Whales and Chicks and Elephants!

Hi, It’s Michaelle again.

So it is whale breeding and calving season here at the Eastern Cape. Southern Right Whales can be seen distantly in the water spraying and flashing a flipper or fluke. Unfortunately, we got to see one up close and personal as a dead whale was beached on the rocks just under the lighthouse. We were volunteering at the penguin rehab center the morning after a huge storm, and then got the word there was whale on the beach. So after our work was done we went down and had a look. It was rolled over on it’s back, bloated, and with seagulls picking at it. It was such a sad sight. I stood out on the rocks and sang it a dirge into the wind before saying a few parting words to it’s spirit. Then over the next few days all the people came. It was actually a bit sickening to witness. After I paid my respects, I didn’t want to go down and see the whale anymore. It was just too gruesome as everyone hovered around on the beach gawking at the whale, some jerks climbed on top of it to have their pictures taken. Everyone took it as a social gathering as it took people 2 days to remove the whale from the rocks, by transporting it on a semi flat bed. The smell still lingers.

So after that, all I wanted to witness were live whales, which I am happy to say I am getting to see. I have spent a lot time on the rocks gazing at them courting and cavorting out in the ocean. I can’t get a decent picture of them as they are too far out for my little camera, so I can’t share the sights with you, but they fill me with wonder as I spend hours watching them.

So Claire told you about what happened out on the breeding islands off the coast and that we have 7 new chicks to help. Well two of them, who also happen to be the biggest, we named after our dear friends Lia and Eve. They are both adorable and have so much attitude. They keep each other company and you see them often snuggling up for warmth with each other. Lia has a great appetite and Eve is starting to loose some of her fluff and getting her juvenile feathers. Within a month, she will be a “blue” and completely waterproof so that she can start swimming. It is pretty exciting to watch. So lia you know have a penguin chick named after you, that is best I can do short of smuggling one home for you. ;P In the picture it's Lia on the left and Eve on the right.

Last Saturday our new friends Carla and her husband Gareth took us out to Addo Elephant National Park and it was fantastic! We got up very early in the morning to drive an hour and half to get there when the gates opened in the morning. This park is huge and covered by bush found naturally in this region. Since it is governmentpark, only species that are/were naturally found in this area are in the park. Even though the bush is so thick you can barely see more than 20 feet into it, we saw so many animals! And best yet, we got to see so many babies! There were little baby warthogs, kudu, water buffalo, and our personal favorite, elephants. Man where the baby elephants adorable. They are so ungainly when they ran it was funny. It was awesome to have Gareth as or own personal guide. He has his degree in wildlife conservation and as such was a walking talking encyclopedia! And man are his eyes sharp. He was driving the car and all of us looking out and around and suddenly he would stop and point out a red hartebeest in the bush that we all missed, or the colony of meerkats that were foraging for food, or the yellow mongeese there were happily prowling around amongst them. He pointed out so many different kinds of birds and told us all about the bush and what animal eats what level of the bush and how you can tell the health of the ecosystem here as to how the bush looks. All in all we saw almost everything but the big cats that lived there (lions, leopards, and caracals) and the black rhino’s. They were just not interesting in coming out of the bush enough for us to see them. But we did see, we saw in abundance, the above mentioned ones plus, 3 colonies of meercats, Burchells zebras, bushbucks, elands, flightless dungbeetles, ostriches, Blue cranes (the endangered national bird) and a black-backed jackal! We also got to witness some pretty cool events just sitting near a watering hole. A family of elephants came up to drink with their baby in tow, and then another family arrived. And you could hear the adults working something out with their rumblings and jostling each other around. I wish you guys could have heard it! Later a whole herd of water buffalo came to have a drink at this small watering spot and then a lone young bull elephant came and obviously was thirsty. He approached the water wearily circling the hole filled with buffalo, fanning out his ears, shaking his head, and swinging his trunk trying to bully them out of the water so he could come in and get his water. A dominant male buffalo came around and they faced each other off, but as much bravado as the young bull had, he was still too scared. So he pulled back and waited for the buffalo to leave so he could get a drink. Then a family (females) of elephants came with their little ones and the large females would brook no argument from the water buffalo. They just kept right on walking towards the water and had their fill, making the buffalo retreat. The young bull elephant then snuck around to where the other elephants were and nudged his way in, under the cautious eyes of the mothers, and finally got him some water. I loved it! Later that day we came upon another elephant grouping with two baby calves who were happily cavorting with one another. There was a small ruckus as one mother accidently knocked over the other one’s baby, who gave a high pitched cry. The mothers then got into, locking trunks and pushing at each other with lots of their deep rumbling. The offending mother gave a submissive pee and then like that it was settled and everyone continued to graze before crossing to the other side of the road right in front of our care. So cool! It must be been breeding season here as we saw many signs of it, from a male buffalo trying to mount a female, a female kudu who was trying to lick her back fur back down after she had obviously been mated with, and then catching two warthogs in the act. Nice to know there will be a lot more babies to see in the future. When we ended the day our cameras where full of pictures and our minds were full of happy memories. It was a great day!

