Update from Rich

Katie has done such a great job with the blog I have become a real slacker in writing anything myself, but I guess it is time to finally break the silence. Here are a few highlights from the past couple months:

I had the honor of meeting and shaking hands with President Armando Guebuza on his arrival—his first state visit to Gorongosa National Park. The President arrived with 6 helicopters and a support plane for his 24-hour visit—quite a production. He seemed genuinely pleased with the project and surprised at the rapid recovery of the Park.

I spent an incredible day with a water diviner. We are working in the Great Rift Valley of Africa and professional hydrogeologists have spent years trying to understand the groundwater system and its importance to the Park. Using a guava tree brach, he is able to precisely identify the location of underground aquifers more than 50 meters below the soil surface. OK, I can deal with this—he is picking up changes in magnetism related to deep faults, and I find I can actually get a bit of a response myself when I walk across a fault he has identified. But then he uses a wire and conducting rod to precisely map the depth of each successive confining layer below the soil surface (essentially he is mapping the entire geological formation below the surface)—and the accuracy of his work has been tested many times by drilling teams. OK, this is getting tougher for my science mind to deal with, but I suppose it relates to his extraordinary ability to sense magnetic fields. But then, he loses me completely by giving us an accurate estimate of the yield of the aquifer (i.e. how much water we will get if we drill a bore hole there). He does this by balancing a coke bottle filled with water on the palm of his hand and walking across the deep fault line—depending on how fast the bottle tips over, he estimates the yield (in this case, at 55 m depth). I give up. It works. I can’t explain why.

I am an avid runner and try to run every morning, but I am running out of safe places to run here at camp! For the past two years, I have run along the main road leading to Chitengo from the main gate, and enjoy flushing up baboons, waterbuck, reedbuck, and warthog as I run by. But alas lions have moved in along my running path—a pair were seen a couple hours after I passed by two weeks ago—and we have buffalo moving into the area as well. Now I run from camp to the Pungue River, which mostly involves passing by scores and scores of Mozambicans as they make their way from Vinho village across the river to Chitengo for the work day.

Animal numbers are recovering quickly here, which makes for fun viewing but new challenges we didn’t have in past years. Had my first serious run in with elephants a few weeks back. I had to wait until dark to creep in my vehicle around a big bull elephant feeding next to the road, as the road forward was the only way back to camp (the loop route cut off by high water). He made two full charges at the vehicle (ears out, trunk up bugling) that sent me twice in high speed reverse. It was fully dark by the time I moved past him, so it was really just a guess that he had moved far enough out of the way to let me pass. Not something you want to do everyday, and here we have two months of vegetation sampling starting up this year. The elephants here are still a bit traumatized from the years of war and poaching and it may be a while until they settle down and adjust to being watched.