Tarangire Pictures

I have just finished my Wildlife Management final exam and have a bit of time before continuing with my studying for my Enviro Policy exam tomorrow, so I thought I'd take this opportunity to finally update my blog. It's been pretty busy recently. The last time I updated I had just come back from our five day overnight Tarangire expedition where we camped about 15 minutes way from Tarangire National Park. Tarangire itself is about an hour and a half away from our camp at Moyo Hill and it is an important part of the Tarangire-Manyara Ecosystem that SFS studies in. It is much larger than Lake Manyara National Park, but the habitat is not quite as varied as LMNP. Many animals migrate between the two parks, and also beyond, to Lake Natron and Serengeti. The area between the two parks is an important wildlife corridor, but it is also important grazing land for the Maasai, so human-wildlife conflict is an extensive issue.

Expedition was amazing, despite the hot temperatures and burrs that took over EVERYTHING in our camp. Still, I'd rather deal with the burrs than the safari ants (more about those coming up in my Serengeti post).

I have a lot of things that I could talk about, so I'm just going to post pictures of the highlights!

The beautiful scenery of Tarangire National Park.

There are so many elephants in Tarangire!! On the second day of expedition we were given an academic assignment to watch at least five elephant groups and record how many males, females, and young there were. We also recorded major activities, body condition, and stress level, which was determined secretions from the temporal glands. Most elephants in Tarangire had good body conditions, but most had temporal gland secretions, indicating that there was some kind of stress for them. This might have been the late rains for the rainy season. It was supposed to start raining in mid-February, but it hadn't even started raining yet at the beginning of March. It finally started raining consistently (at least here at Moyo Hill) about a week and a half ago.

There were so many baby elephants. They were so adorable and had no clue what to do with their trunks!

One of the coolest things we saw was a group of elephants mourning over a relative's bones. It is well-known that elephants grieve the loss of group and family members (group members usually are family members), but actually seeing it happened was chilling. They would pick up the bones with their trunks and caress the skulls (shown here). Even the littlest elephants joined in.

At the end of the first day we saw our first big cat!!! A cheetah!

We also saw African Wild Dogs, which is a species that is locally extinct in most areas. This group must have just moved into Tarangire, because before they were thought to be gone from the area. It was the first time SFS students had seen wild dogs in Tanzania! Wild dogs have a bad reputation with local people because they don't directly kill the animal after they catch it (most carnivores will bite the jugular or crush the base of the skull) but instead, wild dogs disembowel the animal while it's still alive. They are also very susceptible to diseases like rabies and canine distemper. In some areas, though, wild dogs are making a comeback. I think there are now about 200 in Serengeti and then this group in Tarangire. We don't know how many there are yet, but one of the Directed Research Projects here is doing preliminary data collection on the population in Tarangire.