Sunset and Stars at Deer Park

The day before my birthday was unusually clear, with views across the Strait of Vancouver Island and to the east of Baker Mountain. It was also a night with no moon, and so I greeted my partner in crime at the door with great excitement–clear sky! bright stars! milky way!–and a packed picnic dinner. We drove up to Deer Park, a campground and lookout point in Olympic National Park, WA, and meandered the trail up to the top.

The view was indeed spectacular, and though we were joined with other photographers and hikers for the panoramic sunset, they all cleared out with the end of the light, and we had the starry night all to ourselves. Well, and one late-night buck who wandered in front of my camera, and paused long enough for my night picture set up (40mm equivalent lens, and a 4 second exposure) to catch his visit.

This was also my first time playing with combining multiple images together in different ways, using a couple of different softwares. There are panoramas, which are multiple horizontally adjacent shots stitched together (using Lightroom 6’s included merging). I tried one HDR picture where three shots were taken at dark, medium, and bright exposures, and then combined to get more out of the range of lights and shadows (in Affinity photo). And a couple of the Milky Way photos are also composites, with multiple 20-second exposures taken one after the other, and aligned to keep the stars bright, reduce background noise, and remove streaks from airplanes and satellites (using the Starry Landscape Stacker). I’m pretty happy with the early results, although I know there’s a lot more to learn about how much digital software can do–and how to make it look good.

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More Mpala Mammals

On my first few game drives at Mpala, I saw more wild mammal species than I can remember seeing in the rest of my life combined. The later weeks did not disappoint, with a longer drive to the northern, drier areas of the reserve, different antelope species, the elusive straw-tailed whydah bird, charismatic reptiles, broad-shouldered raptors, and multiple elephants with young babies, including one that we watched nurse!

Backyard Birds at Mpala

Just over halfway through my trip to Kenya, my camera’s shutter broke. This is the murphey’s law well-known to professional and travel photographers, that cameras are most likely to break on big international trips when they’re not possible to fix or replace–and the missed photo opportunities are priceless. For this reason, many photographers will carry a second full-size camera with them when they travel. However, I am not a professional photographer and my second camera is a reliable but simple waterproof point-and-shoot, and while it takes pretty good landscape and macro shots, it doesn’t have much of a zoom.

Around this time, the rainstorms started, and all the birds changed their behaviors as they began nesting and breeding patterns. I was surrounded by stunning birds, but without my camera.

These pictures were taken with a friend’s camera, loaned to me for one day, and almost all of them were in the bushes around my house–and even perched on a string hanging between the porch columns! I’m so grateful to her for letting me borrow her equipment, and glad I had the time to sit and watch these beauties. Seeing a weaver bird build his nest from start to finish put me in awe of the complexity of creation. The paradise flycatcher was one of my favorite birds of the whole trip, and I was charmed he came to visit my porch on that day. Also pictured are a go-away bird, purple grenadiers, swallows, sulfur-breasted bushshrike, and a sunbird with incandescent feathers.

I hope you enjoy seeing these pictures as much as I enjoyed taking them.

Rains in Africa

Since the first afternoon we arrived in Kenya, storm clouds had been threatening to bring an early start to the rainy season. We worked hard to get the prescribed burns for our research project finished before the rains, each day looking anxiously out across the valley where other ranches were getting isolated storms. Fortunately we were able to finish in time, and just a few days afterwards, multiple bands of storms thundered in. It was amazing to see the intensity of the rainstorms, and how quickly the land responded! Plants started greening up in just three days, and week after the first storm the whole landscape was transformed. Animals changed their behaviors too, with birds starting their breeding and nesting patterns for the new season, and insects emerging in droves out of the ground.

Baby Cheetahs

These young ones were hidden in the grass a little ways away from one of the areas we burned. Our hope is that the burned areas will attract lots of herbivores, which will in turn provide some tasty lunches for the cheetahs when they get a little bit older!

 

 

 

Game Drive

The only legal way to shoot wildlife in Kenya is from a car, with a camera. In the afternoons and evenings after the day’s fieldwork, we drove around to different parts of the reserve, stopping whenever we spotted something in the bushes, trees, or skies.

The diversity of wildlife here is mind-blowing. In just a few weeks, I’ve seen 34 different species of wild mammals, and more birds than I could begin to count. I’ve also gotten pretty good at taking pictures out of a truck window, aided by the best drive and tour guide imaginable (my advisor).

