1 year in Africa
2 lines from squinting my eyes
3 year birthday for Katie
4 seasons of heat red, rain, green, dry yellow
5 months living in the back of the Kombi
105 chicks
Uncountable needs in this country, and still so much uncertainty about how to be constructively involved
A biologist’s paradise – this year we will remember because, wherever one stops and looks carefully, something wonderful in nature reveals itself
Monday, December 29, 2008
Himba village
Dec 15-17
Northern and southern Namibia are divided by a 3 m fence, designed to prevent Foot and Mouth Disease from moving with livestock or wild animals. In colonial times (20 years ago), when Namibia was still Southwest Africa, whites owned enormous cattle ranches in the arid southern region and were able to export cattle free of FMD; blacks had communal land where rainfall was higher north of the fence, but per capita land area was small. This pattern still largely holds, although the government is attempting redistribution of land through a “willing seller, willing buyer” program: the government buys farms when they are up for sale and selects new black owners. We’ve crossed the fence northward a couple of times en route to seeing elephants, crocs, and hippos in Chobe National Park (Botswana) with Alan’s older kids, and to pick up day-old chicks for our class experiment at the Polytechnic. But in mid-December we had an altogether different experience of the fence, as we spent several days living right next to it.
Uapindi Kazahe, one of our students at the Polytechnic, grew up literally just north of the fence as it wends its way westward through mountains to the edge of the Namib Desert. When his exams ended, he joined us for 3 weeks on the coast – he had never even seen the ocean before. Then we visited his home when we dropped him off. It was a profoundly interesting experience. Traveling with Uapindi gave us a much more intimate and authentic interaction with rural black Namibians than at any time during our year here. We had lunch with an older man who walked across a rugged rocky landscape on bare feet the size of dinner plates, and who had never before had a meal with a white person – he almost refused to join us, because his previous experience with whites involved beatings. Uapindi translated (the man spoke a home language and Afrikaans, but not English) and also indicated that he had some of the best natural history knowledge in the entire area.
To reach Uapindi’s mother’s house, we turned off the “main” dirt road onto a winding track that passed through the fence at a small border crossing, then entered a stunning valley of always-flowing water and giant makalani palms before branching back up the hill to the half-dozen stick-and-manure houses at our destination. The area is part of a locally-managed conservancy that stretches from the fence north along the western edge of Etosha National Park – Hobatere Lodge, where we traveled with my parents in June, sits in the middle, although we’re not sure if their concession is from the government or from the conservancy. Every km or so was another group of houses. Uapindi’s mother has some 40 cattle and 30 goats and lives in a Himba culture where a person’s wealth is measured in animals (primarily cattle) – by this metric, she is quite well-off and can sell some cows each year (albeit at a lower price because she’s north of the fence) for other purchases. Still, among the half-dozen adults and dozen kids, there was not a single writing instrument, book or ball. We had anticipated that this would be a place to make a difference while we lightened our load of luggage for the return to the U.S.: we left books, pens, balls, cots, camp chairs, sleeping bags, tent, and food. (Uapindi recommended flour, sugar, tea, macaroni, and biscuits [cookies], plus a bag of sweets to hand out to kids. Wherever we have traveled in rural Namibia, gifts of store-bought food have been really appreciated.) In return, a goat was slaughtered for our visit, Uapindi’s grandmother gave me a necklace that she had carved herself, with the distinctive orange color and earthy scent of traditional Himba women, who paint themselves with a concoction partly made of that wood, and we were offered a cow on departure!
The fence provides dramatic results of an unreplicated experiment: on the south side, where few people live close by, the grass is tall and starting to green with summer rain, and the shrubs are full and diverse. On the north side, the ground is rocky and bare, with just a slight wash of green as grasses germinate. It’s clear evidence of the importance of herbivores (from an ecologist’s perspective), and obvious overgrazing (from an agriculturalist’s). The goats and even cows slip through holes in the double fence and graze on the non-FMD side, herded back to their home kraals in the evening. But even with this semi-permeable barrier, the difference in vegetation between the two sides is perpetually evident. The cows also have easy access to the stream of running water – although older water diversions and tanks indicate that stock may have been watered differently in the past, presumably on a larger farm with more infrastructure investment. So the water is eutrophic and smelly. The Red Cross has installed several water pumps for people to use – for instance, every 2 or 3 days, water is fetched by hand at Uapindi’s mother’s house. On an afternoon donkey cart ride down the river, Katie and I drank water from one of these pumps and spent the next day with crummy tummies and diarrhea (fortunately, we were traveling back roads to our next stop at Etosha, so we could stop the car at a moment’s notice in relative privacy). Alan wisely avoided the water. I guess I had become too accustomed to clean water from Namibia’s taps, plus was assured that water was clean and abundant, and believed in the filtering power of soil – anyway, it wasn’t a pleasant result, but could have been a lot worse. The donkey cart ride itself was an experience, with a harness constructed of bits of tire and wire, some chain and metal poles. We had a flat tire on the way, where we learned the “African way” of fixing a flat – on the tube in the tubeless tire, take a handful around the puncture and wrap with a strip of rubber cut from another tube! The 3 small donkeys suffered from this rig, plus carrying 6 people in an unbalanced cart through gullies and over rocky ground. They were fast on the downhill, but I preferred to walk the last stretch.
We observed but didn’t understand the cultural quilt in this area: it’s Damaraland, so many Damara people, but some Himbas interspersed with more cattle than goats, and San people doing most of the work.
We left Uapindi with professorial admonitions to put his theoretical agriculture knowledge to work: this past year, he has learned to calculate stocking densities, build a chicken coop and balance rations to improve chicken production (the chickens roosted in trees at night and had a high rooster:hen ratio), and design a better donkey harness. All of these ideas, put into practice, should raise the health and well-being of the plants and animals in the region. But, of course, they also take some time and capital investment.
Northern and southern Namibia are divided by a 3 m fence, designed to prevent Foot and Mouth Disease from moving with livestock or wild animals. In colonial times (20 years ago), when Namibia was still Southwest Africa, whites owned enormous cattle ranches in the arid southern region and were able to export cattle free of FMD; blacks had communal land where rainfall was higher north of the fence, but per capita land area was small. This pattern still largely holds, although the government is attempting redistribution of land through a “willing seller, willing buyer” program: the government buys farms when they are up for sale and selects new black owners. We’ve crossed the fence northward a couple of times en route to seeing elephants, crocs, and hippos in Chobe National Park (Botswana) with Alan’s older kids, and to pick up day-old chicks for our class experiment at the Polytechnic. But in mid-December we had an altogether different experience of the fence, as we spent several days living right next to it.
Uapindi Kazahe, one of our students at the Polytechnic, grew up literally just north of the fence as it wends its way westward through mountains to the edge of the Namib Desert. When his exams ended, he joined us for 3 weeks on the coast – he had never even seen the ocean before. Then we visited his home when we dropped him off. It was a profoundly interesting experience. Traveling with Uapindi gave us a much more intimate and authentic interaction with rural black Namibians than at any time during our year here. We had lunch with an older man who walked across a rugged rocky landscape on bare feet the size of dinner plates, and who had never before had a meal with a white person – he almost refused to join us, because his previous experience with whites involved beatings. Uapindi translated (the man spoke a home language and Afrikaans, but not English) and also indicated that he had some of the best natural history knowledge in the entire area.
