Chuka village stay and Maasai Mara safari!

Hello from Lang'ata!
We have just finished up a week with the Green Belt Movement, and are back at their center in Lang'ata, on the outskirts of Nairobi. This week we spent a few days in a Chuka community (one of nine Meru tribes) near Mt. Kenya, enjoying time in homestays and working with the women in the local Kiang'ondu network of the Green Belt Movement. In addition to learning about seed harvesting, planting, and forest restoration, we all had a chance to help with daily chores such as milking the cows, cutting up arrowroot and other vegetables for meal preparation, and even learning how to pick tea!

From the Chuka village visit, we headed southwest across the Great Rift Valley to the plains. Today we wrapped up a two-day safari in the Maasai Mara reserve in western Kenya - saw plenty of wildlife (elephants, lions, giraffes, cheetahs, warthogs, topi, gazelles, etc.) and are now resting up back at the Lang'ata GBM centre outside of Nairobi - tomorrow morning we depart early for the northern region of Samburu!

Message from Latif: Hello. We are in Kenya and having a great time. It’s been a busy week for us here. I finally get some idea about where my lineage might be from, better than having no idea. We went out to the chuka community. There we met the chuka people where they welcomed us with open arms. We helped with chores and planting trees. We also did a safari where we saw a number of animals to include lions, elephants,zebras etc.

Message from Charlene: Hey friends and family! I am healthy and happy. So, no worries; Hakuna matata! Just in the first week, this trip has been more than I ever dreamed of! …And I’ve dreamt of this for a very long time! It’s been so stimulating and so amazing. Great landscape, great food and spectacular people. : )

Message from Mayeli: Hello everyone. First let me start by telling my two boys that I love and miss them very much and a special thank you to my husband, and the rest of my family who have been a great support, and made this trip possible through their support. It’s been a very busy week, and we just finished a long safari, before that we spent a couple of days in Chuka with our host families, and have had a blast, everyone has been very welcoming. My favorite part so far has been the predation we got to witness on safari. (Brad: Don’t you realize that I’ve had….since Easters!)

Message from Brenda: Hujambo rafiki na familia! I don’t know where to start because so many amazing things have happened in this past week. I have been attempting to absorb every sight and sound, usually to the detriment of my sleep pattern. So far my most cherished moments have been in Chuka dancing and singing with the community members. They have named me Makena, meaning joyful/always laughing, and I will be forever grateful for their hospitality and warmth.

Messge from Terri: Jambo! I can’t believe I have only been here one week because I have experienced so much already. Some of the highlights have been most recently, the Maasai warriors, their village and the songs they sang with us. We each wore the lions head which was killed by the chief’s son while we danced. Of course the safari was most excellent as we saw most everything you can imagine, however only three of the big five! We were just 15 feet from both a pride of lions and a cheetah! Ok, back to the highlights: The Chuka village was probably my favorite part so far. We each stayed with a Chuka family and became part of their family. My family named me Gacieri which means a seeker – for knowledge. I milked their cow, harvested tea, and helped cook meals. We each planted a tree and harvested seedlings as the Chuka community is part and parcel of the Green Belt Movement – the focus of this first part of our journey. We have been treated very well, are drinking lots of water and learning a ton. I can’t wait to share all my photos. Thank you Blake for all your love and support, and my family and friends for checking in on me. I am very blessed.

Message from Taya: I’ve been constantly thinking about the plausibility of me doing research on lions in Kenya. Challenges are great and many in every single aspect and as soon as I’ve stepped off the plane I’ve been trying to assess them and work them out. So my guilty pleasure here is keeping a wishlist of things I want to buy from here and constantly updating it.

Message from Mwalimu Jim: We had a great stay in Chuka! The women running the shamba (farm) were wonderful, and the men (Kiriungi and Njoka) taught Latif and me how to cut fodder for the cattle, how to pick tea, how to make arrows, how to chop wood and how to carve. I tried to offer help in cooking but the women just giggled and sent me away. We ate like kings although it was their own simple fresh food (cabbage, potatoes, rice, ugali, githeri, fruit, millet porridge, chai, etc.) and Kiriungi gave us lessons in the Chuka language and culture. I felt like part of the family and very welcomed!!! We also learned the dance of love!!!

Greetings from East Africa!! We are back in Kenya for another month-long UW Tacoma study abroad course - this year I am once again here with Dr. Jim Gawel, and we have ten students from the UW Tacoma and Seattle campuses with us...everyone has come in from the long two-day air trip (via Amsterdam) and are settled in at the Green Belt Movement's (GBM) facilitieis in Lang'ata, outside of Nairobi. Tomorrow is a packed day - orientation, including an overview of the various projects that GBM (brainchild of Nobel prize winnter Wangari Maathi, who recently passed away), a visit to a local giraffe sanctuary, and some lectures on Kenyan economics/politics from faculty from nearby Kenyatta University. We're also be preparing to spend some time in the one of the Green Belt Movement communities, with the Chuka up on the eastern slopes of Mt. Kenya. More later - now everyone must get some rest!

Back in Mastatal after a week on the coast!

