By: Sam Hoving, Carleton College

I was off transects (a rare boon for a group of five), so I enjoyed sleeping in until seven instead of the usual five AM wakeup. With only five of us students on the program this time, four out of the five must go on transects every morning. These are four to five hour long driven expeditions, on which two students, an instructor, and an “escort guide” from the community will search for and record every herbivore, predator and bird of concern along the route. Of course, these are tremendously cool opportunities to see amazing and rare wildlife, but a day to do laundry and just relax before the heat of the afternoon is surprisingly nice.

A leopard that we encountered on a later transect. One of the more rare sightings, only spotted once out of our sixteen transects. With that said, our group was lucky enough to spot this same leopard wandering through our campsite on our first night!

I exited the tent to find that a mega site had rolled in next to us. They had twenty to thirty tents of solid metal pole construction, with mattresses, showers, toilets, the whole nine yards. Even their own kitchen and banquet table! They spent more or less the whole day moving logs, constructing tent after tent, and generally getting the site ready for a mobile safari to roll in later. The whole process took them two days, and they only stayed for two nights afterwards! 

Anyway, after taking my anti-malaria meds for the day, I got out some yogurt and granola for breakfast, and was going to have some flaming hot Doritos™ as a snack afterwards. I pulled those from the tent too, and setting the bag on the table, I turned my back (a rookie mistake) to eat my yogurt around the fire pit only a few feet away. Less than a minute later, I heard a loud crinkle and vigorous scampering, as a vervet monkey climbed his way out of reach into a tree, my chips in tow. As I ran over, still processing what just happened, the monkey looked down at me and tore the bag wide, showering chips in a spicy red rain of triangles. 

The culprit in question, in a Camel Thorn Acacia tree that provided shade for our “kitchen” and an escape route for this thief. 

They go *everywhere*, and of course the monkey isn’t letting go of his prize, climbing higher as it notices my approach. In shame, I started picking up the Dorito bits, crawling under thorny bushes and circling the tree several times, finding bits everywhere from our handwashing buckets to our box of teas. While the starlings and babblers fought for whatever I missed, the monkey finished his meal and tossed the bag to the ground, landing on the sand with a soft hiss.

So, lesson learned. When Gabe says “don’t leave any food out,” he really means, don’t leave any food out! It does raise the question, would the monkey have been as quick to grab the bag if I’d left one of our mango chutney flavored bags out instead? Can monkeys taste spice, let alone enjoy it? Unfortunately this isn’t the kind of science that we’ve been allowed to conduct here, so this question of mine may end up forever unanswered. 

The rest of the morning and afternoon flew by as I worked on my species description assignments while the two cars returned from transect, one after another. After our natural history class, taught in any scrap of shade we could find, I worked on my species accounts some more, and watched a Spotted bush snake try to sneakily climb past a starling guarding a tree.

I didn’t mind our cute little visitor, although the starling was less than thrilled.

For our camp dinner we made seswaa, pap, and grilled veggies, the first two being traditional Tswana dishes that Dix and SB showed us how to make over a campfire! Super tasty, and I can’t wait to try them out when I’m back in the US. The rest of the evening was spent doing dishes and talking around the campfire while Gabe played the guitar I brought along. Unfortunately our camp hyena Peewee didn’t make his usual appearance, but we did hear them later that night.

To finish off this first blog of the semester, here’s my final anecdote: to hit the bathrooms before bed, we packed into Lucy (our river crossing queen of a Land Rover). We’re not allowed to walk to the ablutions (bathrooms) after dark due to the wildlife in the area. Berkley played popcorn between Sierra and I in the back when we hit a bump by the bathroom hard, sending us flying everywhere. Already laughing, we see a massive bull elephant not 10 meters from the car, for which Colin tells us to be quieter, and someone at the same moment says to shine a light at it so we can see it better (a very bad idea). To which Colin immediately responds “Do none of you have any survival instincts?!” This got the three of us in the backseat into a contagious laughing fit, which barely ended by the time we reached the second set of bathrooms.

What a day, an embarrassing (but silly) lesson to learn that morning, productive work and reading for the afternoon, and a copious amount of laughter in the evening. I went to bed wholly satisfied with the events in my life that had led me here, and looking forward to the next two and a half months!