Elephants on the Back Porch!

My allergies have finally cleared up. My annoying nightly routine of coughing and wheezing has cleared up as well. Can’t say about the allergies—who knows what plants they got over here that might have triggered a reaction. But what got rid of the nightly routine was switching the time of day I take my malaria pill. Of all things!

At least it worked. Asthma is no fun. The coughing makes you breathe harder and the hard breathing makes you cough. I was having to use Ryan’s little emergency inhaler regularly each night. Once after dinner and once before bed.

Fun fact: The back porch of our cabin is maybe twenty yards away from the main fence that separates the science compound from the fo’reals African wilderness of the park. It is not a very impressive fence either, more of a flimsy, woven-wire net, draped over regularly spaced poles. It marks the boundary line, and that's about it.

So, three, maybe four nights ago, Ryan came inside and said he could hear elephants on the other side of this fence.

Now it’s one thing for me to describe what two young bull elephants sound like, but it’s another thing entirely to stand there in the low evening light, and hear those sounds and see the trees swaying and know that there are wild elephants feeding just beyond the trees.

It sounds like the sharp pop of a gunshot when they break the trees. They break trees! And when they chew, it’s like listening to someone push a huge pile of leaves around with a rake. They can sound absolutely massive! They can also, surprisingly, sound like nothing at all. A few people have told us that they’ll be walking through the bush, circle around a termite mound and suddenly be face to face with a herd of elephants that they had no idea was there.

For me it was kind of the opposite. The elephants had no idea I was there on the other side of the fence and they nearly came face to face with me! I was twenty-ish yards away from two young bull elephants (that’s stupid-close in layman terms) and I could have tossed a rock and hit them. Ryan was inside watching Caden—he’d seen elephants in the park many times already and wanted to let me have a look at these guys—and the only reason I let those bulls get that close to me was basically because I didn’t know what to do. My brain went into what I will call “zoo mentality.” I saw the fence. I knew they saw the fence and in that moment I just accepted the idea that the fence was “official” enough to keep us on our respective sides.

Am I a newb or what? Pardon me while I laugh at myself.

Those elephants… I’m at a loss, actually. The adjectives I use will “make sense,” but I wish I could share the emotional impact I felt while experiencing them. These creatures were massive in a way that I could almost feel. They were calmly timid, gorgeously wrinkled, and childlike in the way they swayed and snorkeled along.

I did not get a picture for several reasons. 1) I didn’t have the camera with me, 2) I can’t really get great pictures AND concentrate on my surroundings too, 3) It might have freaked out the elephants, and 4) I probably wouldn’t have taken pictures even if I had my camera with me because all I was thinking was “elephantelephantelephant!”

I was here and the elephants were right over there!

It made Ryan a bit nervous when he came out to check on me and found me within trampling distance. He asked me to step back a bit and when I did, the elephants finally noticed me and ran in the opposite direction.

Whew. That was an amazing experience that I will never forget.

“elephantelephantelephant!”

Friday, July 04, 2014

Happy 4^th of July, everyone! Boy, time really does kind of stop when you’re out here. I had no idea what day it was until our neighbors invited us to a barbeque they’re putting together tonight to celebrate the 4^th. We had hamburgers, fire-baked potatoes, apple pie, and something called banoffee pie (which I highly recommend if you want to die happy in the very near future.)

That’s about all the news we’ve got for this week, but that’s not the end of this post. I finally got our Youtube channel up to date, so you get all our Africa Videos (thus far) all at once. Woo!

Merry Christmas.

Caden playing in a warthog's old burrow.

Our budding entomologist. 

Our established scientist livin' the dream.

Lions! Rui, Gorongosa's park veterinarian, shot that lion with Ryan's dart gun. Also: Lions!

Extra Lion videos.These extras are just for you guys because we love you!

The elusive nyalas. Seriously. They're elusive if you're trying to dart them.

Caden demonstrates his ability to care for a pet by making sure his lion toy gets a proper naptime.

A bucket of water is a bucket of fun!