Pursuing praxis

Are up and a little better organized: http://public.fotki.com/ariel025/2007-africa-trip/

Mind you, I’ve got like a gajillion, but because of the slow internet speed, I’ve picked a few of the best and/or most important and shrunk them down like mad so that my connection doesn’t crash and it takes less than a hour up to upload one. I’m serious. So - enjoy!

A quick rejoinder I wrote to a question about the compatibility of Objectivism and Environmentalism:

I think the un-obvious point (to non-Objectivists) is that it’s the -ism of environmentalism that is the essence of Environmental-ISM (an ideology, and not a science), which Objectivism out and out rejects. What many people’s knee-jerks to this rejection of Environmentalism miss are the many "environmentally-friendly" concretes that a purely capitalist society/economy would foster/promote/ensure.

It’s these points that many non-fundamentalist environmentally-aware people are concerned about, but often miss because of the widespread misunderstanding/mis-education of what laissez-faire capitalism is and entails. However, pan-handling the appealing concretes of L-F capitalism without denoucing the heart of Environmentalism is way, way not-ok - the fundamentals have to be dealt with before the derivative issues, which explains Objectivism’s approach to dealing with Environmentalism, and O’ism’s likely veneer as a rape-the-planet-to-hell-with-the-consequences stance (which is a "Not A, therefore B" logical fallacy).

So, although I haven’t the time (or internet speed) to read the book or the link [mentioned by C], I’ll agree with both D and C in this (perhaps superficial) way: environmentalism is antithetical to an Objectivist outlook; thinking rationally and long-term about the world we live in, and the resources (physical and human) it contains, within a rubric of individual rights, is part and parcel of a capitalist and Objectivist outlook. There’s obviously a huge market for beautiful scenery, fresh air, clean water, cures for cancer, and knowledge of biological and physical systems in general, and it’s the gazillionaire capitalists that can make this happen, and happen best, and not governments (which is what the more pragmatic, compromising environmentalists almost universally support).

I ranted in a rather long-winded blog some time ago about how people genuinely committed to sustainable, long-term conservation would all be rabid capitalists. I have a vested interest in making sure there continue to be mountain nyala and lesser kudu for me to study, which are rare and in the more remote areas of Somalia and Ethiopia, and like hell I’m stepping foot in Somalia while Islamic law, martial law, militarism, and/or tribalism reign there. And like hell these critters have a chance while starving people and mystics (of spirit and of muscle) roam and rule those lands. The only way I’ll get to see those critters in their native places is if one or both countries (particularly Somalia) moves down the road to capitalism. Although I’m an optimist at heart, I won’t be holding my breath about Somalia’s short-term future.
 

As a continuation and tangent on the previous line of thought on stuff, identity, and cause and effect:

As far as I can tell, a good chunk of science is devoted to answering the question: I see an effect; what is/was the cause, and how do I know it? At the end of the day, what is the identity of the material and processes responsible for this, and how does that identity cause this effect?

I’d like to point out that when you start with an observation of a thing (or a process performed on, to, or by things), and you want to understand their causes by studying them (as opposed to studying your astrology forecast, your tea leaves, or the mental exudate of someone unfamiliar with those things), you can only ever arrive at an explanation rooted in material things (even if you’re a psychologist studying a non-material thing like consciousness – because it’s an attribute of the brain, a material thing, and doesn’t exist apart from one, just like the color green doesn’t and can’t exist apart from things that are – and are seen to be - green). The law of cause and effect applies only to things with an identity, and it applies unavoidably and without error; there are no violations to cause and effect or to identity, just in our knowledge of them. Stuff is what it is, and it does what it does – whatever that may be; we just have to figure it out. At no point in this trail of knowledge building does the stuff being studied suddenly cry out “I decree that you can’t understand me any further! Suspend the rules you use to learn about everything else and find another explanation! Find a way to explain me without studying me!”

And I’d also like to point out that what counts as “beyond explanation” in nature has changed over time; that is, with the expansion of human knowledge. The bar keeps getting pushed higher; or rather, the line of defense keeps shrinking back, and it will no doubt back into a circle around human consciousness, concept formation, thinking, feeling, and all that human stuff, which is still just stuff and processes of stuff, even if demonstrably cooler than the next coolest animal. But, I can think of no object or phenomenon in reality, for which we have data, which will repel any and all human understanding from now to the end of humanity. (And stuff lacking data cannot be counted as knowledge). So those who would say what we can’t know, a priori, demonstrate their own (shall we say) lack of information.

I suspect that the urge to make such a conclusion (and pronouncement and prescription for other people’s activities) comes from a morphing of “I don’t know” to “I can’t know” or to “No one can know.” To me it clearly indicates that person considers himself the measure of all human knowledge, present and future. That is patently irrational. To be rational, one would have had to survey all possible means of acquiring knowledge of something – which in concrete terms is very hard to do when new technologies are constantly being created, and new discoveries which prompt further technologies also keep piling up. How can a person look at a complex (and no doubt baffling) system and also know of all possible ways of investigating it, even those not invented yet, and conclude (without exhausting all possibilities, including those uninvented) that it simply can’t be known? Or, that the natural system is evidence for an un-natural being acting in un-natural and un-knowable ways? Oranges make orange juice, and mangos make mango juice; just as an orange will never squeeze out mango juice, a natural system can never provide evidence for a system or thing beyond nature (super- or un-natural). It will only ever speak to more of the natural, regardless of our level of understanding of it.