Well that is all I have for now, Friday we are flying out to spend 5 days at Kruger National Park with two of our vet school friends, Eboni and Jasmine and one of our Professor’s Dr. Fare-Hoskens who is a native of South Africa. We are going to watch, and hopefully help, with their research project on the white rhino’s. So exciting!

blue canary in the outlet by the light switch who watches over you

The first few days after we got back from Cape Town there was terrible weather, heavy rains, crazy storms on the Eastern Cape (the picture to the right not meant to illustrate the bad weather). Because of this weather and because the penguins on Bird Island are breeding later in the season than usual, so the chicks are younger and weaker than they normally would be, over 600 chicks on Bird Island died because of the storms. That’s from just under 800 breeding pairs. Tragic… especially since the African penguin has just recently been moved from the “vulnerable” list to “endangered.” Through this mayhem, the lighthouse rehab received 7 chicks and 3 injured adult penguins. So Michaelle and I have been busying ourselves with these cuties, as well as with a number of necropsies since we also received some cadavers of chicks from both Bird Island and St. Croix Island. It’s a very sad situation and not looking good for these guys.


Michaelle and I with two of the penguin chicks

Thursday I went with Lynne to Port Elizabeth because she needed to have a mammogram done and wanted a friend to accompany her (and Gordon couldn’t go because one of them needed to be at work, running the bar). So I got to experience Livingston, the government-funded hospital where all the people go who cannot afford to go to the private hospitals. The idea of the government using tax money to provide affordable health care for the people is a great one. However, the hospital actually sees very little of the money that is designated for this purpose. It gets lost somewhere up at the top and falls into some private pockets. As a result, the people receive very poor health care. Livingston is a pretty horrendous place. It very much resembles a prison. But I’m glad that I got to experience it. I think the main thing that blew my mind was that even though 90% of the patients are dying from complications due to AIDS, there is no separation of the immune-compromised people from others who carry diseases that aren’t necessarily life-threatening to someone with a fully functioning immune system, but can be deadly to an AIDS patient. Apparently the number one disease that patients with AIDS die from at the hospital is tuberculosis. The second is pneumonia. The sanitary conditions at Livingston are pretty terrible as well. Lynne advised me to avoid the bathrooms there as they are rarely cleaned properly and they do not have toilet paper. Last year she was in the hospital with a brain aneurysm and was without a bed and without food for three days. I remember from a conversation I had with Trudi a while back that South African doctors receive some of the best training in the world but they all go off to practice medicine in other countries because they do not have the resources here to practice proper medicine. So most of the doctors that come to practice here are from other African countries that maybe do not receive as good training. Anyway, such was my very limited experience with the South African healthcare system.

In other news, Michaelle and I spent all day Saturday at Addo wildlife reserve which is a little east of P.E. One of the volunteers at the lighthouse, Carla, and her boyfriend, Gareth, very kindly drove us there and gave us a great tour of the reserve. I will let Michaelle tell about that experience in more detail, but I will share a few of the many many pictures that I took.

Above (left to right): Kudu! Meerkat!! Some of the many elephants we saw... and my new favorite baby animal are elephant babies!

across the lines

So there’s a topic I’ve been wanting to write about for a while now and an encounter the other night has inspired me to finally get to it. Racism. I realize that apartheid only ended very recently with Nelson Mandela in 1994, so it’s only really been about 15 years since racism has been “outlawed” in this country. But it still boggles my mind how openly racist so many people are.

Okay, so in all honestly most of the white South Africans that I’VE dealt with are not racist. Trudi, the operations manager at the Cape St. Francis rehab, is an activist for many political and social issues and she actively fights against racism. Also, all of the volunteers and people involved with the Eastern Cape penguin rehab as well as the people over at Sanccob aren’t racist (or if they are they don’t say anything), but I feel like people who care about animals and the community (in the sense that they donate their time to help out at the rehab) are more likely to be progressive and more open-minded. That’s definitely a generalization, but with my experience working with animals this theory has proven true.

