hcroze's blog

Pangani Giant Land Snail

The Easter weekend rain chased away the elephants from central Amboseli National Park, but it brought out many other interesting creatures, like the Pangani Giant Land Snail (Achatina megapodus) pictured here. It was about 5:00 PM on Good Friday, and the rain was pelting down. I went out with an umbrella to check on the solar battery bank and surprised this fine specimen who appeared to have been radulating for calcium on some of the elephant lower jaw collection. The Panganis usually only occur south of Kili, but climate change and the heavy rains must be causing a range shift. This is the first one I've seen in Amboseli in nearly 40 years, although Cynthia and Iain Douglas-Hamiliton used to have a pet female in Lake Manyara. They become quite tame, but can play havoc with a small kitchen garden.

There is dancing in the streets, literally, in Kisumu and Mombasa. On Thursday, 28 February 2008, President Mwai Kibaki and Hon. (now Prime Minister) Raila Odinga were bearded for more than five hours in Harambee House by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, former Tanzanian president Benjamin Mkapa and current Tanzanian president Jakaya Kikwete. As a result, they agreed to a power-sharing agreement that was signed that afternoon under the scrutiny of millions of jubilant Kenyans and the world.

One of the great joys of living in this beautiful country is the relative freedom of the skies for aviators (and birds, of course). Join me in a flip over Amboseli.

Click here for some recent news! Have a look at Ushahidi, a Kenyan people-driven website with news and blogs on the situation. On first read, it seems quite balanced and factual. ('Ushahidi', by the way, is Swahili for 'testimony' or 'evidence'.) The site points to other blogs and commentaries from Kenyans and others inside and outside the country. For example, it announces a fund raiser called One Kenya, One Voice that's being held in Boston on 2 February. (And 'vuma' means 'rumble', 'roar', or the sound a distant drum makes.) Where there are voices like these, there is surely hope.

Echo glides past

Echo of the Elephants again... In this YouTube video we see Echo, matriarch of the EB family, shepherding half her family over one of the few green grass patches left near the end of this very poor rainfall year.

I was resisting the temptation to post more of Cynthia's and my 'home movie', thinking that folks might get a bit bored, but then I read Sara Cowgill's recent comment, "For me, elephants don't have to be drinking water to be exciting, they don't have to be giving birth, or dying, or copulating, or fighting. I want to see them lumbering along, the sounds they make talking to each other and the breath, the foot pad making contact with the earth, the sounds of the skin rubbing, the tail swishing ...". OK, so here's more 'lumbering along' (more like gliding, in fact) ...

Peter Dennis asked in a recent comment, "how Ely is doing?" Good question. Those of you who have seen the first of the three-part BBC Echo of the Elephants TV series will remember Ely as Echo's fourth calf, the heroic little fellow born in 1990 who overcame a birth defect that crippled his front legs for nearly a week until after innumerable tries he forced himself to stand.

Development blocking corridors

Amboseli National Park is under siege. Burgeoning uncontrolled development in the form of lodges and hotels are springing up like mushrooms from elephant dung, cutting off wildlife corridors from the Park to the surrounding ecosystem.

The map shown here zooms in on the southeastern portion of the Park (boundary shown as blue-green dashed line) and the ecosystem. Some features:

Echo tests a strange smell

Just came back from a flying visit to Amboseli for some admin and logistic work. Went out with Cynthia yesterday morning to try her new little hand-held Panasonic DVD recorder on Echo and the EBs. You can see the video below. The family is looking plump and healthy, despite the prolonged drought (Amboseli has only had half the annual rainfall so far!): it pays to have a wise old matriarch to maximise your survival chances.

This whimsical elephant was painted by Daniel, age 19, a student at the Kenya Community Centre for Learning (KCCL). Daniel comments, "I drew the elephant first because it is my favourite animal. Then I painted the wall and the grass. I painted the elephant last."

Although I have certainly spent too much of my professional career writing or commissioning UN reports on the environment, there are some publications that might be of interest to the general reader or even the odd scientist. I've put a few under the ATE publication list. For the record, herewith below, the rest.

 
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