EXPEDITION!

Below are the long overdue snippets of our five day expedition to Serengeti National Park. I hope you enjoy!

The Serengeti…
Serengeti comes from a Maasai word meaning endless plains. When I heard that I though it was nice, but when I saw it my jaw dropped. These so called “endless plains” are an ocean of grass. Sometimes we would drive along a road in our land cruisers and 3 of 4 sides would be completely flat grassland until the horizon and on the 4th side there would be some small hills in the distant blue background. I have never experienced the feeling of smallness you get from being in the ocean, when I wasn’t in the ocean, but standing up in the land cruisers seeing stretches of grass up on grass blowing in the wind made me feel smaller than I ever have before.
Serengeti National Park is located on the northern boarder of Tanzania. It is especially famous for over 1.5 million wildebeest that migrate back and forth between Serengeti in Tanzania and the Maasai-Mara in Kenya. The wildebeest are just now beginning to make there way back down from Maasai-Mara, so we did not see many in the Serengeti, but we saw so many other amazing animals I wasn’t really thinking about what we weren’t seeing.

Favorite Moments from Serengeti
A New Cat
Driving back to our camp on the last afternoon and we saw something moving through the grass. It was too small to be a lion or even a cheetah or leopard, but it looked a lot like a cat. Finally we got a clear look at it, and it was a Serval. They look a lot like house cats but about three times the size. They have long legs and striking patterns and enormous ears. They hunt by hearing their prey until they are close enough to pounce on it. Their long legs help them get above the grass height so that they can hear rustles made by prey. It was an incredible creature and a very shy one at that so we were especially lucky to spot it.

And It Rained
On our second day we came back to camp from our morning drive and lecture to eat lunch and rest. After lunch it looked like it was going to rain so I climbed into my tent to have a nap and pass the storm. I woke up when a tent mate said “Sara, is this all water under our tent?” she had here hand on the bottom of our tent and that looked like a water mattress. I put my rain gear on and went out in the a down pour like I have never seen. I didn’t know there was that much water in East Africa or that it was possible for it to all come out of the sky at the same time! It was such an unbelievable thing to see it rain after a month and a half without it that we just laughed and watched as a small creek formed and flowed directly under two of the tents. I have more respect for African Safari tents than just about any inanimate object in this world. Our tents were a bit damp and the bottoms of our sleeping pads were wet, but for the most part and especially considering the amount of water that had come out of the sky, our stuff was shockingly dry!

Ancient Footprints
Oldupai Gorge, the cradle of humankind. It was pretty amazing to really be there. They have this funny little falling apart museum that is full of replicates of all of the incredible artifacts they have pulled out of the gorge. They made a large emphasis on the fact that it was named after a plant in the Maasai language spelled Oldupai, but the first scientific papers that were written said Olduvai, so most people know it spelled with a “v” but they were trying to correct that misconception. So I am passing that info on to you and furthering their attempt at correcting history. The display and replicate (plaster mold) they had of the set of the Laetoli Footprints were truly amazing. The information plaque talked about the importance of a print versus a fossilized bone. The bone gives you the structure and alignment, but the print tells you exactly how weight was distributed on the foot and the movement that created that particular print. I could hardly comprehend that a being, very similar to me, with feet that look just like mine, had moved in such a way, in such a place, in such a time, so that it happened to be preserved, captured in rock, for millions of years. The whole exhibit was amazing.

Cheese.
We bought the buffet for lunch at the Lodge in Serengeti and I have truly never enjoyed cheese as much as I did that afternoon. Things they don’t tell you when you are going to Tanzania 1. There is no readily available cheese 2. You will miss cheese tremendously 3. When you do finally eat cheese you will think you have gone to heaven. My friend Sally was sitting next to me at the table as we ate our cheese (we ate other things too but most importantly cheese) and she said with a smile on her face “Oh my god, I just died. I’m dead.” Pretty much sums our cheese experience.

Pride Rock
There are kopjes all over the Serengeti. A kopje is an outcropping of rocks in the middle of the plains (think Pride Rock, Lion King). They are really cool and bizarre looking structures in an otherwise completely flat area. We got to visit one of them and climb around on it (“but not too much because you might hurt yourself” tut tut tut… says our stand in Mom named Erica. Really, she’s awesome. I can only imagine the stress of being responsible for 27 20-ish-year-olds who had been cooped up in cars for two days and now they have giant rocks to climb around on). It was super fun and beautiful and there were pink/purple/blue lizards running around on all of the rocks.

Birds!
We did a few field exercises on ungulates and birds. I learned a ton! For those birders who are reading this and especially requested to know the birds we have been seeing here is a partial list!
Abyssinian Black Wheatear, African White-backed Vulture, Bare-faced Go-away Bird (really big and totally cool bird!), Black-backed Weaver, Common Bulbul, Dark-backed Weaver, Drongo, Grey-backed Fiscal, Helmeted Guinea Fowl (tons of them everywhere!), Von der Dekens Hornbill, Lilac-breasted Roller (such beautiful birds. They are purple, and blue, and turquoise, and pink), Little Bee Eater (also super cool green and yellow bird!), Magpie Shrike, Martial Eagle, Red-headed Weaver, Ring-necked Dove, Sandgrouse, Scaly Francolins, Superb Starling, Blue-earred Starling, Brown Parrot, Brown Snake Eagle (super intense birds, wouldn’t want to be small and fuzzy), Egyptian Goose, Fischer’s Lovebirds (I thought these only existed in book and maybe pet shops), Hildebrandt Starling, Hoopoe (very large rust colored bird with an extravagant crest), Marsh Sandpiper, Three-banded Plover, Black Crake, Blacksmith Plover (the previous four are really interesting water birds. We got to watch them looking for food for a bit which was quite entertaining),White-browed Coucal (craziest call I have heard so farthe description in my bird book which is ver accurate is “hoo-hoo-hoo-huhuhhuhuhuhuhuhuhu… and a series of gurgling notes likened to water being poured from a bottle”), Yellow-billed Oxpecker (they really do hang out on the buffalo)…! Ok, I hope that was incredibly satisfying for some and sorry for other’s who were 100% not interested.



We also saw an incredible amount of lions, male, female, and little ones, leopard, cheetahs, elephants, giraffes, zebras, topi (they are really interestingly colored), gazelles, impala, hippos (saw two out of water! They are the most enormous creatures! Where did they come from and who thought it was a good idea for all of the hippos to hang out together cuz they are the grumpiest animals I have yet to come across!), crocodiles (ah scary!), warthogs, hyraxes (related to elephants even though they look like rabbits), banded mongoose (mongeese?), Buffalo (saw a herd of them that must have been a few hundred strong. Wouldn’t wanted to have been on foot I can say that much), hyenas, and jackals.

In a nutshell it was astounding!