To reach Uapindi’s mother’s house, we turned off the “main” dirt road onto a winding track that passed through the fence at a small border crossing, then entered a stunning valley of always-flowing water and giant makalani palms before branching back up the hill to the half-dozen stick-and-manure houses at our destination. The area is part of a locally-managed conservancy that stretches from the fence north along the western edge of Etosha National Park – Hobatere Lodge, where we traveled with my parents in June, sits in the middle, although we’re not sure if their concession is from the government or from the conservancy. Every km or so was another group of houses. Uapindi’s mother has some 40 cattle and 30 goats and lives in a Himba culture where a person’s wealth is measured in animals (primarily cattle) – by this metric, she is quite well-off and can sell some cows each year (albeit at a lower price because she’s north of the fence) for other purchases. Still, among the half-dozen adults and dozen kids, there was not a single writing instrument, book or ball. We had anticipated that this would be a place to make a difference while we lightened our load of luggage for the return to the U.S.: we left books, pens, balls, cots, camp chairs, sleeping bags, tent, and food. (Uapindi recommended flour, sugar, tea, macaroni, and biscuits [cookies], plus a bag of sweets to hand out to kids. Wherever we have traveled in rural Namibia, gifts of store-bought food have been really appreciated.) In return, a goat was slaughtered for our visit, Uapindi’s grandmother gave me a necklace that she had carved herself, with the distinctive orange color and earthy scent of traditional Himba women, who paint themselves with a concoction partly made of that wood, and we were offered a cow on departure!
The fence provides dramatic results of an unreplicated experiment: on the south side, where few people live close by, the grass is tall and starting to green with summer rain, and the shrubs are full and diverse. On the north side, the ground is rocky and bare, with just a slight wash of green as grasses germinate. It’s clear evidence of the importance of herbivores (from an ecologist’s perspective), and obvious overgrazing (from an agriculturalist’s). The goats and even cows slip through holes in the double fence and graze on the non-FMD side, herded back to their home kraals in the evening. But even with this semi-permeable barrier, the difference in vegetation between the two sides is perpetually evident. The cows also have easy access to the stream of running water – although older water diversions and tanks indicate that stock may have been watered differently in the past, presumably on a larger farm with more infrastructure investment. So the water is eutrophic and smelly. The Red Cross has installed several water pumps for people to use – for instance, every 2 or 3 days, water is fetched by hand at Uapindi’s mother’s house. On an afternoon donkey cart ride down the river, Katie and I drank water from one of these pumps and spent the next day with crummy tummies and diarrhea (fortunately, we were traveling back roads to our next stop at Etosha, so we could stop the car at a moment’s notice in relative privacy). Alan wisely avoided the water. I guess I had become too accustomed to clean water from Namibia’s taps, plus was assured that water was clean and abundant, and believed in the filtering power of soil – anyway, it wasn’t a pleasant result, but could have been a lot worse. The donkey cart ride itself was an experience, with a harness constructed of bits of tire and wire, some chain and metal poles. We had a flat tire on the way, where we learned the “African way” of fixing a flat – on the tube in the tubeless tire, take a handful around the puncture and wrap with a strip of rubber cut from another tube! The 3 small donkeys suffered from this rig, plus carrying 6 people in an unbalanced cart through gullies and over rocky ground. They were fast on the downhill, but I preferred to walk the last stretch.
We observed but didn’t understand the cultural quilt in this area: it’s Damaraland, so many Damara people, but some Himbas interspersed with more cattle than goats, and San people doing most of the work.
We left Uapindi with professorial admonitions to put his theoretical agriculture knowledge to work: this past year, he has learned to calculate stocking densities, build a chicken coop and balance rations to improve chicken production (the chickens roosted in trees at night and had a high rooster:hen ratio), and design a better donkey harness. All of these ideas, put into practice, should raise the health and well-being of the plants and animals in the region. But, of course, they also take some time and capital investment.
Science in restricted territory
Dec 11-15
Sometimes, when people find out that I’m a scientist, they ask: “So, what have you discovered?” Usually, I’m at somewhat of a loss to answer this question. It’s not easy to compress the fine details of interaction strengths in a food web into a comment that is both intelligible and compelling. Or I sound vague and undecided in stating – truthfully – that one species can have both positive and negative effects on another, depending on time, place, and what is being measured. Now, however, there’s a clear answer for the “discovery” question: Alan and I discovered a new species, which has never been reported from Africa, but which has strong negative effects on bivalves. Furthermore, there is good evidence that the species is not a new introduction, but simply something that no one bothered to record previously. This ease of discovery is the silver lining of sabbatical in a country where you can count the marine biologists on one hand.
The species we discovered is a phoronid worm that burrows into shell. Phoronids are unsegmented worms, currently included in the same phylum as brachiopods, with which they share a horseshoe-shaped ring of tentacles for filter-feeding. Phoronis ovalis is the only phoronid reported to burrow in shell, and the other dozen or so species of phoronids make free-standing tubes. Very little published literature is available on Phoronis ovalis, but by piecing together papers and websites, it appears to have a temperate distribution that includes Scandinavia, the Mediterranean, Pacific Northwest, New Zealand, east and west coasts of South America, and Japan. It has not been reported anywhere in Africa, including South Africa (where its absence may be genuine, since there is close scientific attention to marine species). But it’s definitely in Namibia. Here are some things we’ve learned about it (let’s call it Phoronis sp., since we can’t be sure it’s P. ovalis): The ring of tentacles is less than 200 microns across, and the total worm length is around 2 mm. The burrows come to the surface at densities of more than 100 per square cm. Shells that are seriously infested with phoronids become porous but thicker, because the host has to repair and re-apply shell on the inside. This takes so much energy that the host itself loses condition! Phoronids are not too picky about host species, as long as they are essentially always under water: we have found phoronid holes in Perna perna (brown mussel, our main study species), Choromytilus (native blue-black mussel), Mytilus galloprovincialis (introduced blue-black mussel), limpets, whelks, and even a barnacle. How could this species have gone unnoticed for so long? More than half the mussel shells on the beach are riddled with these holes! Maybe the answer is best summed up by the comment after our public talk at the Swakopmund aquarium in late November: The only mussel we’re really interested in is the “white mussel”, which scientists call a clam, and then only because we use it for fishing bait.
Well, to quote Dr Seuss again, “If you want to find beasts you don’t see everyday/ You have to go places quite out of the way./ You have to go places no others can get to./ You have to get cold and you have to get wet too.” Ever since we arrived in Namibia, we’ve wanted to see the full range of intertidal sites, but we’ve been limited to the area around Swakopmund because only this 200-km stretch of coast is publicly accessible. To the south, the coast is well protected by the great sand sea, and off limits to all but diamond miners. To the north, most of the Skeleton Coast Park is closed to public access. However, our discovery of Phoronis sp. in Namibia gave us a logical reason to face the administrative hoops and request a permit for beach access in the Skeleton Coast Park. (We have, alas, run out of time for southern sampling, but we have contacts in a few key coastal towns who may be able to report on the presence or absence of phoronid holes there.) After a few false leads, we finally had an in-person meeting with the Director of Parks and Wildlife Management, where we presented our case in a 2-page letter and – Eureka! – walked out with a Skeleton Coast Park permit! We were on our way into restricted territory with no roads, no people, but full of stories and legends to fuel our excitement!
