Innovation on Earth

The Night Skies of Southern Africa

July is winter when you’re south of the Equator. The days are pretty short and the nights are cold!During what I considered to be my “summer vacation” trip, I wore my down jacket every night in Southern Africa. We were often waking up before the sunrise and setting up our tent as it was getting dark.

Each night, we would set up our tents, and then explore the campsite a bit while one of our guides, Norman, cooked for the group.

Sometimes we’d use this time to shower, help chop vegetables, or just relax after a long day. As an animal lover, I’d often be off checking out the local flora and fauna. 

One of my favorite things to spot were these beautiful nests, which were all over, and always seemed to be on the brink of falling off:

The sun would usually set sometime before food was ready.

Once dinner was prepared, we’d gather around a fire, eat, and chat about our day. Our other guide, Justice, would often give us a briefing for the next day to come.

After dark, there were even more bugs to spot, on nearby trees (like this cricket), or sometimes on the walls of the bathroom, like that big one we had also seen at Fish River Canyon (hand for scale):

After dinner, we were usually so tired we just went right to bed. But sometimes, we stayed up with our cameras, trying to capture the beauty of the night sky. The Milky Way is really bright when there aren’t street lights around! Can you believe there are this many stars?

In the morning, we’d have to take down our tents and head out for the next day’s adventures.

After more than a week of camping, skin dry and dirty from the cold, dusty wind, we arrived back in Cape Town to a posh hotel for our last night of the trip. Somehow, we got upgraded to a bigger room than we paid for, and got a view of the sunset over the ocean.

We hadn’t expected to do much sky gazing in Cape Town, where many less stars were on view due to the bright lights of the city. However, something unexpected happened. We met up for dinner with a woman I met 17 years earlier, on my first visit to Cape Town. Through the power of the internet, I had located her and asked if she’d like to meet up. She suggested a restaurant downtown, and we arrived without a reservation but got seated on the patio, overlooking the harbor. 

As we waited for our food, we kept seeing people with cameras, looking up at the sky. With the help of our smart phones (finally back in cell reception land), we learned that there was a lunar eclipse that night. And our seats on the patio gave us front row seats!

In addition to the full coverage of the moon, as the Earth’s shadow blocked it from the sun’s light, Mars was huge and red, at its brightest just to the side of the moon.  It was an incredible sight. I didn’t bring my camera with my zoom lens, so just watched for hours and took bad photos with my cell camera.

Luckily, this was the longest eclipse of the century. It started at 7:15 and reached totality at 9:30 PM. But then it stayed totally dark for 1 hour and 43 minutes. During that time, it was visible, but just a kind of deep red glow. We drove back to the hotel in time for me to grab my zoom lens and capture it as the eclipse started to recede again.

It was a truly magical evening, and I was glad to capture it, at least a little bit, with my camera. A fitting end to a trip full of beautiful skies!

Fish River Canyon, Spitzkoppe, and the Weird Rocks of Namibia

I’ve written about Namibia’s salt pans and desert dunes, so by now you must be picturing Namibia as a flat, dry expanse. The school year began, and I got busy and stopped writing about my summer adventures.

But if I stop here, your image of Namibia will be wrong. It IS quite a desolate country, with only two and half million people in the whole country, but it’s not as barren as you might think. We first glimpsed Namibia from our campsite in South Africa, gazing across the Orange River.

The next day, before heading to the official border crossing, we canoed along the border. The water fowl and jutting rocks were a beautiful distraction from the freezing puddles of water inside our awkward blow up canoe. Here’s my best shot of an African fish eagle, the North American bald eagle’s long lost cousin:

From here, we entered Namibia and drove straight to Fish River Canyon, one of the biggest canyons in Africa. We watched the sun set and took a million photos.

Here’s a video that tries to capture the experience of being there, not knowing where to focus my attention, because there were so many angles to seeing this place:

The next morning we went back to see the sun rise there.It was really peaceful (and cold)!

