Greetings from Moyo Hill!

So, I apologize for the delay between blogs. We’ve gotten settled in at Moyo Hill, SFS’s Tanzania campus. It has spotty electricity and water despite its nice facilities, which means very limited internet. This is frustrating in terms of communication, but this has a redeeming side as it makes me think of others things to do with my time.

The camp is smaller than KBC, walled in with green (that’s right–green!) vegetation and a beautiful muraled gate. It used to be an old lodge. The sign’s still up for it actually. Inside is 

one city block large with our bandas on one side, then the extra bathrooms and the gate, the classrooms and administration building, the local staff and faculty housing and the garden all in a rectangle. In the middle are lawns (real grass!) and red dirt pathways, a raised gazebo (great for meals and reading) the dining hall and kitchen, and a valley ball court. It has a fresh feeling to it, high up in these hills where cool breezes blow and the first rains of the wet season damped the earth and kiss the pine needles. It couldn’t be more different from the Kenya campus. But I almost say I like KBC more–for its familiar places, its homelike feel, its people that I came to know and love.

One aspect that I truly love about Moyo Hill is its proximity to town. We have much more independence here, despite the smaller campus. We can walk a three mile running loop that winds around the hills with breathtaking views of the terracotta-ruby and emerald valleys, the escarpments that drop off into the periwinkle sky, the graying clouds with bellies full of rain. This same path takes you to Rhotia, a little town laong the highway to the Seregeti. The people are friendly and curious of students. As long as you great any one taller with you using “Shikamo” (the respectful formal greeting for elders), you’re sure to be welcomed. 

Repeatedly: “Karibuni, karibuni sana. Tanzania mzuri sana. Karibuni” welcome, you are very welcome. Tanzania is very nice. You all are welcome.  It’s nice to have the freedom to explore. And Sunday we will go to Karatu, a slightly larger town, to eat and shop and pick about. Can’t wait!

So far we have had a class in each of our subjects: Wildlife ecology, Wildlife Management and Environmental Policy. We don’t continue with Socio-Culture and KiSwahili here, which is a shame. In Tanzania, people speak KiSwahili almost exclusively, and more lessons would be of great help! Yesterday and the day before we explored Lake Manyara National Park. One our first visit, we simply drove around, seeing elephants, baboons, sykes monkies and impalas. The was even a stop where you could get out of the land cruisers and stand at a rail while hippos wallowed fifty meters away. It might not have been the safest gamble on the park managers’ park (the single chest-height rail wouldn’t stop a dik-dik, let alone a mood

y hippo) but it was incredible.

Then on our second visit we did an exercise on primate behavior. For two hours we monitored and recorded the activities of a troop of baboons. This weekend, I’ll do a formal write up on what I saw, what I think it means statistically and in comparison with other literature. I figure as I hope to do more primate research in the future, I ought to get used to 

this. We sat in the land cruiser, sweating and swatting occasional flies as we observed baboons fighting, foraging playing, mating, grooming and sitting in the shade, looking pensively at peace with the world. They have a rather complex and flexible social structure. Males gain status through fighting; females (most interestingly) inherit the status of the mothers to form a hierarchical dominance chain. Even a low-ranking adult must defer to the youngest children of a superior mama.  Grooming is the glue that holds the relationships in the troop together. When a troop becomes to large for the females to groom everyone, it 

fissures and breaks apart. The baboons in Lake Manyara (Papio cynocephalus anubis, or Olive Baboons) have a special problem. Baboons are naturally very adaptable to a wide variety of habitats and feeding niches. They are resourceful and clever. In many cases, like this one, they resort to digging through garbage from tourist lodges to supplement food needs. The less of its activity budget it spends of searching for and consumin

g food, the more time a baboons can spend on social activity and reproduction. These baboons, however, had at some point come across waste infected with syphilis, and contracted the disease themselves. To increase reproduction fitness, baboons have many sexual partners. Needless to say this venereal disease spread like wildfire.

To 

It’s a sad reality, how even indirectly, humans can do great damage to our animal cousins. But many of the baboons we saw were happy and healthy.

Today, we have an all day-traveling lecture (loading up on the coffee!) culminating in a transect walk exercise to record animal densities around water holes. Water resources are naturally distributed evenly. This can have some good results- concentrating animals in areas that people can identify and protect, and show off to tourist to generate revenue. But it also means high densities of animals in the dry season trample plants, overgraze and compact the soil, decrease its water retention. Today we’re going to see to exactly what degree these things are occurring in the local area.

Totaonana!

 

 

 

Location: Rhotia, Tanzania