The Skeleton Coast gathered its name and fame from a book by that name, written in the 1950s about events during WWII: a passenger ship ran aground at a point even farther north than our planned sampling, and rescues were attempted by land, sea, and air. Planes crashed, tugs grounded, trucks floundered in sand, but ultimately all but two of hundreds of people involved in the accident and rescue survived. By sea, the Namibian coast is nearly straight, with little in the way of protected harbors, and waves on shore that are large even in calm seas. The Namib desert is essentially devoid of freshwater, a forbidding barrier by land. The desert is breached at intervals by rivers, but these are generally dry, running to the coast only when inland rains are extreme, which happens every couple of decades. Mindful of the difficulties of negotiating such an area, we traveled with Mr Klein, our host at the Salt Company, who knew the coast by air and land from many years of prospecting and mining; we also traveled with one of our students from the Polytechnic, Uapindi Kazahe, who knows people wherever he goes. From Swakopmund (22.6 degrees S), we traveled north about 160 km to a campsite at Mile 108, then a further 200 km to Mowe Bay, where we camped for two nights at the end of the road. From there, on a day trip, we all got into Mr Klein’s Toyota Fortuner, which can ford rivers of sand, climb mountains, and stick to seaside cobble. We followed a track or the beach to our northern sampling site at Rocky Point (19 degrees S). On the return trip to the south, we camped at Torra Bay, totally outclassed by the summer holiday fishers who set up colorful castles of tents, windscreens, and caravans, with all the comforts of home powered by generators. We crossed the dry river mouths (in order from the south) of the Ugab, formed by Paleozoic glaciers; Huab; Koigab; the five mouths of the Uniab, including its current channel harboring reeds, gemsbok, and springbok; Hoanib, with a flamingoed lagoon bordered by a thick layer of snail egg cases; and avoided the quicksand that sometimes marks the mouth of the Hoarusib. Mr Klein had been stopped for weeks by these rivers in other years, so we were thankful for just minimal amounts of rain. (Actually, the weather was remarkably cooperative, particularly the absence of strong southwesterlies that can blow away campers, and rain just as we were packing to leave Mowe Bay).
What does a beach look like when human impacts are really low? The sand was littered with wood and whalebones. Vertebrae like coffee tables. Two-story ribs. The tough part of the back of the skull. A midden of charcoal and mussel shells, along with a ring of rocks, still was visible where native people had homesteaded perhaps a century ago, living in a hut of skins draped on whale ribs. We saw bits of old wooden fishing boats, the crashed airplane, and the top of the tug, swept by waves, along with several other wrecks. We saw the detritus of old mining operations, cleared areas where people had camped, piles of sand and stone, and rusty equipment for sorting beach gravel by size and density. Mr Klein said that Namibia’s large diamond mining company, Namdeb, sold its mining rights quite some time ago, which should have been an indication that prospecting on the Skeleton Coast was fruitless, but nevertheless some mining still goes on.
Most of the Skeleton Coast, and in fact Namibia’s coast in general, is sandy beach. Any species requiring hard substrate is restricted to a few outcrops (although what happens below low tide is something of a mystery: there must be rocks that we can’t see in some places, as indicated by kelp blades at the surface of the water). At the rocky sites we visited along the Skeleton Coast, the limpets and snails reached absolutely enormous sizes – 10 cm diameter, as big as a hand! Some familiar species disappeared: lobster molts and clam shells were not on the beach after Mile 108. New species amazed us: Ghost crabs popped out of their sand burrows by the hundreds and scattered across the beach. 1-cm moon snails with a comma umbilicus showed up on a few beaches and in jewelry for sale at the park entrance, but the comma necklace snail distribution is supposed to end at the southern tip of the continent. To the north, mussels became both smaller and less abundant, and some of the larger individuals were actually drilled – something we’d only seen in small clams and mussels in the Swakopmund area. Of course, we can’t know for certain how much of the variation in intertidal community structure that we witnessed on our trip was due to latitude, and how much to human access. The rock type varied as well: Rocky Point is made of rare red volcanic rock that only reaches the coast in one place. Other sites we sampled were a conglomerate, often eroded into steep intertidal mesas. At still others, layers of rock were turned on end. Most of the sites had been previously sampled by Spanish researchers, and the algal results reported in a monograph by Rull Lluch. But Alan’s extensive searching with Google Earth revealed one more rocky site, north of Terrace Bay in the restricted park area. It was particularly limpet-y, sort of like the bottom of a pink-red non-slip shoe, with lots of grippy bumps. The red and pink came from the apparently unpalatable algae, the bumps from the shells of limpets. Only where the cobble had recently receded could any green be seen on the rocks, more clear evidence of the importance of herbivores in regulating community structure, because the algae colonize these rocks faster than the limpets.
So what’s the story on phoronids? As we sampled north from Swakopmund, the prevalence first increased in mussels, and then as large mussels became less common on the beach, the frequency of phoronid holes also decreased. By the time we reached Rocky Point, we didn’t find any mussels with phoronid holes, although they showed up in a few snail shells. When we discussed our trip with Dr Bronwen Currie at NATMIRC in Swakopmund, she produced some large Perna shells that she had brought back from a rocky site near the Kunene River, the border with Angola: 1 of 10 had phoronid holes! And the marine biologists in South Africa are now sending photographs of snails with small holes in the shell: these may be phoronids, too! So it seems we haven’t quite finalized the entire range of the species, but we’ve found a 200-km stretch of coast where they are particularly common. We also found them buried in layers under about 3 m of silt, sand, and vegetation, now being eroded by waves at the base of a cliff – surely these must be quite old! But we are always warned that a 1-year snapshot of life on the beach is deceiving. That sand could have been deposited just a short while ago during a massive east wind blow. Like any proper “discovery”, ours still has a few mysteries remaining.
Sometimes, when people find out that I’m a scientist, they ask: “So, what have you discovered?” Usually, I’m at somewhat of a loss to answer this question. It’s not easy to compress the fine details of interaction strengths in a food web into a comment that is both intelligible and compelling. Or I sound vague and undecided in stating – truthfully – that one species can have both positive and negative effects on another, depending on time, place, and what is being measured. Now, however, there’s a clear answer for the “discovery” question: Alan and I discovered a new species, which has never been reported from Africa, but which has strong negative effects on bivalves. Furthermore, there is good evidence that the species is not a new introduction, but simply something that no one bothered to record previously. This ease of discovery is the silver lining of sabbatical in a country where you can count the marine biologists on one hand.
The species we discovered is a phoronid worm that burrows into shell. Phoronids are unsegmented worms, currently included in the same phylum as brachiopods, with which they share a horseshoe-shaped ring of tentacles for filter-feeding. Phoronis ovalis is the only phoronid reported to burrow in shell, and the other dozen or so species of phoronids make free-standing tubes. Very little published literature is available on Phoronis ovalis, but by piecing together papers and websites, it appears to have a temperate distribution that includes Scandinavia, the Mediterranean, Pacific Northwest, New Zealand, east and west coasts of South America, and Japan. It has not been reported anywhere in Africa, including South Africa (where its absence may be genuine, since there is close scientific attention to marine species). But it’s definitely in Namibia. Here are some things we’ve learned about it (let’s call it Phoronis sp., since we can’t be sure it’s P. ovalis): The ring of tentacles is less than 200 microns across, and the total worm length is around 2 mm. The burrows come to the surface at densities of more than 100 per square cm. Shells that are seriously infested with phoronids become porous but thicker, because the host has to repair and re-apply shell on the inside. This takes so much energy that the host itself loses condition! Phoronids are not too picky about host species, as long as they are essentially always under water: we have found phoronid holes in Perna perna (brown mussel, our main study species), Choromytilus (native blue-black mussel), Mytilus galloprovincialis (introduced blue-black mussel), limpets, whelks, and even a barnacle. How could this species have gone unnoticed for so long? More than half the mussel shells on the beach are riddled with these holes! Maybe the answer is best summed up by the comment after our public talk at the Swakopmund aquarium in late November: The only mussel we’re really interested in is the “white mussel”, which scientists call a clam, and then only because we use it for fishing bait.