The only battle ground for this is philosophy, and it’s a limited battle ground. That is, not all tough questions are best treated by philosophy; in many cases, the philosopher has to pass on the question to a scientist or other specialized person, because it simply isn’t for philosophy to say. A philosopher cannot give answers to questions like, What did humans evolve from? Did humans evolve at all? Is natural selection powerful enough to produce new species? An educated and careful philosopher could undoubtedly posit some very good answers, but he would be speaking outside his capacity as a philosopher. Instead, philosophy deals with questions like: How do we know about reality? Is reality knowable? Can we know about anything besides reality? What is reality anyway? How is knowledge made? Is there more than one way to make knowledge? Is it strict, or is there some wiggle-room in how you do it? What counts as good or real knowledge anyway? And how do you know THAT? What CAN you know? Can we say what we can’t know? And so on.

The last few days have been great. I watched six geckos pork out on bugs near the lights in the kitchen last night, and 2 or 3 are living in my trailer. I saw a family group of elephants at the waterhole over lunch a couple days ago, 7 giraffes and 2 rhinos the night before that, have seen a herd of about 30 gemsbok (usually in groups of 1-4), visited two zebra carcasses, saw a mature lion and two lionesses chilling in the shade and/or grass yesterday, more giraffe, - and birds! Big freaking scary birds. Ostriches (2 adult, 3 juvenile yesterday), many kori bustards, yesterday my first maribou stork (ugly ugly ugly), many lappid vultures (probably twice the weight of the jackals they hang out with), white necked vultures, two secretary birds (very very strange) last week… all these birds probably weigh 30 pounds or (much) more.

Elephants are, I’ve decided, disgusting, especially the males. They’ve carved out the gross wrinkly old man niche in nature. Giraffes are graceful and wary, gemsbok are beautiful but (as Wendy put it) vapid, zebras a bit obnoxious with their frequent squeaky-bark fights, springbok retain their coolness but don’t do many exciting things, and wildebeest are still a bit odd - it’s like seeing a funnily shaped, top-heavy accountant in a formal suit walk stately past you, and then break out into skips, jumps, and russian-heel-kicks when someone slams a car door. They are so funny. Jackals are probably the niftiness in terms of "personality." They’re tough little suckers, and can bring down springbok despite their reputation as scavengers. They also cruise camp for scraps, and have this perky on-a-mission attitude, and while wary of people, aren’t much fluffed by them.

I’m planning on going to the Namutoni camp this weekend for more, better, and different game viewing. Some of the parks folks here are (I think… half the conversation was in Afrikaans) going up North/East to trap or shoot a bunch of hyenas and lions. Not sure why - either too many, or too many in the wrong area, or they’re being transferred somewhere else. A lot of people who work here really like the hyenas, in terms of Favorite Critter. I think there are both brown and spotted in the park, though not many around here (Okaukuejo camp). It’s most of a days drive up to Namutoni though, so we’ll be camping.

As for my work on the skull collection here, it’s going much faster now that I have an assistant. I can spend ages just transporting stuff back and forth, and now I get to spend more of my time actually measuring and taking notes. Plus it helps the skulls dont weigh 20 pounds. Minor worry about zebra snakes in the shed, but we do most of the work in lab, and I figure some thumping around in the shed and they’ll flee quietly. (Werner here said he’d rather be bitten by a puff adder - also local - than a zebra snake, to give you an idea).

As for my bug issues, they are coming under control with physical, chemical, temporal and spatial strategies, as well as mental acclimitization on my part. Rivers of microants in the kitchen no longer bother me (much), the cellar spiders behave much like the ones at home (and I haven’t found any more on my luggage), the icky giant fast black hairy spiders specialize in flat-as-a-pancake and eat moths, though I still quite dislike them, especially when the body approaches an inch long. Wasps and dragonflies and flies and giant beetles and rhino beetles and giant locust and giant Mobanie moths don’t faze me, though they always interrupt my train of thought. I’ve figured out how to keep the stinky micro beetles away from me at night (leave a night light on at the other end of the trailer), and I don’t think I’ve seen a single mosquito out here (good news on the malaria front). I think I only vacated one room (a bathroom stall) to an arthropod yesterday, and none yet today. Things are going well.

As for work – I’ve learned loads, and there’s months of work I could do just at Florisbad. Sadly I didn’t get to the fossils, but I’m so swamped with living bovids (and I’m not doing bovines, true cows, so Pelorovis wouldn’t really apply anyway) it’s hard to know what portion of fossil-studying to carve off. As it is, I’m taking some 20-32 measurements, 55+ notes on sutures, notes on dentition, and 4-8 photos per specimen (if available – some are partial or broken skulls, etc.) That’s a ton, though I have extreme difficulty imagining paring back. If anything I may try to swap out photos for the suture notes – see if I can get them from photos later.

But it’s been really exciting to see how just a couple of the different tribes differ in their suture fusion patterns – among adults, and also as it happens through developing juveniles. The patterns and trends aren’t watertight – there’s a lot of variation, and I’m sure I’ll encounter more, but I’m starting to get a picture of it for some taxa, and it varies consistently among the tribes.

To talk more concretely (on the off chance you’re dying to know…) it’s really interesting how, for example, in eland and kudu, the skulls start out with these really large gaps between some of the bones, and then how these gaps close, and stitch together, and then get remodeled by bone maintenance till you can’t see them in the adults – you’d be hard pressed to know that there were originally two bones there. But it doesn’t happen for all sutures that way, and when it does, the timing of it depends on the suture, and on the species. In the kudu and eland, the suture down the midline of the skull (between the left and right frontal bones, which the horns grow on) disappears lickety-split. And the suture it connects to at a right angle, between the frontal and parietal bones (parietals are right behind the frontals, also part of the skull dome, so you get a T-shaped intersection just behind the horns), also disappears lickety-split, but reappears on the side of the head, below the horns, just before it gets to the temporal bone. Chock it up to horns? Naw – the hornless female kudu do it too. And the heavily-horned Hippotragines (sable, gemsbok, roans) and some of the larger Reduncines (waterbuck, lechwes) have totally visible F-F and F-P sutures all the time, no hint of remodeling them out of existence. And trust me, some of the skull+horns of each of these groups are very heavy – it’s not a product of horn size, that’s for sure. Move to the smaller blesbok (Alcelaphines), and you get juveniles whose F-F suture goes from open and simple at the nasal bones, to zig-zagged and smooth between the eyes, to crazily complex between the horns with big gaps between fine struts of bone in the midst of being fused and remodeled like mad, and by the time it gets to the parietal bone, its already being remodeled and turned invisible. This is in the span of about 5-6 inches. Crazy! And – why??