Greater blue-eared starling

Elephant

Grevy’s Zebra

Eland females

Verreaux’s Eagle Owl and owlet

Greater Kudu male and female

Black-backed Jackal

Warthog

Elephants

Bush Hyrax

Greater Kudu male

Dikdik

Eland females

Giraffe

Impala females

Kori bustard, giraffe, and plains zebra

Impala males

Black-backed jackal

White-faced Scops Owl

Elephant

Black-backed Jackal

Grevy’s zebra

Greater Kudu female

Verraux’s Eagle Owl

White-bellied Bustard

Spotted Hyena

Prescribed Burns

Fire–and what happens to plant communities after fire–is the core topic of my dissertation research. I’ve set up experiments in Sierra mixed-conifer forest and nutrient-poor but diversity-rich serpentine chaparral communities, and when my advisor discussed a project with prescribed fire in his study system in Kenya rangeland, I jumped at the opportunity.

For over twenty years, this project has been studying how the presence or absence of wild herbivores or cattle can affect this plant community–the acacia trees and understory grasses that grow on black cotton soil–and through them, the rodents, birds, and insects that also use this environment.

In 2013, the research team burned a section of each plot to test how past herbivory affected fire behavior, and how fire changed all of these interactions between wildlife, cattle, trees, grass, and insects. This year, we reburned all those sections to look at the effects of repeated fire, and burned a second set of sections in each plot to look at differences between fire in different years.

There were 36 burns total, each 30 x 30 meters. The whole process took our team of almost thirty people five days. Most of the crew was there not to light fire, but to keep anything outside of these sections from catching fire. In addition to the two main organizers and fire-lighters, there were people running two water tanks with hoses, people driving the trucks that pulled the water tanks, people running an even larger refill water tank–which was pulled by a tractor. Another crew wore backpacks full of water, to be able to spray any spot embers, and a final crew stayed behind after each burn, to rake apart coals or smoldering dung, and make sure all the hot spots were extinguished. Plus of course all the researchers recording temperature, wind speed, flame heights, bird movements, and tree survival.

For me, this project was a wave of experiences. This was my first time visiting anywhere in Africa and my first time working on a prescribed fire team. My original plan had been to arrive a week or so before the burning started, to have time to settle in and establish my own mini-experiment within the burn areas. However, due to concerns over the rains coming early, the entire project was moved forward, so we starting burning my second day after arriving. This meant that my first week I was trying to learn the system, help with the burns, keep ahead of the burning plan to set my experiments in the late afternoons or early mornings in the areas that would be burned the following day, and see and photograph as much nature and wildlife as I could. I didn’t have time to be jetlagged or tired from the 24 hour flight until over a week later!

From field assistants to coworkers, the team here has been absolutely amazing. Watching an unwieldy group of people with all these moving parts come together to accomplish all of these burns smoothly and safety was incredible. I’ve learned so much, and I’ve had a lot of fun along the way!

 

The Hippo Pools

On Mpala Ranch is an area commonly referred to as the hippo pools, which is just upstream of a small dam, so the water level stays consistent even during the dry season. It’s one of the best places to go to see wildlife, including the hippos that give its name, and many other animals that take advantage of the predictable resource. We saw over fifteen hippos there on our first visit, as well as a small herd of elephants, a troop of vervet monkeys, two giraffe, a fish eagle, a little bee eater, and a hadada ibis. The big yellow-barked acacia that grow near the river are called fever trees.

Life on the Black Cotton

Mpala Ranch has two main soil types–black cotton and red soil–which host vastly different plant communities. Our research takes place on the black cotton soil, where the plant community is dominated by one tree species, the whistling thorn tree (Acacia drepanolobum). Acacias in general are known for having thorny stems and hosting mutualistic ant colonies. The whistling thorn trees have many long, straight spines on the branches, some of which have a swollen, hollow base, which ants can live inside. They also secrete nectar from the base of their leaves that ants can eat. In exchange, the ants may defend the tree against herbivores ranging from other insects to elephants.

The whistling thorn gets its name from the sound the wind makes when it blows through the holes in the hollow thorns. Other trees grown on the black cotton soil, including other acacia species, but the whistling thorn trees dominate. Underneath them grows a variety of grasses.

Many different animals use the black cotton, including wildlife (elephants, giraffe, antelope, buffalo, cheetah, lions), domestic herbivores (cattle, goats, sheep, camel), reptiles, birds, rodents, and insects. Each species affects the plant community in different ways. Grazers eat the grasses, often singling out their preferred species. Browsers pull leaves from the trees. Wood-boring beetles carve tunnels through the tree stems. Elephants will even rip up or knock over full-sized trees, possibly just because just because they find it fun.

These photos were all taken during the dry season, when the grass is brown and the trees drop most of their leaves. In a month or two it will all be vibrantly green again.