Well, to quote Dr Seuss again, “If you want to find beasts you don’t see everyday/ You have to go places quite out of the way./ You have to go places no others can get to./ You have to get cold and you have to get wet too.” Ever since we arrived in Namibia, we’ve wanted to see the full range of intertidal sites, but we’ve been limited to the area around Swakopmund because only this 200-km stretch of coast is publicly accessible. To the south, the coast is well protected by the great sand sea, and off limits to all but diamond miners. To the north, most of the Skeleton Coast Park is closed to public access. However, our discovery of Phoronis sp. in Namibia gave us a logical reason to face the administrative hoops and request a permit for beach access in the Skeleton Coast Park. (We have, alas, run out of time for southern sampling, but we have contacts in a few key coastal towns who may be able to report on the presence or absence of phoronid holes there.) After a few false leads, we finally had an in-person meeting with the Director of Parks and Wildlife Management, where we presented our case in a 2-page letter and – Eureka! – walked out with a Skeleton Coast Park permit! We were on our way into restricted territory with no roads, no people, but full of stories and legends to fuel our excitement!
The Skeleton Coast gathered its name and fame from a book by that name, written in the 1950s about events during WWII: a passenger ship ran aground at a point even farther north than our planned sampling, and rescues were attempted by land, sea, and air. Planes crashed, tugs grounded, trucks floundered in sand, but ultimately all but two of hundreds of people involved in the accident and rescue survived. By sea, the Namibian coast is nearly straight, with little in the way of protected harbors, and waves on shore that are large even in calm seas. The Namib desert is essentially devoid of freshwater, a forbidding barrier by land. The desert is breached at intervals by rivers, but these are generally dry, running to the coast only when inland rains are extreme, which happens every couple of decades. Mindful of the difficulties of negotiating such an area, we traveled with Mr Klein, our host at the Salt Company, who knew the coast by air and land from many years of prospecting and mining; we also traveled with one of our students from the Polytechnic, Uapindi Kazahe, who knows people wherever he goes. From Swakopmund (22.6 degrees S), we traveled north about 160 km to a campsite at Mile 108, then a further 200 km to Mowe Bay, where we camped for two nights at the end of the road. From there, on a day trip, we all got into Mr Klein’s Toyota Fortuner, which can ford rivers of sand, climb mountains, and stick to seaside cobble. We followed a track or the beach to our northern sampling site at Rocky Point (19 degrees S). On the return trip to the south, we camped at Torra Bay, totally outclassed by the summer holiday fishers who set up colorful castles of tents, windscreens, and caravans, with all the comforts of home powered by generators. We crossed the dry river mouths (in order from the south) of the Ugab, formed by Paleozoic glaciers; Huab; Koigab; the five mouths of the Uniab, including its current channel harboring reeds, gemsbok, and springbok; Hoanib, with a flamingoed lagoon bordered by a thick layer of snail egg cases; and avoided the quicksand that sometimes marks the mouth of the Hoarusib. Mr Klein had been stopped for weeks by these rivers in other years, so we were thankful for just minimal amounts of rain. (Actually, the weather was remarkably cooperative, particularly the absence of strong southwesterlies that can blow away campers, and rain just as we were packing to leave Mowe Bay).
What does a beach look like when human impacts are really low? The sand was littered with wood and whalebones. Vertebrae like coffee tables. Two-story ribs. The tough part of the back of the skull. A midden of charcoal and mussel shells, along with a ring of rocks, still was visible where native people had homesteaded perhaps a century ago, living in a hut of skins draped on whale ribs. We saw bits of old wooden fishing boats, the crashed airplane, and the top of the tug, swept by waves, along with several other wrecks. We saw the detritus of old mining operations, cleared areas where people had camped, piles of sand and stone, and rusty equipment for sorting beach gravel by size and density. Mr Klein said that Namibia’s large diamond mining company, Namdeb, sold its mining rights quite some time ago, which should have been an indication that prospecting on the Skeleton Coast was fruitless, but nevertheless some mining still goes on.
Most of the Skeleton Coast, and in fact Namibia’s coast in general, is sandy beach. Any species requiring hard substrate is restricted to a few outcrops (although what happens below low tide is something of a mystery: there must be rocks that we can’t see in some places, as indicated by kelp blades at the surface of the water). At the rocky sites we visited along the Skeleton Coast, the limpets and snails reached absolutely enormous sizes – 10 cm diameter, as big as a hand! Some familiar species disappeared: lobster molts and clam shells were not on the beach after Mile 108. New species amazed us: Ghost crabs popped out of their sand burrows by the hundreds and scattered across the beach. 1-cm moon snails with a comma umbilicus showed up on a few beaches and in jewelry for sale at the park entrance, but the comma necklace snail distribution is supposed to end at the southern tip of the continent. To the north, mussels became both smaller and less abundant, and some of the larger individuals were actually drilled – something we’d only seen in small clams and mussels in the Swakopmund area. Of course, we can’t know for certain how much of the variation in intertidal community structure that we witnessed on our trip was due to latitude, and how much to human access. The rock type varied as well: Rocky Point is made of rare red volcanic rock that only reaches the coast in one place. Other sites we sampled were a conglomerate, often eroded into steep intertidal mesas. At still others, layers of rock were turned on end. Most of the sites had been previously sampled by Spanish researchers, and the algal results reported in a monograph by Rull Lluch. But Alan’s extensive searching with Google Earth revealed one more rocky site, north of Terrace Bay in the restricted park area. It was particularly limpet-y, sort of like the bottom of a pink-red non-slip shoe, with lots of grippy bumps. The red and pink came from the apparently unpalatable algae, the bumps from the shells of limpets. Only where the cobble had recently receded could any green be seen on the rocks, more clear evidence of the importance of herbivores in regulating community structure, because the algae colonize these rocks faster than the limpets.
So what’s the story on phoronids? As we sampled north from Swakopmund, the prevalence first increased in mussels, and then as large mussels became less common on the beach, the frequency of phoronid holes also decreased. By the time we reached Rocky Point, we didn’t find any mussels with phoronid holes, although they showed up in a few snail shells. When we discussed our trip with Dr Bronwen Currie at NATMIRC in Swakopmund, she produced some large Perna shells that she had brought back from a rocky site near the Kunene River, the border with Angola: 1 of 10 had phoronid holes! And the marine biologists in South Africa are now sending photographs of snails with small holes in the shell: these may be phoronids, too! So it seems we haven’t quite finalized the entire range of the species, but we’ve found a 200-km stretch of coast where they are particularly common. We also found them buried in layers under about 3 m of silt, sand, and vegetation, now being eroded by waves at the base of a cliff – surely these must be quite old! But we are always warned that a 1-year snapshot of life on the beach is deceiving. That sand could have been deposited just a short while ago during a massive east wind blow. Like any proper “discovery”, ours still has a few mysteries remaining.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Go Sandboarding!
Katie’s favorite pastimes are still playing with kids and books. Puzzles rank a close third and often trump books if she’s really grumpy: there’s something about concentrating on which piece goes where that takes her mind off other troubles. Recently, we’ve had a lot of tea parties, although not your average china-and-pink-frilly-dress affairs. Our new favorite restaurant in Swakopmund is Napolitana, which we’ve been frequenting about once a week on our arrival from Windhoek to the coast (now that class is over, our flexible research schedule has returned). Katie stands on a wooden shelf and watches pizzas in construction: Roll the dough flat, cut it with a metal circle, sprinkle with flour and store in a pile. When a pizza order comes in, place the crust on a second counter, use a device a bit like a rolling meat tenderizer or massager to put tiny divets in the crust, then paint on a thin veneer of tomato sauce. Add toppings all the way to the edge. Katie prefers just plain Margherita (tomato and cheese, but she picks off the tomatoes even though she loves tomatoes and will eat them by the handful. Kids. Go figure.), but options include creamed chicken, spare ribs, springbok and more, stored in two dozen metal containers with lids, their contents precisely memorized by the pizza makers. After a thick layer of grated cheese, the pizza is popped into a cob oven (well, perhaps cob. Here in Namibia there’s the distinct possibility that it’s made of concrete – but it has the right round shape and turns out very tasty pizzas). The best part for Katie is when one of the pizza-makers gives her a ball of dough. First she slides under the table to try to get away with eating it raw. When her parents object, she rolls and pulls and tugs it into various shapes, lets it sit overnight to get its yeasty rising over with and lose a little water. Then we mold the dough into cups, saucers, spoons, sugar bowls, pitchers, and lids. They dry for a day and are ready to paint with finger paint. The result is clearly for pretending – something Katie has just gotten the hang of (“Don’t worry, Mama, I’m just a pretend lion.”). The dishes would droop with any liquid and in fact won’t handle much more than a week of playing (a perfect excuse to go get more dough…).