And I haven’t even gotten to the wildebeest or the teeny tiny dik-diks and duikers yet. But from a couple casual looks, the teeny tiny ones don’t seem to reach the remodeling stage for any major suture, even when they start hyper-ossifying their craniums. (I’ve got a couple cool pictures of these tiny skulls with loads of extra bone deposited in quasi-random patterns on the forehead and vicinity – like lace or an incipient coral reef. For their size, it’s clear these skulls weigh a fair bit more than your typical midget bovid skull). The bones just come together, sit in place, the line remains visible and uncomplicated, and that’s that – you’ve got a skull that stays together and does what it’s supposed to do, even when the “make more bone!!!” switch has been turned on, as with the lace-headed bovidettes. This is interesting because - if that generalization about the small guys holds true, and I connect the dots well enough (and that’s a fair task) - it suggests how the little guys grow to little sizes, and the big guys grow to big sizes – because there are a couple of options for how to do it, and how one achieves X size can, like most other traits, give clues to evolutionary pathways taken, and relationships (both historical and current) among species.

How does one become small (that is, become smallER compared to an ancestral stock)? Assuming a rubric of typical development – that is, the ancestral stock had a typical growth trajectory of small baby to big(ger) adult, and adults look characteristically different than the babies (pretty safe assumptions here) - what are your options? Well, you can either slow down your rate of growth while zooming through the steps to maturity, basically ending up as a miniature version of the ancestral adult. Alternatively, you can keep growth rates similar and just stop development earlier (save some key reproductive changes for sexual maturity), which results in comparatively infantile looking adults. (Something along this line is hypothesized to have happened in human evolution – the quick rationale or explanation is: just look at a baby chimp; in terms of proportions, we look a lot more like a baby chimp than an adult chimp, which of course assumes our common ancestor looked kind of chimp-like; there are probably better, and worse, descriptions of this unknown ancestor). Of course, those are two extremes of a continuum, and in most cases there’s probably a mix. But it’s good for keeping peas and carrots straight in your mind.

What about for getting big? Same idea – you can simply increase the rate of growth, while keeping the same sequence of steps to looking like an adult – they’re just stretched out in terms of the number of pounds or inches between each step. Or, you can add steps, so that you zoom past the previous “adult” form and achieve something relatively new (or do a combination).

How’s this possible? Well, the simplest way is to just extend the duration of the developmental program – that is, some parts of your body (in my case, I’m interested in heads) grow faster than other parts,or grow in this direction vs. that, (and at different times to boot). Thisresults in changes in the proportions of that body part. If you just think about these as basic instructions (“grow this region of the bone a third faster than that region”) there’s no built-in stopping point. The halt signal comes from elsewhere in the body or program. So if you change the timing of that halt signal, you’re going to get a head shaped a bit differently than normal. That’s all. Do it just a smidge, and a scientist probably won’t even notice, or will chock it up to “normal variation.” Do it a lot, and they start to take notice. Do it repeatedly over tens of millions of years, and some people will say you were deposited on earth as-is a few thousand years ago.

Of course, adding genuinely “new” traits (new instructions for development) is very interesting, and more complicated (“new” being completely relative and contextual, and on the whole a misleading but common word). And on that reason alone, it’s reasonable to think it happens less often. So, my strategy is to keep a good eye out for the things most likely to happen, and among those cases, keep another eye out for oddballs, and see if and how they might go together. Because, given the fact of inheritance, systematic widespread features don’t just come out of left field, although history has a nasty habit of deleting the data that would make that obvious. I mean, when you get down to it, nothing comes out of left field, even the unpredictable congenital defects, “monstrosities” and the like – it’s just unexpected (to us) given a backdrop of experience. If one knew about the genetic abnormality prior to it being obvious, then the resulting abnormality would not be “new,” left-field, or spontaneous – we’d view it as the result of a known cause. That is, stuff acting in accordance with its identity (in this case, dynamic, organic, biological stuff, but still stuff just the same). The gambols of evolution are no less causeless, but a trifle more cumbersome to nail down, given the number of things involved, the time involved, and the patchiness of the data (and several orders of magnitude fewer people working on such questions as compared to, say, biomedical research).

2/10/07

Well, I’m in Bloemfontein for the night – living well for 18 hours before taking off for Namibia, camping, critters, critter poop, and who knows what else. I found a City Lodge recommended for its value in my travel guide, booked a room and here I am – and it’s WAY nicer than I had planned on! Apart from just being a really nice hotel, there’s a, um, retractable window-wall between the room and the bathroom alongside the tub. Beats me what that’s for – watching TV from a bubble bath?? (Hm, not a bad idea….)

