I don't have much of a soft spot in my heart for introduced species. Particularly in Australia, they're destructive and have been a factor in more than a few extinctions. Nonetheless, I have to admit that sometimes they are damn pretty. We've only come across Brumbies, as Australians call their introduced horses, twice during fieldwork. That's not nearly as often as we come across other introduced species such as foxes, cats and dingoes. When we do see some, I just have to stop and stare. Boy are they beautiful!
Photos from the day I applied to ANU
After I finished undergrad, I went backpacking with a friend in South America. Before I left I had spoken with Prof Scott Keogh at the ANU about doing a PhD, and the difficulty in getting international scholarships. I was planning on starting the application process after our trip.
While we were backpacking, I got news from Prof. Keogh that the ANU was offering a special, unexpected round of international scholarships. The application deadline was one week after the announcement, so I had to get a PhD application together and submitted quickly. When we arrived in Santa Fe, Venezuela, my time was running out. International scholarships are hard to get, and having such a short window to submit an application meant that the competition would be greatly reduced, so obviously I had to try my best to get mine in.
Mochima National Park, Venezuela.
My friend and I were supposed to go dolphin-watching and island-beach-bumming in Santa Fe. She ended up going by herself, and took my camera. These pictures are all hers, taken while watching the dolphins frolic and relaxing on the beach. Meanwhile, I was trying desperately to get some kind of respectable application together.
I was frantic. Santa Fe is a small place, with only one Internet cafe. The computers I was on were running Windows 98. They didn't have any version of Microsoft Office on them, instead they had some open source, Spanish word processing program I'd never heard of. I don't even think there was the option to save anything as .doc. I just saved everything as whatever and hoped for the best.
Mochima National Park, Venezuela
I was e-mailing my parents, getting them to send me transcripts and CVs. Meanwhile, I was trolling through my Sent Mail box to see what bits and pieces I could scrape together from attachments I had previously sent. I was running (and paying for) three computers at once: one for downloading documents from my e-mail to a USB key, one for typing, and one for uploading. The kids who usually used those computers for gaming were not impressed.
Mochima National Park, Venezuela.
Life on the Caribbean is not set-up for the frantic. The Internet cafe closed for a three hour siesta from 11-2, and the tired old lady who ran the place wasn't about to give that up.
I did end up getting an application together on time, with a lot of assistance, support and sympathy from Prof. Keogh and my parents. But I also learned that sometimes you just can't live in the moment, no matter what TV and that hippy from Iowa who makes figurines out of wire to sell to tourists on the beach in Colombia try to teach you.
Mochima National Park, Venezuela.
Photographing Uluru
Uluru is one of Australia's most famous landmarks, and as a consequence it is also one of Australia's most photographed landmarks. I see pictures of Uluru all the time on postcards, calendars, and chatchkas-for-tourists no matter where in Australia I happen to be. I didn't think it was possible to take a new, unique or interesting picture of Uluru. Then I saw Angus's pictures of the place. I thought I'd put a small selection of them up, because they're just so good, and so different.
*Click to enlarge the photos in a lightbox.*
Angus also took some pretty amazing photos of Kata-Tjuta, Uluru's under-appreciated step-sister. Although I didn't get to participate in most of these adventures, I did get to do the short Walpa Gorge Walk when I went to pick up Mitch and Gus after getting our tyre fixed.
I may have to print some of these out and frame them.
Angus's picture is in the new reptile guide!
One of the pictures Angus Kennedy took while he was volunteering for me in the field in 2011 was published in the latest edition of A Complete Guide to Reptiles of Australia by Steve Wilson and Gerry Swan. This book is the bible for reptile identification in Australia and this is Angus's first published photograph, so it's a big deal for him. The fourth edition, which includes his picture, just came out this week.
Angus's photo is the second one down on the left, of Ctenophorus tjantjalka.
Here's the original picture:
Ochre Dragon (Ctenophorus tjantjalka). Anna Creek Station, South Australia, 2011. Photo by Angus Kennedy.