Katie’s language skills continue to amaze me. When there is too much adult conversation or science going on, she says, “I want someone to pay attention to ME!” (Either that or she yells and screams unintelligibly.) Bad smells such as tanneries along the road or rotting seals on the beach are pronounced “Disgusting!” She will often tell elaborate stories about animals chasing each other – usually the springbok escapes, and I haven’t yet been able to get her to see it from the perspective of the hyena, who goes hungry. Some of her statements really indicate what a sponge she is for language: “Dorothea [her much-loved doll who has 2 broken legs, a cracked head, and a face painted with blue pen to look like a hyena] is sleeping, but I am getting up to do some work.” “You go from the mussel shell to the gerbil hole, while I sit on the jackal bush.” She makes up songs – sometimes with an odd assortment of Mother Goose phrases – and at the end asks, “Was that a nice song?” Her tenses still get mixed up a bit, but it’s English, so no wonder: I goed. I falled. A shining moment was rhyming “pocket” with “chocolate.” Possibly a fluke…!
One of the earliest polysyllabic words Katie learned was “sandboarding.” We have a beautiful card game of Namib desert plants and animals – her fourth favorite thing to do, which we’ve been playing a bit like “Go Fish.” If you have a scorpion card and want to collect all 4 arachnids, you ask another player if they have an arachnid (At this point, with Katie, we put all our cards out on the table for everyone to see, and she usually won’t ask for an arachnid even if it’s obvious in my hand. And she definitely won’t give up a flamingo or ostrich to complete my bird set! Of course, we play by “Katie’s rules.”). If the other person doesn’t have what you want or won’t give it up, you “Go Sandboarding.” Go Fish didn’t seem to make sense, given that the backs of the cards show unending red sand dunes.
On a weekend in early November, we actually did go sandboarding, joining the Lightfoot/Plummers for a morning of adrenaline-rushing, high-speed thrills with Alter Action on the red dunes near Swakopmund. They provided helmets, elbow pads, and gloves (none small enough for Katie, whom we dressed in a way that we hoped would at least protect her from the sun, our worst worry). They also provided rectangular boards of flexible masonite, about 1.2 x0.6 m, which were waxed on their smooth side. We marched up the sand dunes, lay down on our tummies on the rough side, held up the front of the board slightly, and tried to go head-first. Some of the group personally experienced what happens when you let down the front of the board (huge clouds of sand in your eyes, nose, ears and teeth) or spin to go side- or feet-first (the board digs in and flips you over on top of your passenger). These events were somewhat traumatic for the 5-10 year old girls experiencing them, but they made for the best video footage (the video, complete with soundtrack, was included in the price of the trip, along with lunch – not bad for N$200 per adult). Even the girls thought their wipeouts looked pretty exciting on screen – at least, if you’re going to crash your sandboard, it’s better if the photographer is actually around to capture the event! Katie, fortunately, weathered the day without anything worse than a faceplant, self-induced when she ran down a dune so steep and fast that her head got ahead of her feet. The rest of the time, she clung like a baby baboon to mom or dad’s back, smiling (we have it on video!), even occasionally whooping (can’t be heard over the soundtrack), at speeds up to 59 kph (our guides clocked us with a speed gun). Well, she also clung to our backs on the way back up, making the climb an extra good workout for her parents. We were very proud of Katie’s courage, excitement, and willingness to try new things – enabling us to have one of our most exhilarating experiences of Namibia. It’s true. Sandboarding is a blast!!! That day really felt like a vacation.
Katie’s language skills continue to amaze me. When there is too much adult conversation or science going on, she says, “I want someone to pay attention to ME!” (Either that or she yells and screams unintelligibly.) Bad smells such as tanneries along the road or rotting seals on the beach are pronounced “Disgusting!” She will often tell elaborate stories about animals chasing each other – usually the springbok escapes, and I haven’t yet been able to get her to see it from the perspective of the hyena, who goes hungry. Some of her statements really indicate what a sponge she is for language: “Dorothea [her much-loved doll who has 2 broken legs, a cracked head, and a face painted with blue pen to look like a hyena] is sleeping, but I am getting up to do some work.” “You go from the mussel shell to the gerbil hole, while I sit on the jackal bush.” She makes up songs – sometimes with an odd assortment of Mother Goose phrases – and at the end asks, “Was that a nice song?” Her tenses still get mixed up a bit, but it’s English, so no wonder: I goed. I falled. A shining moment was rhyming “pocket” with “chocolate.” Possibly a fluke…!
One of the earliest polysyllabic words Katie learned was “sandboarding.” We have a beautiful card game of Namib desert plants and animals – her fourth favorite thing to do, which we’ve been playing a bit like “Go Fish.” If you have a scorpion card and want to collect all 4 arachnids, you ask another player if they have an arachnid (At this point, with Katie, we put all our cards out on the table for everyone to see, and she usually won’t ask for an arachnid even if it’s obvious in my hand. And she definitely won’t give up a flamingo or ostrich to complete my bird set! Of course, we play by “Katie’s rules.”). If the other person doesn’t have what you want or won’t give it up, you “Go Sandboarding.” Go Fish didn’t seem to make sense, given that the backs of the cards show unending red sand dunes.
On a weekend in early November, we actually did go sandboarding, joining the Lightfoot/Plummers for a morning of adrenaline-rushing, high-speed thrills with Alter Action on the red dunes near Swakopmund. They provided helmets, elbow pads, and gloves (none small enough for Katie, whom we dressed in a way that we hoped would at least protect her from the sun, our worst worry). They also provided rectangular boards of flexible masonite, about 1.2 x0.6 m, which were waxed on their smooth side. We marched up the sand dunes, lay down on our tummies on the rough side, held up the front of the board slightly, and tried to go head-first. Some of the group personally experienced what happens when you let down the front of the board (huge clouds of sand in your eyes, nose, ears and teeth) or spin to go side- or feet-first (the board digs in and flips you over on top of your passenger). These events were somewhat traumatic for the 5-10 year old girls experiencing them, but they made for the best video footage (the video, complete with soundtrack, was included in the price of the trip, along with lunch – not bad for N$200 per adult). Even the girls thought their wipeouts looked pretty exciting on screen – at least, if you’re going to crash your sandboard, it’s better if the photographer is actually around to capture the event! Katie, fortunately, weathered the day without anything worse than a faceplant, self-induced when she ran down a dune so steep and fast that her head got ahead of her feet. The rest of the time, she clung like a baby baboon to mom or dad’s back, smiling (we have it on video!), even occasionally whooping (can’t be heard over the soundtrack), at speeds up to 59 kph (our guides clocked us with a speed gun). Well, she also clung to our backs on the way back up, making the climb an extra good workout for her parents. We were very proud of Katie’s courage, excitement, and willingness to try new things – enabling us to have one of our most exhilarating experiences of Namibia. It’s true. Sandboarding is a blast!!! That day really felt like a vacation.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Chicken Run!
