Adding to the species list
Botswana Blog Entry- 3/8/17
Today was an interesting day. We woke up, had a nice breakfast, and then had class for the first time. We discussed the blog schedule, class expectations, safety, what wildlife conservation is, why it is important and what is necessary for it to work. We also talked about the field journals and Kubu Island. We then got our things and went to the car and the new safari vehicle, which sadly doesn’t have flaps to keep out wind and dust like the old one. We went to a security checkpoint for the grounds of the Orapa area. We waited and they looked at our passports, then took our picture and made us sign something, upon which time we got a permit to let us in for 20 days. We made our lunches while we were waiting. We then found out it would take about an hour longer each way for Kubu Island, and that would have left us with very little time to explore it and those in the safari vehicle would have been freezing on the way back, so we went to the game park instead (Kubu Island has been rescheduled for very early Saturday morning). The mound of dirt made by the diamond mining in the area was enormous. On the way, we went through a very planned and developed community and it weirded me out a bit. Also, there were two warthogs just in the middle of a small grassy area in the community, which was interesting. Then, we were at the Orapa game park. We saw some impala, but not as many as we had on the game drive that we went on from Maun. We saw a bunch of giraffes as well. We finally saw some zebras, which was awesome. We saw a slender mongoose, a bunch of blue wildebeests and a ton of springbok (sadly, no pronking). We saw some white rhinos, including a mother and a very young child and a group of four of them, where one was young, but not nearly as young as the earlier one. We saw helmeted guinea fowl, which had beautifully colored plumage on their heads. We saw leopard tracks. We saw some oryx, a steenbok, a bunch of eland (which are gigantic) and a waterbuck. We eventually came back, had another class, this time reflecting on the trip today, then talking about some key Setswana phrases, ways to tell some animals apart, the bird that landed on Andrew Stein’s head as he was speaking, differentiating between animal tracks, and a few other things. Today was a pretty cool day, all in all.
Andrew Resnick
New species seen today: white rhino, water buck, blue wildebeest, slender mongoose, springbok, zebra, Gemsbok/oryx, kudu, eland
