Week 7 trip to coast

2/16-2/20 2008
On the drive to the coast by tar road, we again saw hundreds of wheeling kites – our bird book says this is a typical response to termite emergence. The kites appeared to be catching termites in their claws – each would periodically swing its legs forward and its head down, as if picking something off the talons. The talons certainly are not built for catching termites. We saw them up close because Alan picked up a stunned (and probably mortally wounded) bird that had been hit by a truck. The feet and claws reached well around his finger, with each talon more than a cm long and deadly pointed.

We exited the tar road to take the dirt “cut-off” to Henties Bay and stopped to campe at the community campsite at Spitzkoppe. Exactly our style. Very rustic campsites, spaced hundreds of m apart, nestled in spectacular rock formations. Up close, the Spitzkoppe rocks are conglomerates of small, rough pebbles, great for grip when you’re climbing upslope. Even Katie enjoyed the rock-climbing experience (and we saw no snakes, even though the adults fretted about them). We arrived just after a rain, and the air smelled of bay spice and moisture, birds were singing, and rock hyraxes – hundreds of them – whistled from caves and ledges. We fortuitously camped near an area with rock paintings – a lion, rhinoceros, and people were easily recognizable, but the technique of achieving red images on the rock face unclear. The most unexpected aspect of the camp was that “community” means it is indeed run by local people, rather than as a resort of relic colonialism. We stopped en route at one of the roadside stands where we selected a piece of aquamarine with black tourmaline to send to a rock-loving friend in the US. (Other options: garnet, sodalite, quartz, many more…) The stand included two additional pieces of architecture: a m-high hut made of branches angled to a point and daubed in manure (we assume, since sand clearly wouldn’t hold together, and clay is not available); and a slightly taller square cube with walls of soda and beer cans, strung in vertical columns.
On this trip, we went to the salt ponds on 2 days with Hilma and Magdalena (faculty and student at Poly, respectively), caught fish (tilapia, mullet), and discussed salt pond food webs and oyster production. Along the margins of the oyster pond, clams were gaping and dying – these are Manila clams introduced from Europe (but originally from Asia), also familiar to us because they are introduced in Washington. These clams bear some further study: their presence all around the pond indicates at least one successful recruitment event, but the strange size structure (no small clams) means that recruitment may not happen regularly. We suspect the clams were dying from unusually high temperatures and other stresses that contribute to “summer mortality”.

The trip was short because it was bookended by strategic planning meetings in Windhoek...