JR is coordinating a weekly Poly-wide meeting on the development of a new program in Applied Biology. It’s been a fun but challenging and time-consuming opportunity to interact with the few scientists on campus and to talk about scientific skills that need to be cultivated in Namibia. This week’s topic was research, largely motivated by the fact that the new qualification will entail a research project, and there are more than 20 research-related courses already available at Poly to choose from. In a fortuitous turn of events, I also got a glimpse of scientific preparation by judging 7th and 12th grade chemistry entries in Namibia’s National Science Fair, which was held on the Poly campus in September. There’s an interesting dichotomy of perspective about whether training programs need courses in research (e.g. Research Methodology to define research and walk through the development of questions and research designs; no one debates the importance of separate, detailed statistics courses) or need research embedded in courses. For our part, we’re taking the latter approach with Non-ruminant Husbandry.
With the class, we’ve developed a 2-factor experiment to test how a change in agricultural practice would affect productivity and profit. The largest limitation to growing non-ruminants in Namibia is the feed cost – these feeds have to be nutritionally balanced (not just grass, as in ruminants), and the ingredients are almost all imported. So we asked the question of whether we could use cheaper, local feed ingredients and still get satisfactory performance. We chose to focus on chickens (rather than pigs, horses, or fish, our other non-ruminant options that would be impossible to house on campus) and to compare diets of commercial vs. hotel left-overs, with or without earthworms. A rule of thumb for chicken diets from scratch is 50% grains (bread crusts, rice, pasta, corn flakes), 25% protein sources (meat, egg, nuts, beans), and 25% greens (lettuce, chard, herbs), all chopped finely enough to make it down a small bird’s throat without chewing. The chicks get energy from the grains, proteins for building muscles, and vitamins and minerals from the greens.
There have been a few hurdles to overcome. First, chickens are illegal in Windhoek. Well, we’re only raising chicks, and they’ll be moved elsewhere when the experiment finishes at about 6 weeks. We didn’t even ask about whether it was okay to keep them for the first week in our apartment (we finally found a good use for our space heater!). Second, because the poultry industry is essentially non-existent in Namibia, there are few sources of large numbers of day-old chicks in the region. They must be imported from South Africa or purchased from Mashare Agricultural Development Institute, which is maintaining a line of Potchefstroom koekoek chickens after the end of a large trial comparing productivity of 4 breeds. Third, the veterinary fence was closed to all agricultural products from early August, when FMD broke out in the Kavango region. Chickens don’t carry FMD, but Veterinary Services doesn’t issue permits for anything when the fence is closed – until we called for weeks and finally went straight to the head vet in Namibia to get a special “red cross” permit to bring the chicks from Mashare, north of the red line, to Windhoek. This was our “chicken run.” We left Windhoek after class on Tuesday, traveled 5 hours to Roy’s Camp where we stayed the night, then pushed on to Rundu and Mashare, where we picked up the chicks, got the correct permit, and made the 8-hour drive back south to Windhoek by Wednesday evening. Roy’s Camp deserves a special note because it was one of the funkiest, most restful places we’ve stayed. JR went for a walk (!) in the bush (Roy’s camp doesn’t have any large predators) and was surprised by a LOUD barking snort that turned out to be a male kudu warning his group – I guess he was as surprised as I was! We had a wonderful dinner of kudu pockets (Okay, there are no kangaroos or other pocketed marsupials in Namibia, contrary to a variety of children’s books. These turned out to be pieces of kudu wrapped in bacon) and a half dozen different salads, most involving some sort of creamy dressing. We saw a whole herd of eland come to the waterhole at dusk, just as the “torches” made of wicks in glass bottles were being lit around the camp.
The chicks grew from 50 g at week 1 to 250 g at week 5, but faster on commercial feed than on urban leftovers. Worms helped their growth, too. We suspect that the leftovers were protein-deficient (it was a lot easier to get leftover pasta or porridge than leftover lamb or fish!) and missing some vitamins, because six of the birds began sitting on their haunches with curled toes a few days before the end of the experiment. We immediately took these birds out and put them on commercial feed with extra vitamins and minerals, and they were back to normal within a week! We’re having some feed samples analyzed chemically by the Ministry of Agriculture, so ultimately we’ll have data on what the birds actually received nutritionally.
The experiment has now ended and, despite our interest in giving 100 6-week-old chickens to a student interested in starting a chicken business, no one was able to write a business plan that actually showed a profit. The chickens moved instead to an organic farm in Okahandja – the garden city an hour north of Windhoek, where they’ll do a little grazing on cover crops, get some fishmeal from Walvis Bay, consume vegetable scraps and leftovers, and eat a bit of expensive organic nutritionally-balanced chicken food. We wish them happy (if not long) lives!
With the class, we’ve developed a 2-factor experiment to test how a change in agricultural practice would affect productivity and profit. The largest limitation to growing non-ruminants in Namibia is the feed cost – these feeds have to be nutritionally balanced (not just grass, as in ruminants), and the ingredients are almost all imported. So we asked the question of whether we could use cheaper, local feed ingredients and still get satisfactory performance. We chose to focus on chickens (rather than pigs, horses, or fish, our other non-ruminant options that would be impossible to house on campus) and to compare diets of commercial vs. hotel left-overs, with or without earthworms. A rule of thumb for chicken diets from scratch is 50% grains (bread crusts, rice, pasta, corn flakes), 25% protein sources (meat, egg, nuts, beans), and 25% greens (lettuce, chard, herbs), all chopped finely enough to make it down a small bird’s throat without chewing. The chicks get energy from the grains, proteins for building muscles, and vitamins and minerals from the greens.
There have been a few hurdles to overcome. First, chickens are illegal in Windhoek. Well, we’re only raising chicks, and they’ll be moved elsewhere when the experiment finishes at about 6 weeks. We didn’t even ask about whether it was okay to keep them for the first week in our apartment (we finally found a good use for our space heater!). Second, because the poultry industry is essentially non-existent in Namibia, there are few sources of large numbers of day-old chicks in the region. They must be imported from South Africa or purchased from Mashare Agricultural Development Institute, which is maintaining a line of Potchefstroom koekoek chickens after the end of a large trial comparing productivity of 4 breeds. Third, the veterinary fence was closed to all agricultural products from early August, when FMD broke out in the Kavango region. Chickens don’t carry FMD, but Veterinary Services doesn’t issue permits for anything when the fence is closed – until we called for weeks and finally went straight to the head vet in Namibia to get a special “red cross” permit to bring the chicks from Mashare, north of the red line, to Windhoek. This was our “chicken run.” We left Windhoek after class on Tuesday, traveled 5 hours to Roy’s Camp where we stayed the night, then pushed on to Rundu and Mashare, where we picked up the chicks, got the correct permit, and made the 8-hour drive back south to Windhoek by Wednesday evening. Roy’s Camp deserves a special note because it was one of the funkiest, most restful places we’ve stayed. JR went for a walk (!) in the bush (Roy’s camp doesn’t have any large predators) and was surprised by a LOUD barking snort that turned out to be a male kudu warning his group – I guess he was as surprised as I was! We had a wonderful dinner of kudu pockets (Okay, there are no kangaroos or other pocketed marsupials in Namibia, contrary to a variety of children’s books. These turned out to be pieces of kudu wrapped in bacon) and a half dozen different salads, most involving some sort of creamy dressing. We saw a whole herd of eland come to the waterhole at dusk, just as the “torches” made of wicks in glass bottles were being lit around the camp.
The chicks grew from 50 g at week 1 to 250 g at week 5, but faster on commercial feed than on urban leftovers. Worms helped their growth, too. We suspect that the leftovers were protein-deficient (it was a lot easier to get leftover pasta or porridge than leftover lamb or fish!) and missing some vitamins, because six of the birds began sitting on their haunches with curled toes a few days before the end of the experiment. We immediately took these birds out and put them on commercial feed with extra vitamins and minerals, and they were back to normal within a week! We’re having some feed samples analyzed chemically by the Ministry of Agriculture, so ultimately we’ll have data on what the birds actually received nutritionally.