Spent the afternoon at the National Museum – history, culture, natural history, fossils and rocks – all but botany, really. Quite comprehensive, and extremely well done – AND it’s not the size of a city block. It’s being renovated, but let me tell you, they do more awesomeness per square foot than most other museums I’ve been to – and that’s some! They’re just a little bigger than Harvard, with the artistic display wow-ness of the Field Museum in Chicago, the educational oomph of the Smithsonian, and the topical scope of the American Museum in New York. (Plus I got in for free, thanks to Izak). The museum gift shop was neither an ode to trinket-mania, nor a blood-letting for your wallet. The lady there chatted my ear off while I ate my ice cream bar (mmmmmm, ice cream). It’s funny, people ask where I’m from, and I’ve had some funny guesses – Netherlands? France? Maybe I don’t speak up enough when I say “US”, but I’m already conscious of my rather nasal accent compared to the velvety smooth native dialect, or the ever-proper British spin-offs.

At any rate, the museum rocked. They had a stuffed golden bear in the small foyer – no glass or anything – as well as a coat of arms, a crowned crane, and a Pelorovis skull (you think the Cape Buffalo is big? Try again – Pelorovis had horns sweeping out a good 3-4 feet on either side, like a cross between the water buffalo and a Texas longhorn, but with the robusiticity of the Cape Buffalo. This bull would destroy every china shop – starting with the doorjambs).

My plans tonight? Get caught up on computer work, maybe go swimming, have some steak (ten bucks!), take a fabulous bath, blow dry my hair, and go to bed early without even thinking about bugs. Oh and listen to a philosophy lecture. Maybe I’ll do that while taking a bath, though at 3 hours long I might still have raisin fingers by the time I get to Etosha. Hydration comes in many forms, right?

            Back at the front gate, Izak exchanged some words with the older man in charge, and I had my coin purse out ready to pay, but we went back to the truck for one last jaunt. Around past the office building, to an area with old abandoned trucks and sheds and whatnot, there was another securely fenced enclosure, with more lions – all juveniles again, five of them. We got out this time (since there weren’t adult lions roaming about somewhere) and had a look. I kept a bit back with my camera, but Izak went right up to the fence. They were most curious, and five pairs of giant unblinking yellow eyes following your movements in complete synchronization is really something.

            One got up and checked us out – really very curious cat-like, and less I’m-going-to-eat-you like. Izak walked back and forth, trying to coax others out of the shade and into activity. At one point, soon on, one in the middle stood up, took a couple steps towards us, and sprung straight onto the fence, hindquarters about or just below my shoulder height. It was a light athletic spring, not a break-the-fence kind of spring, and gravity quickly kicked in and she rebounded off the fence and dropped to the ground. Nonetheless, I think my cardiac output about doubled, my heart moderately ka-thudding in my chest. Izak laughed, and said that was the female; they are the ones that like to hunt and pounce. She did this a couple more times, each time a kind of serious playfulness; none was noticeably aggressive, just casual interest at best. 90-degree temperatures probably take the edge off.

            A couple of the males were in that awkward adolescent stage where they’re not noticeably larger than the female, just a bit darker all over and with bad hair – a bit longish, but still the same color, sticking up in a low mowhawk on the head, and protruding around the neck and ears so that it looked more hot and uncomfortable than masculine and distinguished. Their paws were absolutely massive in all dimensions, and disproportionately so, giving an indication of how young they were. Above the knees and hocks they were comparatively lightly built, with longish bony backs and longish bony hips and their big ol’ heads. When they yawned I could see they still had their baby teeth, or were just getting in their adult teeth. No impressive canines in the lot. 

            A couple came up to the fence to visit, and one of the males stood up to play high five with Izak, his toes poking through the fence, but no claws to be seen. Izak tapped them on the nose or tickled their noses, with no effect, but I kept my hands on my camera. But, they quickly got bored of playing, and one of the males ditched Izak to chase a dragonfly with noticeably more interest. All eyes constantly followed us. I tried playing cow, like I used to with Willy and General Lee out at Monica’s, who’d get a kick out of following me as I ran up and down the fence, and when I’d double back or dodge back and forth like a cow they’d get all excited and eventually go off bucking. I tried some of that here, and man, I could tell these guys would really go for it. I mean, “cow sense” really is bred into them. I didn’t want to cause a ruckus or test the strength of the fence, so I quit that pretty quickly. Finally they all ended in the shade, one drinking from the pool, a couple nonchalantly hugging each other, and we took off.

            Later, Izak had me show the guys back at Florisbad the pictures on my camera, because no one believed him that the lions stood up on the fence next to him, or pounced on the fence all feet off the ground. They were duly impressed, and I think it really made Izak’s day. Me, I’d have liked to get some better pictures of bovids, but no doubt my new camera makes things look sexier than they actually are, and I’m glad to have seen the lions and zebra. It was apparently too hot for the eland, which like light wooded areas in the morning and evenings better anyway. I dunno why I’m gunning to see eland and kudu, nor why Tragelaphines hit a soft spot in my heart. Gemsbok are pretty darn cool too, and reading up on the wildebeest – they’re just magnificently odd creatures.

            We drove back to the gate with the crazy man, asked about the lions – no, none seen today – and went into the adjoining cheetah enclosure. It had never occurred to me that the big cats would have to be separated, and Izak said yes, they fight. We passed a shiny silver SUV with a couple sunburnt blonde men in it. Asked about cheetah – didn’t see any, they said. So we drove around with the same results. I did see what was very likely a mongoose – orangeish with a white tipped tail, dart across the road and into a burrow. Field guide after the fact suggests it was a yellow mongoose, Cynictis penicillata, very common in southern Africa.

