maasiland weather report and: carnivore research goes botanical
Category: General, Maasailand weather report | Date: Jun 02 2008 | By: Seamus
Blue skies, a few wisps of cloud. Crisp early morning breeze.
And, in the spirit of “going postal” I present to you, “going botanical”. This is something that happens to lion researchers who go out looking for collared lions on several consecutive days and find them obscured by thick thorn scrub,.
(Kasaiyo the collared lion is in the centre of this photo behind trees. Once again.)
Technorati : kilimanjaro, lions, maasailand
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5 Responses to “maasiland weather report and: carnivore research goes botanical”
sheryl, washington dc, on 02 Jun 2008
I’ll take your word for it ’cause I don’t see anything lion shaped in that photo.
s.
Mzungu Chick, on 03 Jun 2008
Beautiful morning
Jerry, on 03 Jun 2008
The “disappearance” of wild animals in photos is no surprise. First, there is the matter of cryptic colouration. Lions & dry savannah grass are more or less exactly the same shade of yellow/brown. Then an example from 40+ years ago. A researcher named John Goddard was flying aerial surveys over Kenya’s Tsavo National Park during his studies of rhino populations (in the days before radio collaring, when even rhino immobilization was in its infancy and when there we rhino in abundance all over Kenya). He published one important photo in the old hard-bound East African Wildlife Journal of 1967. His paper was titled: The validity of censusing rhino populations from the air (E.A.Wildl.J. 1967, (5) 18-23. The fascinating thing about the one photo, which takes up a full page (if memory serves me right), is that he challenges the reader to identify five rhino in the picture. Even a hard look only turned up three for me. Goddard then makes the point that the photo was taken at midday, when nothing throws a shadow. If it had been taken in the evening, shadows would be long and things would be easy to spot. I recently retired, and gave away all my old journals, so I don’t have this collectible piece to hand, so my memory maybe faulty on fine detail, but the point has always stuck with me.
Seamus, on 03 Jun 2008
Jerry,
This anecdote makes me smile. Nothing hits home more than a graphic illustration of futility…
On the subject of photographing animals from the air, I’ve posted one or two blurry pics of Kasaiyo’s group, that I took from the ‘plane. You’ll find them by clicking on the flickr icon. That work in 1967 was probably done using a very similar aircraft.
Wim, on 03 Jun 2008
Actually, I’m liking the trees more and more…
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