The experiment has now ended and, despite our interest in giving 100 6-week-old chickens to a student interested in starting a chicken business, no one was able to write a business plan that actually showed a profit. The chickens moved instead to an organic farm in Okahandja – the garden city an hour north of Windhoek, where they’ll do a little grazing on cover crops, get some fishmeal from Walvis Bay, consume vegetable scraps and leftovers, and eat a bit of expensive organic nutritionally-balanced chicken food. We wish them happy (if not long) lives!
A change in the weather (and some more food comments)
Latitudinally, much of Namibia is tropical – we’ve passed the Tropic of Capricorn on a few trips to the south. Still, we’ve definitely experienced seasonal changes. In 2008, the summer rainy season was shifted later than normal, beginning in late-January and lasting until May. We personally experienced these late rains around 7 May at Swakopmund and 26 May at Etosha. Flamingos breed in the Etosha “pan”, a large saline body of water whose level fluctuates dramatically with precipitation and evaporation. The literature indicates that flamingos leave the coast in December to breed and return in April. This year, we watched flocks of honking pink birds fly north from Walvis Bay and the Saltworks in March, tracking the late start of the rains. They were inland until at least September, but probably didn’t breed successfully, as the pan had too much water: flamingos need a stable level so they can build mud nests rising out of the water, providing some protection from water-wary predators. The late rains were nonetheless torrential, and the northern part of the country flooded, resulting in poor crop production and emergency food deliveries.
By mid-April in Namibia, a sense of sadness is pervasive as the landscape changes from vibrant lush green to its drier hues. Stipagrostis bushmens grass has long nodding seed heads with feathery plumes, so abundant that the landscape turns silver, and the plumes accumulate before the wind in piles like small snowdrifts. Many of the desert plants seem not to be tied to the duration of the rainy season. They germinate with rain; they complete their life cycle with fog; and they fruit and dry up. So the landscape changed color even before the rainy season ended this year. Still, there were enough plants still flowering in May to keep JR’s parents busy with species identification while they visited!
Some of the plants that grow during the rainy season were worth sampling – given the history of hunter-gatherer societies in this region, we know there must be things to eat (in addition to the spiny, toxic ones that have evolved means of protecting their hard-won growth against herbivory). We saw fields of wild watermelons throughout the country, from the highlands around Windhoek to the wild lands of Etosha to the border of the Namib Desert. These melons grow slightly larger than softball-sized, and they look simply luscious as the landscape dries up, like green and gold packages of life-saving moisture. They lasted much longer than we would have expected, and in our travels we asked about their natural history: We heard that the melons can be very bitter, but that kudu and gemsbok will bite into them as other resources become scarce. At Namib-Rand, Mr. Klein collected several on our tour of the reserve and said that some plants produce bitter fruit, but others taste quite nice. The ones he selected were on the “nice-tasting” end of the spectrum, a cucumber taste crossed with watermelon consistency, harboring enormous seeds that are probably also edible if prepared correctly. At Treesleeper, with the Bushmen, we ate sweet berries, which tasted like tamarind but were mostly husk, seed, and a little fruity essence.
We missed one natural Namibian delicacy – not a plant, but a fungus. In February and March, as we drove the B-roads between Windhoek and the coast, we regularly saw people standing by the side of the road with white mushrooms as big as their heads. We were still a little dubious about food safety at this point, so never stopped, but in late April we learned from several Namibian friends that the mushrooms taste amazing as steaks sauted in butter. We should have stopped and paid no more than N$30 for one, as long as it was treated properly and not held upside down, which causes dirt to fall into the gills. In such a dry country, mushrooms are pretty rare, but these grow on termite mounds because these mound-building termites farm fungus. The mycelia send up fruiting bodies when there’s rain.
This year’s winter was not as cold as we’d been warned to expect, even at elevation in Windhoek. We never used our heaters in the apartment and never awoke to frost, although we did pass many people bundled in puffy jackets, or selling gloves on the street. Winter usually brings east winds on the coast. These hot winds are caused by freezing temperatures in the mountains, which set up a pressure differential with the coast. As the air moves from high (cold) to low (warm) pressure, it also drops in elevation, and the air heats up from this adiabatic change. When the air reaches the coast, it can be 40C, driving desert sand before it at such velocity that it sand-blasts paint off cars and knocks small children off cliffs (this latter in theory – we never tested it). The hot air is also essential for drying out the guano on the big platform constructed above one of the salt pans. Usually, the guano is “harvested” in June, but this year the process didn’t start until September. Once again, it’s proving to be a weird year - the east winds were late and infrequent.
In Namibia, the country burns in August. In general, we’ve tried to avoid driving at night in a country where the wildlife is larger than our Kombi, and the wildlife habitat comes up to the edge of the (dark, narrow, 2-lane) road. But on a couple of August nights, we were traveling after sunset through scenes out of Dante’s Inferno. Pitch black. Red flames licking through low bush. Lines of fire stretching into the air as they moved up hillsides. Thick smoke. We have heard that some of these fires are set on purpose, because they flush game, eliminate accumulated grass litter, and open up space for new vegetation growth. Indeed, we have seen green blades appear in burned-over areas. Some of the fires are probably natural or unintentional: the landscape is so dry by late winter that it seems poised to combust.
In Namibia, spring arrives in September. Despite the ongoing dry weather, some of the Acacia trees flower, and there’s a heady sweetness in the air. From our 7th floor apartment, Windhoek looks like a patchwork of purple, because all the introduced (from Australia/NZ?) Jacaranda trees are covered in purple blossoms. Historically, spring was the “little rainy season,” but the recent trend has been that Namibia receives less and less of its annual rainfall during this season. We have heard October called “suicide month”, the hottest month of the year, when clouds start gathering after months of blue-sky, dry weather. The farmers think that these clouds might drop some rain and end the seasonal drought, filling their catchments and growing a bit of new vegetation for their stock. But usually all they get is clouds, not rain. This year, however, we’ve witnessed a little rain as October ends, including unprecedented sprinkles at Swakopmund and 40 mm in a night in Windhoek. We wonder what this signals for the ocean, which is roiling around with odd winds and high production, and there may be another sulfide eruption in store…. This time, if the toxic ocean materializes, we hope to be out on the water of Walvis Bay to study it intensively first hand.
By mid-April in Namibia, a sense of sadness is pervasive as the landscape changes from vibrant lush green to its drier hues. Stipagrostis bushmens grass has long nodding seed heads with feathery plumes, so abundant that the landscape turns silver, and the plumes accumulate before the wind in piles like small snowdrifts. Many of the desert plants seem not to be tied to the duration of the rainy season. They germinate with rain; they complete their life cycle with fog; and they fruit and dry up. So the landscape changed color even before the rainy season ended this year. Still, there were enough plants still flowering in May to keep JR’s parents busy with species identification while they visited!
Some of the plants that grow during the rainy season were worth sampling – given the history of hunter-gatherer societies in this region, we know there must be things to eat (in addition to the spiny, toxic ones that have evolved means of protecting their hard-won growth against herbivory). We saw fields of wild watermelons throughout the country, from the highlands around Windhoek to the wild lands of Etosha to the border of the Namib Desert. These melons grow slightly larger than softball-sized, and they look simply luscious as the landscape dries up, like green and gold packages of life-saving moisture. They lasted much longer than we would have expected, and in our travels we asked about their natural history: We heard that the melons can be very bitter, but that kudu and gemsbok will bite into them as other resources become scarce. At Namib-Rand, Mr. Klein collected several on our tour of the reserve and said that some plants produce bitter fruit, but others taste quite nice. The ones he selected were on the “nice-tasting” end of the spectrum, a cucumber taste crossed with watermelon consistency, harboring enormous seeds that are probably also edible if prepared correctly. At Treesleeper, with the Bushmen, we ate sweet berries, which tasted like tamarind but were mostly husk, seed, and a little fruity essence.