            (But not as common as mice, doormice, rats and gerbils – 61 species in southern Africa alone, with only a couple introduced! This doesn’t include squirrels, ground squirrels, rabbit-looking rodents, true rabbits, moles or mole-rats, or (the) porcupine. How about canids? 5 native canids, 21 mustelids (mongooses, genets, civets, badgers, etc.), 2 hyenas, an aardwolf, and 7 native cats. Then there’s one anteater, one pangolin, one elephant, 4 dassies, 2 zebras, 2 rhinos, 2 pigs, 1 hippo, 1 giraffe – I’m starting to feel like I’m on Sesame Street – 1 buffalo, 1 goat, 33 antelope, 1 deer, 8 baleen whales, 8 toothed whales, 3 sperm whales, 7 toothed non-dolphin whales, 12 dolphins, a dugong, and 5 seals. North America’s starting to feel a little paltry – that was just the list for South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and perhaps Mozambique – southern Africa).

            Left the predator park and headed back into the main part. Saw a group of black wildebeest a ways off, and so circled around on a different road to get closer. Ended up closer to some zebras (Burchell’s, with the alternating fat black and brown stripes), got out and took pictures. Noticed a couple were youngsters. Drove a bit more for the wildebeest, but they were still a long ways off, even for the zoom on my camera, and by this time there were heat waves coming off the ground, so I didn’t get any definite pictures, just some suggestive looking dark brown blotches and helluva lot of grass. A bit farther on, to the left down by the river, Izak spotted some brown bodies through a break in the bushes. Focused my binoculars, and it was a group of females much like the first group. Finally an impala ram passed by, full horns, confirming they were impala. Very cool.

            A bit farther down we took a dubious looking trail/road right down to the river edge. Izak has yet to take the bakkie anywhere he couldn’t get it out, so I closed my window to keep out the brush and held on. Very greenish water, saw some floating plants extremely similar to the Lemna or Salvinia (smaller of the two) that we used in my Bio I lab competition experiments. No crocs in the water, and also no vertebrates to be seen. Izak said he used to come down fishing here when he was a kid. Carp, and some other kind of flat fish I didn’t recognize. Drove  back up the hill past bamboo-maize looking brush that was a good 8 feet tall. Used to make thatched roofs, Izak said.

            We also stopped at the lodging area. A couple old train cars were attached to buildings like the straight parts of an arm, with a couple other buildings around like joints. There was one older man there, an employee. Not another soul in sight. Must be a hellish tedious job, looking after the place. Walked through the train cars – I’ve never been on a train like that – with the narrow side passageways, and the compartments with 2 or 4 fold-down couch-beds and a drinking fountain by the windows. Then a dining car, with little tables and chairs, and it reminded me of that scene in White Christmas. The lodge roofs were all dense thatch, tightly bound together and secured in place. Spectacular fire hazard, I thought. Also not the sort of lodge you’d want to honeymoon at – not a shred of privacy in those thinly walled compartments, nor much room to stretch your legs. I told Izak this and he laughed. He said they often hold conferences there.

To be continued once more…

So, despite my backlogged posts that are trickling in, I’m in Etosha National Park in northern Namibia now (sounds strange to say, because it’s fairly familair and straight-forward, save the wildlife, of which the mammals are straightforward if unfamiliar). I’ve taken over two thousand pictures since I got my new camera, a few hundred of which are for work. Sadly, broadband internet is unheard of in Namibia, and I’m lucky to plug into a dialup that does 20Kbps. So - very few pictures will trickle into my photo site, but I hope to shrink down the best so I post at least something.

What’s it like here? Driving up from South Africa (er… riding. I didn’t do any driving, nuts), it’s no bleaker than the mildly bleak parts of central Nevada. Fish River Canyon is like Death Valley, although I’ve never been to Death Valley. Leo here contradicted me on that, saying that at least in Death Valley, you can get to the Sierras pretty quickly if you don’t want to imbibe dryness for several days. No such options at Fish River Canyon (second deepest in Africa, and absolutely nothing to sniff about). Saw several klipspringer (cute little antelope, bout 30lbs, mousey gray, that look like they’re standing on their tiptoes and are fabulous on rocks, like Rocky Mountain Sheep), my first giraffe (and baby), those ground squirrels with huge testicles, a kori bustard (road runner head, heron body, osterich legs), several wild ostrich, gemsbok (quickly climbing the ranks of My Favorite Antelope), and maybe a couple kudu, but if so they were lying under a tree and I couldn’t be sure.

But, that was last week. Got to Etosha Thursday or Friday (the days are blending together). Got set up in the research camp (um, let’s just say it’s not posh), and went down to the waterhole that’s literally walled off from the tourist camp, and you sit there on benches and see what comes by. Saw two black rhinos - one of the most nearly-extinct species in the world - grunting and bluffing and threatening each other, reflected in the water perfectly, with the orange post-sunset sky darkening beyond. Amazing. They did it for like 15 minutes, lots of grunting, obviously very stupid, mean, ugly creatures, then the big one gave up and meandered away after taking a dip in the waterhole.

Saturday we went for a drive first thing, cruised the southern part of the park by the camp at Okaukuejo (oh-koe-COO-yo), and on up to the pan. Wendy’s the experienced one here, Leo and I are newbies, though at least I’ve had my nose in guide books for the last couple months. Matias is new also, though knows conservation biology principles, so we go slow and marvel at the springbok and zebra which are like rats out here. We drove north to the pan, a great salt pan first found by white people in 1851 by Charles Anderson (unknown to me) and Francis Galton (Darwin’s cousin and a great thinker to boot).  Really pretty amazing, just what it looks like. Hard to describe. Bleak also, but flat and hot and bright and just critters lined up at the edge. There were probably close to a dozen giraffe there, and stuff just coming and going all the time. Apparently a pride of about 18 lions makes its home in the bitty hillocks surrounding the pan, and make use of the conveyor belt of meat products going by. Not surprisingly, it’s a park rule not to get out of your vehicle. Excellent way to never need a vacation again. Ever.

