Today was our last day of data field collection. Everyone is a bit tired by now and our group had a few bumps this morning. I had cook crew so I was up early. My group saw me packing my own lunch and thought I was making lunches for our guide and askari so there was a last minute dash after Wachezagi waterfall to make lunches before we ran out the door. Then as we were packing the lunches and dividing up the equipment we discovered that our GPS was gone. It had been sitting on the table next to Jess’s notebook and lunch but now it was gone. The other two DR groups had left and without a GPS we could not collect data. Daniel called the professors of the other two DR groups to see if any of the students had two GPS units while Christina, Jess, and I took everything out of our backpacks and searched everywhere in case we had just overlooked it. We finally heard back from the Environmental Policy DR that they had an extra GPS that they were leaving in Kimana for us to pick up on our way. While I was digging through all my stuff Molly was talking with us on the porch outside her office. She was telling me about a student who had left camouflage snake guards after her semester. I thought this sounded hilarious and she pulled them out of her office to show me. They come up to just behind my knees and go all the way down to my ankles with a flap that extends down over my hiking boot shoelaces. They are made of stiff plastic and covered in soft camouflage fabric and fasten at the top and bottom with nylon straps. I looked absolutely ridiculous but I didn’t care. Driving back to Elerai-Rupet for the second half of the sanctuary we used the GPS to drop each group as close to their starting point as possible. Kipepeo was the last group to be dropped and we still had to walk a kilometer to our starting place therefore making out start time much later than others in our DR. Today we had Ramon as our askari and David as our local guide. The bush in our quadrant was the toughest we have seen yet. The grass was never lower than my waist and often above my head. There were thorn bushes all over, our visibility was very limited, and our forward progress was incredible slow. I was compass girl again today so I was leading the way. After doing this for about 30 minutes I was very grateful of the snake guards. I could walk through thorn bushes without a scratch and few plants stuck to them. Yes they were very warm but the benefits definitely outweighed the cons. There was one point of our first transect that was interesting. I was walking along trying to hold a straight line while going through a few thorn patches as possible. I was walking between two well spaced bushes when suddenly I saw a very thin yellow thread right in front of my eye. Looking left I saw it was a thread of a spider’s web….three big spiders. They were different colors (one was yellow, one was orange, and one was green) with patches of black on their quarter-sized bodies. I began walking to find a detour and one of my group mates spotted what I was avoiding and had a minor breakdown (she really hates spiders). Unfortunately We encountered another web only a few minutes later with the same type of spider so my poor group mate was rather paranoid the rest of our transect. It was noon before we finished our first transect and the total area covered was quite small in relation to the effort it had taken. We walked a buffer and then stopped for a water and quick snack. We all opted to eat oranges since the day had turned oppressively hot and we still had a lot of walking to do. The other groups had finished by now and we still had a ways to go. As we began our second transect, we got a radio call from Gerenux saying that they had accidentally covered more ground than needed. They had covered enough so that even though we had only walked 500 meters on this second transect, we had enough area covered for our group by taking what we had done today with the Gerenux extra. It was the best radio call we had ever gotten. I enjoy being out here in the bush but when I am sweating and just fighting through the bush while seeing no animals I just want to sit down and drink water instead of walking transects. While this meant we had no more transects to walk we still had to walk nearly a kilometer to get back to a track accessible by cruiser. We crammed ten students, four askaris, four guides, and Daniel who was driving into one cruiser and began driving out of the sanctuary interior. When we reached more open ground the askaris and guides got into Martin’s cruiser and we got to spread out and have seats to ourselves again. Back at camp we were still the first group back and immediately had our wrap up meeting where we planned to meet in a few hours to put together our project proposal that was due tonight at 9pm. Kipepeo met and made corrections to combine the parts we each had written into a smooth paragraph. This we then combined with the other half of the introduction that the Shem n’ Ms had written. At 5pm all of Wachezagi met and discussed our objectives and the statistical tests that we plan to use to analyze our data. By dinner it was all put together with only a few minor corrections to be made and then sent off the Shem via email. After dinner I had to wash dishes as part of my cook crew and now I am heading to my sleeping bag to rest up after a long day in the bush under a hot African sun. Tomorrow we begin the dreaded data analysis.
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