We missed one natural Namibian delicacy – not a plant, but a fungus. In February and March, as we drove the B-roads between Windhoek and the coast, we regularly saw people standing by the side of the road with white mushrooms as big as their heads. We were still a little dubious about food safety at this point, so never stopped, but in late April we learned from several Namibian friends that the mushrooms taste amazing as steaks sauted in butter. We should have stopped and paid no more than N$30 for one, as long as it was treated properly and not held upside down, which causes dirt to fall into the gills. In such a dry country, mushrooms are pretty rare, but these grow on termite mounds because these mound-building termites farm fungus. The mycelia send up fruiting bodies when there’s rain.
This year’s winter was not as cold as we’d been warned to expect, even at elevation in Windhoek. We never used our heaters in the apartment and never awoke to frost, although we did pass many people bundled in puffy jackets, or selling gloves on the street. Winter usually brings east winds on the coast. These hot winds are caused by freezing temperatures in the mountains, which set up a pressure differential with the coast. As the air moves from high (cold) to low (warm) pressure, it also drops in elevation, and the air heats up from this adiabatic change. When the air reaches the coast, it can be 40C, driving desert sand before it at such velocity that it sand-blasts paint off cars and knocks small children off cliffs (this latter in theory – we never tested it). The hot air is also essential for drying out the guano on the big platform constructed above one of the salt pans. Usually, the guano is “harvested” in June, but this year the process didn’t start until September. Once again, it’s proving to be a weird year - the east winds were late and infrequent.
In Namibia, the country burns in August. In general, we’ve tried to avoid driving at night in a country where the wildlife is larger than our Kombi, and the wildlife habitat comes up to the edge of the (dark, narrow, 2-lane) road. But on a couple of August nights, we were traveling after sunset through scenes out of Dante’s Inferno. Pitch black. Red flames licking through low bush. Lines of fire stretching into the air as they moved up hillsides. Thick smoke. We have heard that some of these fires are set on purpose, because they flush game, eliminate accumulated grass litter, and open up space for new vegetation growth. Indeed, we have seen green blades appear in burned-over areas. Some of the fires are probably natural or unintentional: the landscape is so dry by late winter that it seems poised to combust.
In Namibia, spring arrives in September. Despite the ongoing dry weather, some of the Acacia trees flower, and there’s a heady sweetness in the air. From our 7th floor apartment, Windhoek looks like a patchwork of purple, because all the introduced (from Australia/NZ?) Jacaranda trees are covered in purple blossoms. Historically, spring was the “little rainy season,” but the recent trend has been that Namibia receives less and less of its annual rainfall during this season. We have heard October called “suicide month”, the hottest month of the year, when clouds start gathering after months of blue-sky, dry weather. The farmers think that these clouds might drop some rain and end the seasonal drought, filling their catchments and growing a bit of new vegetation for their stock. But usually all they get is clouds, not rain. This year, however, we’ve witnessed a little rain as October ends, including unprecedented sprinkles at Swakopmund and 40 mm in a night in Windhoek. We wonder what this signals for the ocean, which is roiling around with odd winds and high production, and there may be another sulfide eruption in store…. This time, if the toxic ocean materializes, we hope to be out on the water of Walvis Bay to study it intensively first hand.
Independence Day (a belated report)
On July 4, the US ambassador invited more than 500 people to her party (our invitation was number 517). Over a buffet lunch, JR mingled with politicians, heads of university departments, press, and a few other Americans. An a capella group sang national anthems of the US and Namibia, and after speeches, the group toasted each country and its president. For a stiff protocol-ridden event, it was a surprisingly moving experience. There’s nothing like being next door to Zimbabwe to make you think a little more fully and practically about democracy. Have you kept up with this saga of southern African news? Robert Mugabe is a liberation hero of Zimbabwe, a land-locked country just northeast of Namibia and bordering the mile-wide Victoria Falls. Mugabe has a street named after him in Windhoek (so do Mahatma Gandhi, Fidel Castro, and many national heros). After leading his country for (hmmm, I forget exactly) some 30 years, he stood for reelection this year. Zimbabwe used to be the breadbasket of southern Africa, with ideal climate and soil for rain-fed crops – we’ve heard the country was food-independent and exported substantial amounts, for instance to Namibia where the land is generally too arid for successful crop production. Today, Zimbabwe’s agricultural production has ground to a standstill, and, with inflation at triple digits annually, the treasury just issued a billion-dollar bill (and now may just remove 7 zeros from each denomination). Needless to say, people in the country were dissatisfied with their conditions and were prepared to vote for an opposition candidate. Two elections were held: In the first, no candidate received a majority vote (and Mugabe was overall 2nd), so Mugabe declared it void and kept himself in power, although finally agreed to a second run-off election. In the meantime, opposition supporters were harassed, tortured, and even killed, and the opposition candidate actually withdrew from the run-off, presumably to prevent escalation to civil war. On July 4, the ambassador reminded the gathering of some of the principles of democracy: free and open elections, the ability to disagree civilly, an organized transfer of power. Both the UN and African Union have noted that Mugabe is no longer a rightfully elected leader (although the heads of southern African countries have been rather quiet – deep connections from liberation struggles make it hard to criticize a fellow freedom fighter). The ambassador went on to use the US as an example: when parties lose, they go back to their constituents and try to figure out what would allow them to win next time. Without naming Barack Obama directly, she impressed upon the crowd that democracy cultivates leaders, and the strong African-American candidate indicated the on-going development of democracy in America. (The cynical part of me noted that she didn’t mention the contested outcome of the Bush-Gore presidential race, nor the role of corporate interests in determining election results, nor the relatively small spectrum of party platforms that are competitive – democracy everywhere can still use improvement.)
Meanwhile, Katie played with the kids of a fellow Fulbrighter, and we returned after the reception to chalk paintings of the American flag, complete with all Stars and Stripes. Alan spent the weekend at the “farm” of Detlef Klein, one of the Salt Company owners. This farm is on the edge of the Namib desert, so just productive enough in its 10s of 1000s of hectares to support the required minimum number of cows and goats. Over the past two decades or so that Detlef has owned the farm, the numbers of wild animals have increased dramatically – that’s what happens when they’re only hunted occasionally, rather than to remove competition with stock or to provide regular recreation for Spanish ship captains (as happens nearby). Nevertheless, Alan got to go hunting, which he’s really been longing to do in Africa, even though the last time he hunted was with his grandfather as a teenager. According to his report, two shots, two animals: a springbok from 150 m through the head (otherwise the meat is ruined, because the body size is relatively small), and a gemsbok at 250 m through the heart. The latter was so big it had to be winched into the back of the truck. Most of the next day was spent turning these animals into mince, steaks, and biltong, and we’ve been happily eating game ever since.
Meanwhile, Katie played with the kids of a fellow Fulbrighter, and we returned after the reception to chalk paintings of the American flag, complete with all Stars and Stripes. Alan spent the weekend at the “farm” of Detlef Klein, one of the Salt Company owners. This farm is on the edge of the Namib desert, so just productive enough in its 10s of 1000s of hectares to support the required minimum number of cows and goats. Over the past two decades or so that Detlef has owned the farm, the numbers of wild animals have increased dramatically – that’s what happens when they’re only hunted occasionally, rather than to remove competition with stock or to provide regular recreation for Spanish ship captains (as happens nearby). Nevertheless, Alan got to go hunting, which he’s really been longing to do in Africa, even though the last time he hunted was with his grandfather as a teenager. According to his report, two shots, two animals: a springbok from 150 m through the head (otherwise the meat is ruined, because the body size is relatively small), and a gemsbok at 250 m through the heart. The latter was so big it had to be winched into the back of the truck. Most of the next day was spent turning these animals into mince, steaks, and biltong, and we’ve been happily eating game ever since.
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