I made a balloon Namibian flag to celebrate our arrival! Lots of members of my group posed for photos with it:

Looking out at the amazing Fish River Canyon was beautiful, but it was only the beginning of the interesting rocks we were about to see. It seemed like everywhere we drove, there were mountains out the window. But not the kinds I’d seen before.

And then this scene, with bonus zebras. Wow.

I played around with the time lapse mode on my phone.

And then I was trying to listen to an audiobook but kept getting distracted by this odd landscape: 

Then our guide stopped the truck and we had some time to wander the “moon landscape” which is actually what they call it. Is this what you imagine the surface of the moon to be like?

A few days later, we visited Spitzkoppe, an area further north, famous for their rocks. So well known, in fact, that bushmen painted on these rocks thousands of years ago.

The rock paintings were pretty awesome to see. It’s estimated they were painted between 4,400 BCE and 100 AD.

It was an interesting area to walk around. I especially loved seeing how the trees interacted with the rocks, and all the birds building nests in between.

It was also really fun to climb the rocks!

From up high, we could see tons of little dassies, also called rock hyraxes. They’re adorable. They look like rodents, but it turns out that their closest living relative is the elephant.

They came down to check us out up close too, hoping to get some of our lunch. And they succeeded. 

As we were cleaning up from lunch, we spotted a few rock agama lizards. The breeding male is a shimmery purple color, and it was a pretty spectacular color! 

Action shot — notice the tongue.

I hope these photos give you a taste of how varied and interesting the landscape of Namibia really is. Yes, there are safari animals and a huge desert, but this country is so much more than that. 

Birds of Etosha National Park

Given how many amazing birds we saw in Etosha National Park, I felt like they deserved their own blog entry. They’re small, but there’s lots to see. 

I have to start with my favorite, the lilac breasted roller. It’s the national bird of Botswana, and I first saw it there back in 2011. It continues to be one of the most beautiful birds I’ve ever seen. How could I choose a favorite photo? I’ll include only four:

Also, you are probably familiar with the biggest bird of Etosha, right? The ostrich is a silly looking animal, but also quite interesting. The males are black and the females are grey, so this one is a male:Not sure what kind of dance is going on here:And one more shot in front of the salt pan:And a little video of how they run!

We saw a number of other really large birds at Etosha. This one is called a kori bustard. 

These are called secretary birds! They’re huge too!

Not quite as large, but with beautiful “hair” is the grey go-away-bird. Yes, that’s really what they’re called, because of their call. 

Some birds eat meat, and they look a little less friendly. According to our best identification efforts, we think this is an ovambo sparrowhawk:And a southern pale chanting goshawk:

And, of course, vultures eat dead meat and they’re pretty intimidating:You might be able to tell that the vulture on the right is way bigger — it’s a different kind called the lappet-faced vulture. Here are some white-backed vultures with a jackal and an even bigger, uglier bird called a maribou stork. 

Some of the most common birds were quite unusual to my eye, like this cape glossy starling:

Another super common bird was the helmeted guinea fowl. They’re the chicken of Southern Africa: 

One morning we woke up early to walk to a watering hole that was near the campsite. Unfortunately, there were no big animals drinking. Just hundreds of guinea fowl: 

Maybe you need to see the video to get a sense of how peaceful it was, the sounds of the guinea fowl and their quiet sounds.

That morning, we also spotted this red-billed hornbill, which made the early wake up worth it.

At a different watering hole, we saw this great egret. Most of the time, we weren’t able to get so close, because it is forbidden to get out of your vehicle, but at certain campsites, there are watering holes with viewing platforms surrounded by glass. So, I was in the “cage” and not the bird, and we were able to get really close. So many expressive faces!

There were many more beautiful birds, some not identified or I wasn’t able to capture a picture.

I totally had a moment with this little owl, maybe a pearl spotted owlet, but didn’t have my good camera on me. So all I have is the memory and this blurry phone picture:

The challenge of capturing these creatures with photography was a lot of fun. Sometimes I was happy with the results, and sometimes not.

