Angola Trip #2 Wrap-up Yesterday I left Soyo and flew to Luanda, Angola’s capital. Tomorrow I’ll fly to Gabon via Johannesburg, S. Africa (there are no direct connections between Angola & Gabon, so it’ll take a few days to get there, par for the course in Africa). Tim & Sal are in Soyo for a few more days to deploy 2 more MARUs. Although we […]
Outrageous Whale Day!Another component of the whale work here is the deployment and recovery of acoustic recording devices (called Marine Autonomous Recording Units or MARUs, developed by Cornell University Ornithology Lab, Bioacoustics Research Program) to record whale song. Actually they continuously record everything 24/7 while they’re deployed, but the goal is to record whales. The devices are really cool (I wrote about the same devices
Last Peninsula trip, for now On Thursday afternoon Joao and I boated back over to the Sereia peninsula to do a few more interviews at villages. We took along Mendez and Gisela, the Angolan students, and showed them the habitat around Pululu Channel (which is more like a small lagoon than a channel) and another gorgeous channel where there are enormous mangrove trees. Mendez told
The Bone CollectorsThe day after our incredible find and collection of manatee bones at N’Tutu, Warren and I documented and sampled each one back at base. We were assisted by Gisela, an Angolan biology student who, along with a recent graduate named Mendez, came to Soyo as part of an agreement with the Angolan government to see our marine mammal research here firsthand. It was
Whale DaysManatee work in Angola is part of a larger project here that also includes cetacean and sea turtle research. On this trip Tim and our other collaborator Sal (who arrived last Tuesday) are doing cetacean work, and since most of my background with whales and dolphins has been stranding work (dead and injured), it’s been nice to have some opportunities to see happy, healthy
More images from Congo River surveys While waiting quietly for manatees or stopping in at villages to talk to people about them, we have plenty of time to see lots of other interesting things on the river… Broad-billed Roller Mudskipper, a fish that comes up on mud banks to search for food. The way this guy walked around on his fins reminded me of a
Busy days on the Congo I haven’t had much time in front of the computer over the past few days- we’ve been out on the water all day everyday and I also got a nasty cold, so I’ve been doing nothing but working and sleeping with a few meals somewhere in between. We’ve made three trips up the Congo River looking for manatees and talking
Angola Trip #2, first field day Tim arrived here in Angola yesterday and we’ve finalized our workplan for the next couple weeks. This takes a bit of effort coordinating boats, drivers and translators (when we visit villages) with staff from Angola LNG. Our liason on the base this time is a great guy named Stuart, a Scotsman with a wonderful sense of humor who is
In Transit (written on Tuesday somewhere over the Atlantic)Now that I’ve finally settled into my comfortable seat on the 15 hour flight from Houston to Luanda, Angola I actually have time to really start thinking about returning to Africa. Of course I have been planning logistics for the past month or so, but then I took a much-needed relaxing vacation in the Pacific northwest with