Katie update

Anyone who has tried to talk with Katie over the phone, or who meets her for the first time, would never believe how much she talks with her parents and friends. She tells extended stories about going to the post office, or about the lives of cormorants (catching fish, feeding their babies, going to sleep), or about going to school with Abby and Teddy. Sometimes she tells us about how she can shoot birds, or about how someone shot back at her but she didn’t die: This shooting legacy is either from playing with Fulbright kids who are older boys, or from my training one day at the beach when Alan was giving me a hard time for pretending beach wrack was different family members – what are the options for playing on the beach? Interpersonal relationships among mussel shells and lobster legs, building towers out of rocks, digging holes, or shooting with kelp stipes! Actually, I have to say that learning how to shoot seems incrementally better than learning about barbies, which has been Katie’s experience with older girls: I’ve run interference to encourage barbies to go on sailing trips, instead of repetitively going on dates and getting married.
Katie does finally have her own doll, so she no longer needs to wrap up a hairbrush in a washcloth and rock it to sleep. She selected Abalone from among the hand-made doll options at the large craft shop in Windhoek – Abalone is wonderfully adventurous (although entirely cloth, so doesn’t go to the beach) and hardly ever cries or complains!
Once or twice a day, we get out the lightweight orange ball and play soccer (here football) on a sandy spot near the hatchery. Katie’s ball-handling skills have definitely improved: she can give the ball quite a boot, although only in the direction that she’s running, which means I often have to run it down before it enters the Salt Co canal or goes under the boundary fence. When the wind picks up, soccer is particularly challenging, because the wind drives the ball almost faster than I can run! Katie has also figured out the basics of catching a ball in her arms.
We spend a lot of time at the beach looking for tracks and skeletons. She is learning how to tell jackal from hyena tracks (hyenas have very large front feet; jackals tend to place their back feet exactly in the front tracks) and also tell their kills apart. She knows that a dead cormorant with a hole in its belly was killed by a jackal, whereas hyenas tend to dismember the entire bird. One particularly tragic kill included a cormorant let still tangled in fishing line and wire… and with older bones indicating that this gear had been ghost-fishing for some time. Clearly the extra load weighed down the bird and made it an easy target for the hyena. But, of course, as ecologists, we talk with Katie about how predators need to eat, so it’s sad for the cormorant but necessary for the hyena.
Katie is not a huge fan of hyenas – they are on her “scary animal” list along with lions, crocodiles, and hippos. I think this is because Alan responds to her screaming by telling her she should be quiet or she’ll call the hyenas!

Alan has been through heroics to acquire some basic research equipment that we take for granted in the US, specifically iButtons, which log temperature remotely, and a YSI dissolved oxygen, temperature, and salinity meter. He is still working to acquire material for plankton nets. In retrospect, of course, we could have brought these things with us, but we really had no idea just how large a role anoxia plays in Namibia’s marine environment, nor that we would be working in a reverse estuary – the salt ponds just keep getting saltier! I mention this in the context of Katie because we now have temperature records for a variety of locations around the Salt Co, and the records are dramatic – up to 10C degree swings daily, probably as a response to solar heating of shallow water in the day and black-body radiation to a clear sky at night. Katie happily paddled around in shallow 30C water, just where the canal exits into the oyster pond and the water is warmest in the afternoon – it was just the right depth for her to support her body on her hands, and to enjoy the soft sinking sensation of anoxic sediment on the bottom (Apr 5)!
Katie has just exceeded the 20-freckle threshold – and yes, we are keeping her in sunscreen! She is in the phase of perpetual “Why?” And she has begun to add “eee” on the end of words. Sleep-ie, Bike-ie, Juice-ie. No one around her talks like this, as far as we know, so where does this come from?
On 2 occasions in Windhoek, our time there has overlapped with a lunchtime dance in the parking lot. A group of Oshivambo women occasionally gathers, sometimes with a single drum, but also just with clapping and their voices, in a circle. One by one or in pairs, the women dance into the center. The rhythms have been too complicated for me to pick up yet (let alone the words), but I have learned that the steps they use are very particular for each song, not free-form dance. The style involves flat-footed stomping, skipping, jumping. Katie has been transfixed by the music and dancing, but unwilling to join in, even though the women say that they began learning these songs when they were Katie’s age.