That night I got to the waterhole late, the sun had long since set and the orange was receding from the sky. I found 7 giraffe taking a drink, and when they moved away I finally looked around to see if anything else was there, and found two rhinos again! They don’t move much when they’re not in an altercation, so in some sense they’re easy to look over. They were on opposite sides of the hole and imitating rocks pretty well. A couple of black-backed jackels were darting around (they’re quite cute and active, always on a mission with those foxy ears). And the sociable weavers (birds) are always making a racket, and it’s fun to sit and watch birds and bats pluck meals from the bugs flocking to the floodlights.

Today I missed the morning drive because I locked my keys in my trailer, so I went to the waterhole to do some work and chill out for a couple hours and see what comes by. Zebra and springbok are perpetual and numerous, the blue wildebeest have babies with them (cute in their odd little wildebeest way), a few gemsbok hanging back. Presently a herd of elephants paraded up, cows and babies in the front, bull trailing at the back. They dominated the waterhole for most of an hour, before parading away, the bull hanging back at the hole for another half hour. Suffice to say, their size makes them initially impressive as hell. Shortly the dirt, wrinkles, and stately slowness gets old, and I start focusing on the babies and craning my neck for gemsbok. The male was pretty darn gross. Inspecting my photos later, I saw that he’d let his schlong drag the ground for a while. Lovely, dude. Another lone bull came up a while later, bit younger it seemed, had it together a bit more.

But mostly my interest was in the wildebeest and gemsbok. Two groups of 8 gemsbok finally picked their way to the waterhole, and I got a good look. Too bad the baby gemsbok are almost never seen (I’m not sure why yet). They’re just so beautiful though.

Ok, enough superlatives from me. I’ve got to go be social and hang out at a barbecue, then do more work before bed. It never ends! Hopefully there aren’t any (more) Giant Black Hairy Fast Spiders waiting for me in my trailer. The bug saga is far from over, let me tell you. But - that’s for another time.  

2/7/2007

Got ready lickety-split and phoned up Soetdoring Nature Reserve which is about 3km away from Florisbad. (It’s pronounced “soo-(it)-DOORRR-uh”, about 3.5 syllables, roll the r’s – I can’t). R30 per five people in a vehicle (that’s about four bucks). I decided to go right then (instead of in the evening) because I hate saying woulda-coulda-shoulda later in the day and wishing for more time. So, hopped in the bakkie and off we went.

            There were two or three people at the main gate, but not the person to take my money, so they let us in and said pay on your way out. Not sure if Izak knew the people (seemed like it), but at any rate the gate was basically deserted, and it was exceedingly quiet (and getting hot). Headed in without a map, I got out my ‘noculars and camera and started looking. First saw a group of antelope – pretty sure now they were impala females, but at the time Izak suggested reedbuck. The females (hornless) were dark reddish brown on top, sharp transition to sandy brown on the sides and belly, black stripe down the back of the hind legs, flat-headed, white parts on the tail (hard to tell which parts). Thought I saw a male standing some ways off, with short straight horns, but I could be wrong about that. A confirmed group of impalas later on makes me think this group was impala also. They were in tall grass near some trees, though not overly forested or such.

            Next up, there was a river or lake, wide and shallow, with broad green grassy margins around it, a long ways off. Saw zebra, black wildebeest, and (probably) springbok. Apparently the black wildebeest and zebra like hang out together. The springbok (or similar) were considerably smaller, a couple dozen of them easily, and mostly lying down. Could see the brown and white and maybe black, and rather whitish faces from the distance. We drove past a couple signs pointing the way to a campground and a picnic place. For eating, Izak said. Is that where the lions go when they’re hungry? I asked. He laughed.

            Drove over to the “Predator Park” to see the lions and such. It had a separate gate, with a very, very high fence that immediately reminded me of Jurassic Park. No really, though the cables perhaps weren’t quite that thick. We passed through one gate (one marked with a sign “Enter at your own Risk”) and Izak asked the gate keeper about feeding lions. Not till next week, he said. He also was very friendly, and called Izak his brother (colloquially) and said something about Izak’s wife working there too. We drove off, and I considered this new information, and Izak soon shook his head and said the man was insane. He said he didn’t know the guy at all, and chuckled a little saying “My ‘wife’….” Frankly, the guy reminded me, in his actions and postures, of some of the gay black men I’ve seen in San Francisco. But, he was missing his front teeth.

            We drove around looking for lions under trees, since it was quite hot by now. We kept the windows up except for a couple inches at the top. Izak said he was a little afraid, since a couple years ago the lions killed a couple people. Tourists? I asked. Yes, he said, they were out of their car taking pictures. Well brilliant of them, I thought, I have no such intentions, doubly so now. I asked if lions were hard to spot. He said no, although they do get down when they see a car nearby. Unless, he said, if they’re hungry. Looking for human-sized snacks? I asked. He said they get used to handouts from people. Or maybe they’re looking to put someone out a hand, I laughed to myself. I asked how they feed the lions – turn an antelope loose and let them have at it, or bring one in dead already? He said they shoot an antelope and bring it in. Aw, no fun for the lions. This giant enclosure, and not a piece of live food of significance to be had. That must suck. Although there were a surprising number of broken bones all over the ground. Not enough to trip over, but enough to notice. All white and gray, broken but not usually shattered, never articulated.

            There’s also quite a bit of trafficking in lions between the various parks and reserves. I think Izak said he heard Soetdoring recently sent some lions to Kruger. They’ll also get ones from other reserves and parks. I didn’t get a strong understanding of what the breeding situation is – whether they let them have at it, if it’s monitored or regulated, and how/if the cubs learn to hunt for themselves.