They also changed the species description from "mature male is dark brown to grey" in the third edition to "mature male is blue-grey" in the fourth. Coooool!
In which I am accused of witchcraft, which is Serious Business
There are no photos associated with this story, for reasons that will become apparent. Therefore, I've paired the story with pictures of giraffes.
In 2008 I was doing herpetofauna surveys in rural Congo. An important part of doing herp surveys is wandering around at night with a torch looking for critters that only come out after dark. The first day we got to our field site, despite having confirmed our arrival the day prior, we found our local guide completely drunk. He was clearly in no condition to guide us anywhere.
Portrait of giraffe. Nairobi National Park, Kenya, 2013.
The trip leader, a Congolese herpetologist, resigned not to do any surveying that night. I, young and enthusiastic, had other ideas. We had been to this village several times before. If we stayed within the village itself, and didn't wander into the surrounding countryside, what did we need a guide for? Time in the field is precious, and I didn't want to waste a second. I convinced the Congolese Master's student with us to wander with me, just around the village.
The result of this was two young guys wandering slowly through a rural village, shining flashlights into every nook and cranny along the outsides of mud huts looking for snakes, geckos, and other things that go slither in the night. Imagine how alien flashlights look in a place with no electricity. Nonetheless, all of this would have been fine if we had been with our local guide. Without him, I quickly learned just how creative the answer to the question "what could possibly go wrong?" can be.
Giraffe feeding. Nairobi National Park, Kenya, 2013.
An older man, also very drunk, came stumbling towards us, yelling and waving his hands. He quickly started arguing in a local language with the Congolese student. This happens sometimes, and it's usually quickly resolved. This time it was different. The man was adamant. The Congolese student explained to me that this man was accusing me of witchcraft. Particularly, of sneaking around trying to steal people's possessions and hair to use for my own nefarious purposes. I'm pretty sure a response of "we're just looking for lizards, snakes and frogs" would only have reinforced his suspicions. Clearly only witches have uses for snakes, lizards and frogs.
Witches are Serious Business in Central Africa. It's from this area that the religion of Voodoo originates and is still widely practiced (though now it's usually combined with Christianity). The drunk man ended up taking me and the poor Congolese student to the village chief, who reassured the man of our humanness. We were supremely embarrassed and most definitely done surveying for the night.
Giraffe mocking the Sydney skyline. Sydney, New South Wales, 2012.
It's not difficult to offend local sensibilities when the culture and religion are completely foreign, and language barriers make it difficult to pick things up from the people around you. However, on that same trip, our Congolese trip leader managed to get himself accused of witchcraft as well. At the end of the trip, while we were waiting for the bus back to the city, our trip leader was showing me pictures he had taken during our trip on his digital camera. Unfortunately, he wasn't paying attention to where he was pointing the camera and someone thought he was recording her.
Voodoo has not adapted well to modern technology. One of the ways this has manifested is in the way some people treat photographs. They believe that by taking a picture of them, you are stealing their soul, or that you could use their picture to manipulate them like you would use a Voodoo doll. This is a good example of why it's important to always ask someone if you can take their picture before doing so, especially when travelling. You could be stealing their soul.
Giraffe with oxpeckers. Serengeti National Park, Tanzania, 2008.
Our trip leader ended up in a shouting match with about a half-dozen people standing in a semi-circle in front of him. They were yelling so close to each other's faces I was worried it would devolve into an actual fistfight. It was after dark and there was no electrical lighting in the area, so the whole scene was illuminated from below by the eery green glow of the camera screen. Combine this with the thunderstorm that was raging around us and the occasional bolt of lighting that would over-illuminate everything for a split second, and it was a rather unpleasant and spooky situation. One that might make you believe in witches. Thankfully a pickup truck finally arrived to take us back to the city, and we got out of there before anything serious happened.
As far as I know those two situations had nothing to do with each other. On subsequent visits we had no problems, though we were careful to have our local guide with us at all times.
Giraffe with calf. Maasai Mara Game Reserve, Kenya, 2008.