Sometimes I caught the bird in his natural habitat, and sometimes just on the ground. And sometimes I just marveled at the nests themselves, often quite spectacular:

Which is your favorite bird?

Night Safari at Etosha

The night before we got to Etosha National Park, our guides asked us if we wanted to sign up for a night safari (at additional cost). We said yes, of course! The more animals, the better! But after a long day of animal spotting, driving around in the truck on bumpy roads, and breathing in dust, we got to the campsite late, and we were exhausted. There wasn’t enough time to eat dinner. We rushed to set up our tents before the sun set.

I had bought some cup o’ soup and cheap ramen, so I shared with the other members of my group so we could snarf down some food before hitting the road again. We got to our jeep just in time for the guide to give us blanket ponchos and hit the road. He told us that he would try to text the animals to let them know we were coming, but no guarantees we’d see much. We braced ourselves, unsure if we had made the right decision.

The night safari turned out to be a fabulous choice. The guide / driver had a red light which he used to try to spot the reflective eyes of animals. We hadn’t been driving too long when we spotted a bat-eared fox, which was ridiculously cute: 

As we drove along, the whole jeep was trying to spot creatures. Often, one of us would see something move, and yell, “stop! On the right!” Almost always, it was a springbok — not so exciting. We started saying, “It’s always springbok,” and laughing, because more times than not, that’s what we were seeing. 

But it wasn’t always springbok. Watching giraffes running through the night was a spectacular sight.

We also spotted a small-spotted cat, which is basically the wild version of a house cat. They aren’t very common to spot in the wild, so this was really exciting! Once we spotted it, the guide was able to switch to his white light and the cat didn’t run away too quickly.

The scrub hare is basically an African bunny. Less exciting. 

Steenboks were at least a little more interesting than the springbok, because they’re little and cute. But still kind of deer-like:

We had seen a bunch of blackbacked jackals during the day, but at night they’re kind of spookier:

The guide drove us over to a watering hole where we spotted a leopard! Too far for me to get in a photo, but definitely there, walking back and forth along the shore. There were also massive numbers of elephants, but yeah, it was night and hard to get a good photo. The light was powerful but the guide didn’t really care about the elephants because… leopard!

Then the guide drove us over to the spot where we had seen the zebra carcass and group of lions earlier in the day. Some members of my group recognized the spot (not me, because I’m directionally challenged). Once the guide spotted the lion, he off-roaded the jeep and we drove through the fields right to the lion! I’m not going to lie — I was a little bit terrified to be so close! He kept the light to the side of the lion, so as not to blind her or anger her.

Lions are pride animals, so the guide explained that there was a group of 7 or so who had made this kill, and the others were probably off getting a drink or something. This was the guard. She was sleepy and full, so not interested in attacking us. Phew! (I have photos that show more guts but they’re really gross so I’m sparing you the disgustingness with the magic of cropping):

At this point, we were pretty happy with the night safari. But it was getting cold and everyone was tired. We were huddled up in our blanket ponchos trying to stay warm as the wind whipped by our faces (and it was probably in the 40s anyway — winter in Namibia is not warm).  I made small chat with our guide, who was super nice. I told him that we still needed to see a hyena before the night was over, and within 5 minutes, there was one standing on the road in front of us. I’m magic!

I tried to wish for a few more animals, but apparently I only got one successful conjuring. We never spotted a honey badger, though apparently they are easy to see at the campsite and we just missed it. We did get back to dinner waiting for us, a really yummy shepherd’s pie type dish. And we never saw a cheetah or a pangolin (google it!), but that just gives me more reasons to go back some day.

So yeah, totally worth it. 

One more blog entry on Etosha National Park coming soon — Namibian birds are much more interesting than you might imagine.

