(A huge baobab at a school ground. They are such cool trees!)I guess it’s been a while since I updated this, it has been a busy couple of weeks here at Mwamba!
Last week was Dave and I’s first full week of looking after hospitality at the center (we started June 8). On the weekend of June 12, we did a little touristing in the area to celebrate our anniversary, visiting the Bio-Ken Snake Farm outside of Watamu, and had a lovely getaway to one of the beach resorts in the area for the weekend. The snake farm was very interesting, as they are the main provider of antivenin for all of East Africa, and have over 60 species of snake living at their center! We got a tour, and our guide Dickson was fantastic, telling us all about different kinds of snakes, how poisonous they were, and their habits. He even let us hold a few of the non-poisonous ones. The snakes were really beautiful, and so much less stinky than the garter snakes at home.
We went crow counting at Malindi again, as well as our normal Tern count at Sabaki River Mouth, with only one hitch... a lunar eclipse! Once a month (on the full moon), we go to Malindi and do crow counts. There is a native species (Pied Crow) and an invasive one (Indian House Crow) so they are collecting data on the numbers of each to see how the local population is holding up. Not well, as we usually count about 50:1 House to Pied crows. From there, we go to an estuary, the Sabaki River Mouth to do roosting counts of the wader birds there. The reason we go on the full moon is because it is so dark and in the middle of nowhere (20-30 minute hike in to where we count, across all kinds of mud and sand) that we need the moonlight to count. Last Wednesday , even though it was a full moon, it just wasn't that bright and we couldn't figure out why! Then, as we were looking, we saw that it was an eclipse, and we got to watch it progress all the way home (walking and driving). It was very beautiful. Though it meant our
wader-counting objective was a bit of a fail!
(Albert and Lydia, two of the people I went crow counting with. We are on top of an abandoned hotel)After that, it was full-time guest house duty, as well as trying to fit in our other projects around here. We have had two big groups in; the first one was from Aga Khan Academy in Mombasa, Kenya. They were here for four days, and it was amazing how different things seemed with 8 extra people around (think one 4-slice toaster for eight guests and six volunteers!). They were very easy to have around though, and we really enjoyed their stay. They left Sunday morning, and we had another group of 12 coming in from Minnesota that night!
There are two housekeepers on staff here, but we felt it would be nicer to have us volunteers put some time in than to get them both in to work all day on Sunday, so at 9:30 am we began. There are 6 guest rooms here, which may not sound like that many compared to a hotel in Canada, but it was a lot of work! Each room needed the bathroom cleaned, bedding changed, sweeping, mopping, and cleaning up of any garbage. As well, we did not have enough sheets for a full changeover, and had to wash sheets and some towels and hope that they hung dry before the next group came in! Not such a big deal to wash some sheets at home, but here where all of our laundry is done by hand, it was a bit gruelling. By lunchtime at 1pm, we were mostly done and just waiting on some sheets to dry. Perris (one of the housekeepers) came in after church and looked over (fixed up!) the rooms we had done to make sure they were up to Mwamba Guest House standards, and by 4 we were done and off to the beach to cool off!
Since then, the week has been a little calmer. The current group is from the Minnesota Zoo, and are all university age and very interested in biodiversity and conservation. This area is a really fantastic area in terms of cool conservation projects, so I think they came to the right place. Some of the projects are:
Bio-Ken Snake Farm
Kippepeo Project – A butterfly farm where farmers can bring collected live butterflies and pupae to be raised to sell elsewhere. A positive incentive to keep from exploiting the nearby forest, as it’s their main habitat
Watamu Turtle Watch – a group that monitors turtles, rescues and rereleases sea turtles, and protects nests all along the beach here. Visiting their center is still on my to-do list!
Arabuko-Sokoke Forest- a really amazing and ecologically significant forest with a few endemic species (Sokoke Scops Owl, Golden-Rumped Elephant Shrew)... I’ve been helping to maintain a blog for David Ngala, one of the key conservation workers in the forest, check it out: davidngala.wildlifedirect.org
As well as the A Rocha boardwalk at Mida Creek and Tree Platform at the Gede Ruins! The last bird ringing pictures I posted are from Gede.
Environmental education is really important here, as conservation efforts are doomed to fail unless you can get the people in the surrounding communities on board. One of the things A Rocha does is school visits, where our EE coordinator Stanley Baya and intern Naomi do presentations. Often when they go, they take trees to plant to promote "farming" of trees, as opposed to chopping down ancient ones from the forest. We got to go on a tree delivery and here are some pictures:
(kids love being in pictures here!)
(unloading from Duma, our trusty old station wagon)If you want to read some stories that Naomi and I have put on the ASSETS blog about Environmental Ed, take a look at assets.wildlifedirect.org
In other news, I am feeling kind of satisfied with my computer maintenance lately... all the computers here have antivirus software now, and aren’t passing Trojans around on the network anymore! However, the salty sea air wreaks havoc on all the connections, so I’m perpetually responding to “Hannah! ___________ isn’t working...” to find that cleaning/reseating the cable is all that is necessary! Ah well, when I got here, I wouldn’t have even thought of that, so I guess I’m learning.
Sorry for the novel, hope this gives a bit of a clue to what we’ve been up to lately!
Wow, what a life!
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