fieldwork: chaos, gadgets and random insights

One of the beautiful things of doing research in Hluhluwe (besides the obvious; foreign country, chance of spotting leopards, no responsibilities besides the work) is that its fabulous to see biology happening.
For example, there are a number of beautiful birds here with incredibly long trails, they’re called wyads. Their long tails serve, just like in peacocks, to show off for females. They are literally  billboards screaming out to the females: ‘pick me, I’m the best male around!’. The longer the tail, the more fit, healthy, strong and attractive the male is, therefore the most likely to be picked by females. If only because if for some stupid reason long tails are deemed attractive, a female that mates with a long-tailed male will get sons that have long tails, therefore are deemed attractive, and will then get many young. And many young (kids, grandkids) is the ultimate goal. So theres this pressure for long tails, males with long tails do better and get more young, so the (bird)world is taken over by longer and longer tailed males.
But, you can imagine, there are also disadvantages to having a long tail. It’s heavy and cumbersome. You can imagine its loads easier for a predator to catch a bird thats lugging a long, heavy tail around.
So you have these two pressures, one driving for longer tails, and one for shorter ones. The cool thing is, when you see these birds flying around, you see botth things happen. I have seen the males doing a mating ritual, showing off for a female, and sure, those long tails fluttering in the air are impressive! But then, you see several individuals fly, and some of them are so ill-suited to flight! That tail is so long, they are terribly slow, beating their wings frantically and hardly moving forward cause of a dead weight at their ends. I reckon I could even catch one if I tried, so you can imagine they are actually just useless birds.
And thats so cool about here, you can see some individuals just having too long a tail. You can see them being caught by a raptor, but you can also see/imagine the females being impressed with them. Natural selection selects out the individuals with too long a tail through predators, and with too short a tail by the females being uninterested, so you are actually seeing evolution happening!

Another cool thing is that I can see my perception of this place change. At first I would drive around and look next to the road and see a savannah landscape; a beautiful sea of grass. The cool thing is, we then spend a day walking around in there, looking at species and taking measurements, and then when you drive out again, you no longer see a sea of grass, you see all these beautiful different flowers, you see different species and recognize structures. You see nutrient-rich patches and hills and the different grasses that grow there. You see order in chaos. Its the same feel as when you watch a sportsmatch, where at first all you see is a lot of people picking up a ball, throwing it around and crashing into eachother, and after a while you see a separation in positions in the field, you see lines and movements and organization. Or it’s like when at first you walk in on a party, first you just see loads of people, but once you have spoken to a few you start to recognize groups and activities, the guys sitting in a corner looking lost, the girls that are bitching and gossiping about others, the people dancing and the (figurative) party clowns and the guys looking out to pick up an easy lay. What seems a totally random turns out to have an enormous underlying organization. A boring and random field of green is in the end unbelievably complex.

Then, even if you are not so into biology, it’s a cool field because of the gadgets. The professor supervising this project and our semi-local supervisor have just come down to help us finish up the project. Our prof loves gadgets, and his newest toy is a field computer. It’s pretty amazing, small, handheld, waterproof, durable, long battery life, built-in GPS etc. It is perfect to connect the data you have on a place (for example rainfall maps) to what you see around you in the field. I’m sure it costed thousands of euros, but it is really fancy and useful. Then another things he has got is a fancy hightech temperature measurer, that uses infrared and can measure the temperature of anything instantly. So we had fun running around measuring temperatures of our drinks, our stove, our hands, all sorts of bugs and everything.
But then, in between this fancy equipment, we needed something to measure in a standard way how much you can dent the soil. So we went roaming around the research compound, randomly picking up poles, pipes, bricks and tree branches, in the end randomly trying to jam one bit into another until it finally stuck, putting a number of these together with ducttape and sawing bits until we had a cool new instrument. It looks exactly like what it is, a number of things that were lying around that have been crudely thrown together, but it measures how many centimeters the soil dents if you drop something heavy, so its perfect.
And that is one more thing thats so cool about fieldwork here; the going back and forth between the most expensive high-tech tools to whatever you can furbish from basic backyard material. It is nice to have cool stuff, but you especially need to be flexible enough to think up creative solutions. After all, this is africa.