games for biologists

Our first few weeks have been packed with things that needed doing, keeping us at work most of the day. Luckily, there has been time for games every now and again in the field. Driving in the park is like playing a nintendo racing game (avoid the pothole, swerve past bits of elephant dung, watch out for suddenly crossing impala!), we have raced swallows (who knew they can easily keep in front of a vehicle driving 50 km/h?!) and played where’s waldo with the lawngrasses (it’s quite hard to find the ‘official’ short-growing-grasses between all the tall-growing-grasses-that-aren’t-tall).

For another example of games in the field, we played annemarie-koekoek the other day with a group of giraffes. We spotted them at the foot of a hill we were working on, and continued with our measurements after observing them for a while. The next time I looked up, they were a lot closer. They froze, while still curiously observing us as we had observed them. I returned to my measurements only to look up and find them staring at us, not moving a muscle, yet having approached even closer.  This game continued for a bit, until they were fairly close. At this point, two young giraffes couldn’t stand the tension and ran towards us (in that curious, clumsy way giraffes run), in the end veering off and disappearing behind the hill, the rest of the group quickly following.

We use a load of instruments (I am trying to make our metal rings, ziplock baggies and shovels sound interesting;) ) in the field, and a number of them are always getting lost. We will search the whole site for a ruler or pencils, only for Rienk to find them, sometimes days later, in one of the pockets of his field trousers (so useful, those trousers with a zillion pockets to lose equipment in..). So one day, bored in the field, we started playing “in the field, I carry in my pockets: a ruler, a ziplock baggy for samples, a pencil behind my ear (fastening a pencil to the clipboard is no use, in the end you will always find a missing pencil behind Rienk’s ear), eragrostis superba, a handheld global positioning system-device, a rhino and...” We continued this game for a bit and I realised that it’s a tight call who is worse at multitasking; Rienk or me. Also, I have found out that if my brain is forced to choose between remembering a useless list of items or remembering which plant species I’m collecting, my brain opts for the useless lists. Great for the productivity, you can imagine..

The third game we have been playing is one with elephants (to be fair, we had already been warned that the elephants in Hluhluwe were naughty. Never thought I’d hear a many tons-weighing herbivore described that way...). To explain the context; we are measuring the amount of moisture in the soil by burying water-saturated little chalk blocks attached to a wire in the soil, and coming back at different times to measure the moisture content at that time.  At one particular site, an elephant decided it did not like the look of those white wires, and pulled up our block, depositing it in a tree. Full of optimism, Rienk and I took it down from the tree and buried a new chalk block. When we returned a few days later, we found this one completely destroyed; munched upon and left in little pieces all over the place. Clearly, this elephant loves the game ‘annoy-the-researchers’. Slightly less optimistically, we have buried a new chalk block, but as for now, the score is 2-0 for the elephants.