However, even though a lot of white people are trying to shun their racist upbringing, the black community is far from recovered from the past. This became very evident soon after we started working at the Eastern Cape rehab and received a very cold welcome from Viwe, Xolani’s wife. Xolani is the curator at the rehab and Viwe works there as well, helping out with the penguins and helping to run the gift shop. She has yet to really say a word to either Michaelle or I (okay, actually this morning she answered my bright “Good morning, Viwe!” with a nod and a mumble that resembled something suspiciously like “good morning” but that was definitely a first). And one morning (before we left for Cape Town) she pitched the biggest fit and went off on Trudi because she felt like Trudi was letting us help more with the penguins than her and that wasn’t fair because we didn’t have to go through all the training that she had and that wasn’t fair because she didn’t have the opportunity to go to school like us just because she was black. She is definitely still very bitter and very sensitive to having “privileged” white people around. I get it, of course, and regardless of the fact that I think she should give us a chance and not hate us off the bat just because we’re white, I do understand where she’s coming from. And it sucks. It sucks that this country has this history and it sucks that black people have not and continue to not get the same opportunities that white people do.

It sucks that there is are these two very rich towns (Cape St. Francis and St. Francis Bay) that are full of beautiful, expensive vacation homes and rich old white people drive BMWs around while right in between these two towns there is a huge collection of tiny shacks built out of wooden planks and tarps pulled across the tops for roofs and bare-footed kids are running around starving. It shocks me every time we drive past and I can’t wrap my mind around the stark contrast of these two worlds that are so vastly different, yet right next to each other.

So I said that most people I’ve dealt with here are not racist. But the other night I was hanging out with Lynne and Gordon (the couple who run the bar downstairs), playing some cards, and in walks a very handsome white dude, obviously a surfer. So he sits down next to me and I’m showing him how to play the card game and we’re just chatting about stuff. He said he’s from Cape Town so I was like “Hey, I just went there, I love your city, it’s great…” and so on. He responds “Oh, it’s terrible. It’s a kak city and it’s all corrupt. All these damn caffers are taking over and getting jobs that they don’t deserve.” Oh man, my eyes must have gotten as big as saucers as I stared at him incredulously. “What did you just say? You’re a racist!” “Yeah, I am. What of it?” Ugh. I went off on him. Then I tried to have a constructive discussion. Pointless. So then I just went off on him some more. And everyone else was like “Oh yeah, people are just like that, you just have to accept it.” Um. No. It’s not okay. I get that people are brought up that way, but that doesn’t make it okay. Don’t tell me to just accept it. He’s wrong. He needs to know that he’s wrong. Or at least not be proud of the fact that he’s racist. I mean, don’t admit to it!! Hang your head in shame!! And if you continue to just ignore it and think that “it’s just the way people are” nothing is going to change! I’m not going to just sit here quietly and let some dude talk about “useless caffers.” Ugh. I was so angry that night. I think it was the culmination of feelings from various small events that have happened throughout the past month that act as a reminder of this country’s past and how much it is still struggling with the residue of apartheid. And I know that the USA is still struggling with our past and that we are far from perfect and that racism still exists there too. I guess I’ve just never encountered such blatant racism in the past.

Anyway, I guess what I’m trying to say is that I love this country and it’s great. But man does it have a long way to go. Oh don’t even get me started about the current president, Zuma. The Clinton scandal pales in comparison to what this guy’s got going on. Yeesh. That’ll have to be a subject for another post…

time for solitude and time for sharing

So here we are- back in our little Cape St. Francis abode, after a pretty miserable 11 hour bus ride on a very miserable, rainy Monday (getting up at 4am in order to get to the Cape Town bus station on time). It was very sad leaving Cape Town- what a great city. As you can tell from Michaelle’s post- we did A LOT while we were there and didn’t even come close to doing everything we really wanted to. But overall I am very satisfied with our time there. I feel like I got to do everything that was essential for me to do and got to spend time with some really amazing people along the way, so I’m very pleased.

Michaelle didn't talk about her birthday which was June 8th, so I'll just summarize what we did. That morning Nola took Liz, Michaelle and I to the Two Oceans Aquarium to bleed all their penguins, including Ivan- the beautiful King penguin (who despite the name is actually female). Then Nola and Liz went back to Sanccob and left Michaelle and I to explore the aquarium before it opened, then ransack the crafts market nearby for gifts and souvenirs, then check out the local brewery on the Waterfront, then walk over to Long Street to explore it in the daylight. It was a nice, full day and we actually ended up staying downtown until late at night because our attempt to catch a bus home was thwarted when we realized we were stuck in rush hour traffic and wouldn't make it home in time to catch a cab back (since we were meeting people on Long Street for dinner). So we hung out and drank coffee, then met Monique, Steph, and a bunch of Sanccobers at Mama Africa for a great dinner and awesome live music.

Above: left- Ivan, the beautiful King penguin; middle- Nola getting a blood sample from Ivan while Liz is holding; right- at Mama Africa, the birthday girl with some of the band members.