            We finally approached a caged area – chainlink fencing on all sides (and top), reinforced, etc. Three lion juveniles were in there. Still a little spotty, but not full grown by any means. I couldn’t tell which were male or female, and none had the adolescent male look. There were some leftover bones inside, still articulated, not white yet, still red-brown and dried looking. We stayed in the car and I took some pictures. Very regal in their cuteness, though not terribly exciting. Still – they were lions! Apparently they’re caged so they can feed more often without getting run out by the adults.

2/5/07

Well, just a few days left here in Florsibad. I’m still battling jetlag something fierce, and worked all night in collections last night, lol. Izak has been most kind, happily driving me around to the many places to go for shopping, and email, and sending off my microscribe. I smoked my credit card getting that sucker mailed off, and a good camera bought in the meantime, which is also taking very nice sceinic shots in my off hours. I’ve listened to both Heart of Darkeness (Joseph Conrad – one star) and King Soloman’s Mines (H. Rider Haggard – 4 stars) on my little pocket pc while doing work. Now I need to motivate for more serious “reading” that I bought with me.

Today’s trip to town is for errands and such. I hope to “go see the lions” with Izak on Wednesday. There’s a nature reserve very close to here, and I guess they feed the lions on Wednesday. Mostly I want to see bovids, but hey, two for one, why not, eh? It’s called Soetdoring Reserve (or something very close to that) if you want to look it up. It’s in the plain jane map in the back of my travel guide, so maybe it’s on google earth.

Food and water have proven a bit of a challenge for me. Boiled water is icky, and it’s easy to dehydrate if just left to that. But then, I can run through so many liters of storebought water in a week I’ve had to compromise with myself, and boil and chill tea (masks the taste – except when you made mushroom rice in that same cast iron pot, then the tea tastes a little mushroomy), and buy juice (the recent batch has got to be 80% corn syrup – it’s horrendous, but a good sugar pick-me-up when it’s hot in collections). I’m back to my staple of peanutbuttter and crackers, supplemented with instant rice, cheese and crackers, the occasional can of tuna or tomatoes or green beans, some really aweful granola, apples, and occasionally some pasta and sauce and deli meat. I had chicken nuggets, but after storing the bat in the freezer for several days, I don’t care to eat any opened foods that shared space and air with the little guy.

Oh, and just for the record: I’m not homesick or bored or anything, but rest assured, I won’t be abandoning the first world any time in the foreseeable future (i.e. my lifetime). And it’s not even bad out here in Florisbad. I just can’t comprehend how people would prefer this (or anything worse) to an American city (or parts thereabout). Sure, there are parts of poorer America that could probably rival less developed countries, but being within US borders does make a big difference. (I don’t think I mentioned I’m locked inside grounds gates at night, even out here in the country).

I picked up a rag-popular-newspaper (not exactly the ZA Wall Street Journal), and was just appalled at the blatancy of the violence around parts, especially Joburg. I mean, people do mean, icky, revolting things back home, but both the frequency, severity, baldness, and swagger of these crimes is amazing. I’m glad I won’t be spending any time in Joburg apart from the airport and transport to Pretoria, and even then I should be staying on museum grounds almost the whole time.

I was also right about the socialist bent of the country (at least in print). You’ve got an editorial on one page saying that despite 15 years of freedom, racism is as rampant as ever (racism meaning white supremacy here). Then the cover story was about a conflict between the SPCA and an ethnic community that ritually slaughtered a bull. The SPCA was playing the civility card, with animal rights floating just under the surface of the argument, and the clan was being defended by the Commission for the Protection of the Rights of Cultural Religious and Linguistic Communities (CRL Rights Commission). The story says the CRL Rights Commission says “the Yengeni clan had performed the ancestral ritual to cleanse [the defendant] from prison bad luck.”

The reasoning gets better: “”He [the defendant] did not slaughter the bull, his family did. Therefore, the SPCA is fighting a losing battle,” [the CRLRC spokesman said]. “They are undermining and violating other people’s rights. His family pierced the bull with a spear to allow it to burp, and if it did not produce a sound, culturally they would have left it,” she said.

“Chairman of CRLRC Dr. Mongezi Guma said the commission was concerned about the high level of ignorance among some South Africans, when it came to another’s beliefs and practices. “As a result, there is a tendency to undermine these cultures and religion, thus imposing Western ideological practices on indigenous practices. … It is ethnocentric and undermining to hide behind animal rights, and deny human beings their rights to uphold and practice their cultures and religions,” Guma said.”

Wowzers. Talk about an incomprehension of what a right actually is, and what it is not, and what it entails, and where it comes from. Bulls have rights, and cultural and religious and linguistic communities have rights… but do individuals have rights? The right to do what? To whom, and to what, and for what reasons? Whatever the hell they feel like, so long as it’s part of a recognized groups’ rights, and not Western in its origin. And what happens when one culture’s practices entails X, and another culture’s practices entails anti-X? Then what? Both are in the right, by this definition of rights. A full escalation to conflict would be the only rational thing to do, when you have no objective standard for anything surrounding the concept of “rights.”

WWR, Part IV

Chiropteran revival

My little bat’s doing better!

I’d put a pair of pants over the top of the bag-cage, thinking the light must be facilitating his lethargy. He’d kicked around a few times, never cared about the cricket or water. I’ll just keep an eye on him so I don’t have a dead bat on my bed-stand for too long, I thought.

I hadn’t heard anything from him, so a couple hours later I lifted up the pants – and he’s hanging on to the top of the strainer! Not exactly hanging upside down yet (maybe it’s not high enough), but he’s got a four-way grip on the thing, so that must be a good thing. I put a cap of water in the bottom, on the off chance he drinks, and also to (hopefully) humidify his air a bit and reduce his dehydration rate.