Hola! We are back in the farming village of Mastatal, Costa Rica after a whirlwind visit to the Pacific coast. We spent some days at Hacienda Baru, a private nature reserve near Dominical, where the class explored the mangroves and other coastal habitats with staff naturalists. We also spent time with naturalists in Manuel Antonio Natural Park as well as some mangrove islands further north - all teeming with monkeys, sloths, and other wildlife. Finally, we had the opportunity to participate in night beach patrols, looking for nesting sea turtles - several groups had the good fortune of witnessing the ancient ritual of Olive Ridleys crawling up onto the beach in the dead of night and laying their eggs!

Students are busy wrapping up their research projects - they'll be giving final presentations tomorrow afternoon in the outdoor classroom here at Rancho Mastatal - then it will be back to the San Jose area to return home and/or continue travels elsewhere!

Greetings from Mastatal!

Hello from Costa Rica! Erica Cline and I are in a rural farming village in Costa Rica with 13 students on a UW Tacoma study-abroad course. We left the San Jose area a few days ago, and all are now immersed in life in a remote village, with students fully engaged in their independent research projects, which form the core of this study abroad experience. Projects span a range of mostly ecological studies, including exploring the effects of roads and landscape use on stream macroinvertebrate biodiversity and sediments, poison dart frog behavior, hummingbird foraging, butterfly diversity, fungal pathogen dynamics in cacao plantations, and the antibiotic properties of medicinal plants found here in the rainforest. The group will be here for another week or so before heading to the coast to explore mangrove and other habitats there, before returning back to the village. More posts and updates to come!

Back in Watamu

Greetings from the Kenyan coast – I’m here for a few weeks at the Mwamba Field Study Centre (A Rocha Kenya) working with colleagues on several different conservation projects. I’m continuing work on a collaborative project with Colin Jackson, an ornithologist at A Rocha Kenya, and his field crew on conservation of several endangered bird species that inhabit the nearby Arabuko-Sokoke Forest (ASF). ASF is the largest last remnant forest along the East African coast, and is home to six birds on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (or the IUCN as it’s known) “red list” of endangered/threatened species. Last year we published the results of a study we conducted (with UW Tacoma undergraduates) exploring the interaction of bird and arthropod populations with elephant disturbance; this month we have just submitted another paper (again with the help of UW Tacoma undergraduates who accompanied me here last autumn to do more fieldwork) detailing the preference of one of the red-listed birds (the East Coast Akalat – Sheppardia gunning) for a particular habitat in the forest (Cynometra forest & thicket). We’re in the process of writing up another paper this week that attempts to more closely analyze data linking the relationship between elephant disturbance and other vegetation characteristics and bird diversity in the forest reserve. Plans to conduct an exhaustive elephant count, in conjunction with the Kenya Wildlife Service, have been delayed for a few weeks – we’re hopeful that this will get done within the month so that we’ll have updated information about the elephant densities in ASF, which will help us all to better understand the rich ecological network involving these megaherbivores and the rest of the forest denizens (and consequently the implications of different management strategies).
On the marine side, I’ve been continuing my collaboration with Watamu Turtle Watch, finishing up analysis of data linking beach habitat condition and Chelonia mydas (green sea turtle) nesting along Watamu Beach. We should have a preliminary paper submitted on this work in the next two months – more info to follow!

Earthwatch Team Two 2011 wraps up

We wrapped up another week of fieldwork in Tarrazú with the second Earthwatch team of the season. With the usual flurry of activities, the small (only four!) team was invaluable in helping set up traps, collecting insects from the field, and sorting specimens in the lab. Last week we took some time to move our entire operation to a new (but nearby) site - we're now fully installed in a new laboratory facility - an old house that we're leasing from the coffee cooperative. All are very happy to be away from the car emissions testing facility that had been located just outside the doors/windows of our old lab facilities!

This morning we found ourselves in the middle of the San Isidro Blessing of the Animals (& crops) in Santa Maria - droves of people came down from the surrounding hills with their dogs, cows, horses, ducks, etc. in tow for the festivities - a great way to finish off the week!

Fieldwork in Tarrazú

I'm spending a few weeks in the central highlands of Costa Rica, conducting research in an ongoing project I'm conducting with Earthwatch Institute and a local coffee farmers cooperative (CoopeTarrazu). The focus this year is on pollinators, and especially on the importance of nearby forest fragments on coffee yields and the abundance and diversity of bees visiting coffee. Fieldwork activities include sampling bee/wasp diversity and abundance in and around coffee fields, and manipulating pollinator access to flowers in order to compare the effects of wind vs. insect pollination on yields. This week, I've got a group of volunteers from the global firm Ernst & Yield helping out in the field- we're spending the mornings putting up insect traps in coffee fields and nearby forests, and the afternoons in the lab sorting the insects captured from the previous days' traps. The volunteers (ten of them) are also working with the local coffee cooperative in an effort to help them develop their social corporate responsibility protocols. The group will be here a total of eight days; another group of volunteers arrives this weekend, and we'll continue collecting data on more farms throughout next week.