The day that Michaelle went paragliding with Jenny and Judy, I went into Sanccob for a few hours that morning to get through some of the blood smears from the Namibian Islands that Nola wanted us to help her with and I found malaria on a few of the slides which was pretty exciting for me. Well, you know, not good for the penguins on that island, but exciting to find something different than a bunch of white blood cells and Babesia which can become pretty monotonous after looking at 90 slides. Then, as it was turning out to be an absolutely gorgeous, clear day- I left Sanccob around 10:30 and set off to climb Table Mountain. That was my main goal while I was in Cape Town, to climb the mountain at a challenging pace on a clear day. So that’s what I did. And it was definitely a challenge as the climb up is basically big boulder steps all the way, but I kept up my pace, stopping only to take a few pictures and refill my water bottle from the mountain streams. I made it up in about an hour and five minutes which I was pretty proud of, though I did piss off a few Australian guys in the process who were not very happy when I asked to pass them… um, not my fault you’re slow!! Anyway, I had a great time and the view from the top was amazing. I walked around the top for a bit, checking out the views from the various sides, then chose a particular rock to sit on that overlooked the best part of Cape Town and sat there, dangling my feet off the edge, listening to Andrew Bird and just taking in the fact that here I was, on this great rock formation, looking out on this great city and out onto the Atlantic Ocean… in AFRICA. It was just amazing. Then I took the cable car back down, caught a taxi back to the Aviva house and met everyone else before heading out to News Café to watch the opening concert for the World Cup.

Above- at the top of Table Mountain, view out onto the city.

Yeah, so there is this small event happening in South Africa this summer… you may or may not have heard of it… called the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Of course I’m being sarcastic, but really I’m sure no one has heard as much about it as the people currently in this county. It’s like World Cup 24/7. All that’s on the news- what team has arrived, where they are staying, what celebrities are coming to watch the Cup (how many times have I heard about John Travolta being here to support the Australian team? About 20 bazillion), constant analyses of players, teams, coaches, etc, and of course… what foreigners are saying about these freaking vuvuzelas. Okay, so personally I think they are kinda cool and it’s nice to have this one thing that South African fans bond over and can show their support for their team. But wow… those things are annoying. You hear them all the freaking time all day long and late into the night. Gets kinda old. Anyway, so yes, the World Cup is in full swing.

So we went out to celebrate the opening concert that was happening in Jo-burg Thursday night. We were gonna go into downtown Cape Town to the Fan Park to watch it on the big screen, but then we heard that it would take 3 hours just to get into downtown by taxi, so we abandoned that idea and settled for partying at News Café. My goal for the evening was to see Shakira and Freshlyground perform “This Time for Africa” (which, along with the “Wave Your Flag” song, has become the theme song for this South Africa trip). The rest of our group either peaced out to go home or moved on to the next bar before the end of the concert, but Cyril and I stayed to the very end and got to see the Shakira performance, so I got to dance to the song and that pretty much made my night. Then we caught up with the others to continue the celebration.

Me with Cyril- wearing the ridiculous French wig that was passed around between the Frenchies that night.

Friday morning we all had to be at Sanccob by 7am in order to finish work by 3pm so that we could have a braai and watch the first game of the Cup- South Africa vs. Mexico. So that’s where I watched the game while Michaelle, Judy, Jenny and Zach were at the Waterfront. Nola is vegan too so she made sure that we had veggie sausages at the braai which was pretty awesome. That day was also very productive because we bled the 66 gannets again in order to have samples to bring back to Athens to do PCR on. So now we have lots of guano and blood to fill up our luggage.

As Michaelle was saying, it’s kind of hard not to get into the spirit of the World Cup when you’re surrounded by so many hardcore soccer fans. The energy is really contagious. Example: Saturday night (after I chilled out for most of the day while Michaelle did Table Mountain and then Liz, Michaelle and I went to dinner with Nola) we headed for Long Street to catch the USA vs. England game. After only about an hour of being surrounded by various USA or England fans, I was all riled up about cheering for the US and going off on the Frenchies who were all about supporting England. It was great fun, though I have to admit that tied games are somewhat anti-climactic. Post-soccer, we headed to the Rhino Room to dance. And boy did we dance… until about 4am. Well, some of our party left earlier, but Michaelle, Fionnula, Zach and I were a little more hardcore. Anyway, last night out in Cape Town was a blast and it was sad to leave.

But we received a very warm welcome back from our Eastern Cape friends, so that felt good and we’ve enjoyed a great lazy first day back before getting back into our routine here. I’m looking forward to giving my poor, sore legs somewhat of a rest… all that climbing and dancing has left them pretty painful.