Probably a lost cause still. I’ll ask James tomorrow if he keeps (or wants) a chiropteran collection. If not, I’ll take care of the little dude for a bit more (he must be starving and I’m not inviting bugs in), then turn him out and let him take his chances. If James says yes, well then he’s toast (or frozen toast, as the case may be). The odds of him being competitively viable are very small, I think.

WWR, Part III
 

I could feel the warmth of his little bat body in the palm of my hand, and his little belly was fluttering up and down – pulse or breathing, I couldn’t tell, but man he had a crankin’ metabolism. His ears are small by bat standards, and he’s dark brown, with a gray-brown underside. Know what? Bat toes are really cute. Five little ones, all lined up in a row, with a bigger one on the end. He opened and closed his mouth a few times, and it’s mostly just pink with very tiny little teeth. If I remember correctly, fruit bats have noticeably larger teeth, especially incisors. Which makes sense – he’s out at night in a bug-infested area, flying around the lights. He digs bugs.

I held the ziplock bag open by the fan for a bit, to make sure he was getting enough oxygen. Belly up, belly down, he didn’t seem to be moving much no matter how I turned him. About 10 minutes of this and I began to think about the freezer again. I mean really, I probably broke some bones somewhere in his body, and one of his wings doesn’t seem to get stretched out as far as the other. If he’s not bleeding internally, then it’ll take forever for the bones to heal, and he’ll probably never be 100% functional again. And it’s not like I know how to feed a bat in the meantime. And if I let him go, he’ll probably just die shortly, out of functional failure or an inability to feed well enough. Then he’s just another meal for the ants. Best to put him in the freezer, kill him more quickly, and have a bat skeleton to boot.

So I pushed the air out of the bag, sealed it, opened the freezer and slid him onto the bottom shelf. Apparently cold temperatures are a hell of a reviver, because just like that he was kicking like mad and stretching his wings and opening his mouth. I pulled him out and he was still again. Slid him back in, and he sprang to life. Guess the prospect of freezing to death is pretty motivating for a body. So now what? He’s obviously got some kick left in him, and on the off chance I really did just knock him silly, he deserves a shot at life before I make a specimen of him. Plus – now I have a bat!

But I also have work to do tonight. As cool as it is to hold him in my hand, I need to find another way to get oxygen to him. Aha – pasta strainer. I put the little dude on my bedside table, still in the bag, slipped the big strainer in over him, and voila – an airy little cage in a plastic bag. Not bad. I nailed a cricket hopping across the floor and popped it into the cage as well. I wondered about dissolving a few grains of vicodin in some water to help with his pain (it’s not like he’ll be flying any time soon), but I think small insectivores like him usually get all their water from the bugs they eat. So now I have a crippled bat and a half-dead cricket on my bedside table, as I sit propped up in bed blogging away.  

Realistically, he’s probably not going to make it. And I should get over my cute-fuzzy irrationalism and put him in the freezer. But I’m reminded of a news story Randy sent around the other day, about a duck who got shot in three places and survived two days in the fridge. Freaked out the hunter’s wife when she opened the fridge and the duck raised its head. (“Hey! Who turned on the light?”) And now he’s at a duck assisted living facility or somesuch.

The drive to live – 3.5 billion years of success.

(To be further continued)

I had my first up-close mammal encounter tonight (Sunday, Jan. 28). I’m dinking around my kitchen with dinner stuff, and hear a repeated thwapping somewhere in the room. Hoping it wasn’t another monster dragonfly, I turned around to see a bat zooming around like a toy airplane. Again, how he got in, I have no idea. There must be a hole in my ceiling, and then they come in through my false ceiling or something. (I think there are rats up there too, and certainly the birds roost on the top).

The bat didn’t freak me out the way the dragonfly did, but no doubt about it, I simply can’t co-exist with a flapping bat a couple feet above my head. I tried – for about two seconds, then made my decision. I crept to the front door while shooing him away with my pillow, and threw the door open. I even turned on the porch light, hoping he’d fly towards the bugs. No go. No matter how many times he ran into the walls (he seemed to be flying in a modified star pattern now), he was always a foot too high, and it’s like the door was invisible. I tried the same thing with my kitchen light and window, with the same results. Sigh. What to do. My swats with the pillow were largely useless, and I felt like a ninny besides. So I put the pillow down and flailed about with my arms when he came close. Big improvement, genius. I wasn’t afraid of him, really, he just got a bit too near my head sometimes, and I could see his little bat ears and face and gray belly as he approached me like… a bat out of hell.

Next up – the feather duster. I was pretty decent in little league back in the day. I’d given him a good 10 minutes to fly out, and he seemed to be getting tired, trying to roost on my walls after making full-body contact. I figured maybe I could knock him silly and chuck him out the door. I swatted at him for about five minutes, and then THWACK! A poof of feathers and a plop, and I had a motionless bat on my floor. My first reaction? “Oh no!! I hurt him!” But, I got the pasta strainer and a magazine and put him out on the front porch.

But, cute furry little creatures can make a mess of your rational faculty, and I started feeling bad for the little guy. Plus, I figured I was giving the ants a free meal and depriving the osteology collection of a perfectly healthy (if somewhat mangled) bat skeleton. I figured I’d put him in a bag in the freezer and learn about durmestid beetles (which are used to clean skeletons) this coming week. I got the meat fork and a ziplock bag, went outside, and went to lift him up with the fork, and he stretched his little wings and kicked with his legs. Awww. I wondered if I’d only stunned him, and maybe he just needed some time to revive away from the ants which were already checking him out. I fork-lifted him into the bag, squashed some ants, and headed back inside.

To be continued.