January 2013
63 posts
Students are flying home now
Students are all about to fly out of the Nairobi airport on the first stage of their journey home. It was a true pleasure to share these weeks in Kenya with them, and we are sure that they will have many great stories to share with all of you back home!
One word of caution to everyone, including students: many of them will never previously have experienced jet-lag involving this many time zones....
Clean sweep of the Mpala felids, canids, and...
This is the 9th Cornell field course to visit Mpala, but the first in which we have seen all of the cats, dogs, and hyenas that are found here:
Cats:
Lion, Leopard, Cheetah, Caracal, Serval, African Wild Cat
Dogs:
African Wild Dog, Black-backed Jackal, Bat-eared Fox
Hyenas:
Striped Hyena, Spotten Hyena, Aardwolf
Photos (some better than others) of the cats and dogs below…
Lions for everyone
We are in the midst of our last full day here at Mpala. Students are working on the write-ups for the final research projects, hoping to get done in time for us to go out and play in the field for the afternoon.
We had a spectacular event a dusk last night when one of the student teams ran across a small pride of lions while working on their bird survey final project. They put the word out via...
Trek to the north
After a morning of intense field work on Wednesday in order to collect data for final projects, we jumped into the Land Rovers to head to the northern reaches of Mpala. The class had not yet explored this section of the research ranch which features a number of different, drier ecosystems. Lions are still missing from the course list, so we spent a good bit of effort looking for big cats. We...
Kenya, January 15th
Everything and everybody is doing great here on the field course. Students have completed their second research projects and all of the paper discussions, so academics now focuses on their final projects, which are largely under their own control. We had a very unusual January day of light drizzle today, which more-or-less forced us to stay in from the field and get caught up on those academic...
message from the students (and new photos below)
[Some of the students wrote the following post by passing around one computer this afternoon. So, in their own words…]
Jambo! We hope you’ve been enjoying the frosty winter temperatures back home. A few of us have been up since about 5:00 this morning following some of the big game and watching the sunrise, so we decided to send you all a message. While we’re sure you’ve been following us...
Kenya, January 12th
Everything is going well here. We’ve been spending most of our time out in the field doing various fun activities, but at the moment the students are working on draft 3 of their first project write-up, and about to transition to working on the initial draft and statistical analysis for their second research project. They brainstormed that second project together, and then collected the data...
Kenya, January 11th
Just uploaded a handful of photos that various students passed along to me.
Even the students who are not visible in these photos are still alive and well…
They were more interested in me posting pictures of wildlife. The ones that look like they were taken at night are from our excursions after dark with a bright spotlight.
