time doing general animal counts for any animal we spotted that was larger than a rodent. We recorded data that was similar to the elephant counts, including group size, sex and age class. We also recorded the type of vegetation/habitat, the primary behavior of each group, the groups' responses to us, and the distance each group was from the transect/road. Lunchtime was spent at a lodge where I had some feta and spinach pizza and sat looking out over the savanna below me! Following lunch we went on another game drive before heading back to camp for the evening. Animals that we spotted over the past two days included elephants, giraffes, jackals, lions, warthogs, ostriches, several species of mongoose, impala, waterbuck, gazelle, hartebeest, dik dik, bat-eared fox and a terrapin to name a few. All of our vehicles were trying really hard to find leopards and cheetahs after there was radio chatter of them being nearby, but we sadly did not find either. A huge issue today was the tsetse flies, which were at times swarming our vehicle and biting every single part of our bodies (even through clothing!). However, some highlights included a rainstorm while on the game drive - we played Africa by Toto of course! We also got a flat tire right before the rainstorm which added to the excitement as Dr. Theisinger and Michael (one of our drivers) replaced the tire. 

Day 3:

Today we spent the morning interviewing Maasai people/households about the issue of human/wildlife conflicts. My group interviewed four people - 1 man and 3 women - all of which were farmers and pastoralists. All explained how animals like elephants and zebras destroyed their crops while animals like hyenas and leopards ate their livestock. Preventative strategies included using bright lights and dogs to deter wildlife, as well as building fences and using horns provided by the WMA (wildlife management area). Views were mixed regarding the help the WMA and/or local government provided, and all of those interviewed said that the future looks bad for them as the number of wildlife encounters have been increasing over the years. This afternoon we did a poop assessment in Manyara Ranch!!! Manyara Ranch is a multi-use wildlife conservancy, and the assessment was actually pretty interesting. We drove along a transect and every 500 meters got out of the car and checked for poop along a 10-by-10 meter quadrat. I was able to identify several species of poop including giraffe, elephant, zebra, impala, dik dik and wildebeest as well as "easier" animals like cows and sheep (some pastoralists are allowed to have their livestock graze in Manyara Ranch). A really cool factor was that we could exit the vehicles: this is because it isn't a National Park. As a result, the other students in my vehicle and I were able to walk up to a group of 10+ giraffes and get within 20ish yards of them! This was one of the coolest things I've ever experienced. Even better, since we finished early we were able to go on a small game drive, where we saw different species such as eland, guinea hens and kudu. The drive back to camp was spent playing a fun game called "contact", and following dinner at camp I had cook duty - this was a little more miserable than usual since we only had three pots and limited water to wash all of the dishes. It rained throughout the night, and Harrison ended up waking up in a puddle in the middle of the night as a hole in the tent soaked his side only (I guess I'm a lucky guy lol).

Day 4:

Today we woke up to some nasty humidity, which has been gradually increasing over the past few weeks as the rainy season draws nearer. We packed up all of our tents and gear and had a small lecture after breakfast about wildlife managements areas with Dr. Mwamhanga. We then traveled to Burunge which was the nearest WMA to Tarangire. Here we had a lecture/info session from the leadership of the WMA before driving around the land. We had lunch on top of a rocky hill with beautiful views of Lake Manyara in the distance before driving down to Lake Manyara (the non-national park side of Lake Manyara) and walking along the shore. This place had stunning views and there were hundreds of flamingos in the water! Following this, we stopped by a women's co-op where we bought hand-made basketry items before heading back to campus. Campus greeted us with a rainstorm and I spent the rest of my Sunday unpacking, relaxing, calling my parents and getting ready for my NASCAR race.

I had a great time this week and can't wait for my free day tomorrow! I hope you all have a nice week

-Matt