The Living Desert, by the Sea

The Namib Desert runs along the coast of Namibia, and it’s pretty incredible to see the ocean on one side of the road and sand dunes on the other. I couldn’t get them both in one photo, so here are two photographs side by side, and you’ll have to imagine 🙂Actually, I attempted to film it out the window of the truck, as we drove, and you can sort of experience what it was like:

One minute, you’re looking at flamingos in the ocean, and the next, you’re sweating buckets in the desert.  Ok, first, you probably want to see the flamingo photos! See if you can spot the pelican in there too. 

I am really interested in animals, so I went on TWO different desert walks to check out what lives in the desert. We took jeeps out into the desert and tried to find tracks to point us to living creatures. While the guide was telling us about the desert, trackers were out looking for creatures, by identifying tracks in the sand. 

The sand itself is interesting to learn about, because there are so many different minerals which make it appear with all sorts of colors.The black part is actually iron, which is magnetic. Check out what happens when the you put a magnet up against the sand!

The Namib Sand Sea is a UNESCO World Heritage Site because it’s the only desert in the world able to sustain life through fog. The fog brings in little pieces of detritus from plants, which bugs eat, as well as drink up the water in the fog. Then, other bigger animals, like geckos, can eat a beetle and it’s like a drinking a whole water bottle! They get their water from eating insects.

We were lucky to see lots of animals in our hunt, beginning with a male Namaqua Chameleon, who did not seem at all fazed to have a giant group of humans surround it. Maybe he had seen these guides before, who came bearing worms.

The chameleon was pretty pleased to get fed worms. Their tongues are incredible, and I’m not sure this video captures how cool it is to watch them eat:

Want to see that in slow mo?

Next up, the trackers spotted a Namib day gecko, which got scared and dropped his tail when the guide picked him up. The tail kept moving after it was detached! That’s a way of distracting predators so that the gecko can escape. Whoa.

Here’s a shot of the little guy, unfortunately, without his tail:

We also got to see a Shovel-Snouted Lizard, who was a real cutie:

On the less friendly side, we saw the most neon yellow scorpion I’ve ever seen. Ok, I’ve never seen a yellow scorpion, but apparently the Namaqua thicktailed scorpion is not so uncommon here. I’d rather not get in the way of one of these.

Scorpions are closely related to spiders, which can be a little creepy as well. This one is really interesting though, because it makes a trapdoor in the sand.  The guide found it by digging underneath the trapdoor, which I believe I stepped on, but he still spotted it. Unsuspecting bugs step on the trapdoor and then the spider gets them! Totally incredible.

But onto an even more frightening animal! I don’t think of myself as a snake person, and especially not when they’re venomous, but it was pretty exciting when the guides spotted a Peringuey’s Adder, or Sidewinder Snake. The guide said that if you get bitten, you won’t die, but “you might wish you had.” Their venom attacks in two ways, with a neurotoxin and a cytotoxin, so you could end up having to get a limb amputated. There’s no counter-venom, so you can only treat the symptoms. Awesome. Our guide seemed surprisingly calm, considering he was barefoot. Mostly the people in the group just seemed excited to see the way this snake moves sideways. Which is pretty cool, but I tried to keep my distance.

Actually, the snake definitely seemed way more afraid of us, than we were of it. When first picked up from a bush and dropped onto the sand, he buried himself into the sand to hide. It’s amazing to me how all of these animals have ways of hiding — the spider under his trapdoor, the gecko who drops his tail, and the camouflage of the chameleon. Even the scorpion wanted to hide! Below is a different chameleon, by the way, but the same species as the other one, who was so much paler! He’s camouflaging with the bush.One animal that wasn’t shy was the tractrac chat bird, who came right over when we stopped for snacks. The birdies apparently know that the guides carry worms to feed to the lizards, and sometimes the guides will share with the birds too. Some great photographs were acquired as a result.

Before this trip, when I imagined the desert, I had no idea how many creatures could live in the sand! My eyes are opened!

Journey Through the Namib Desert

I’m just back from almost a month of traveling, and I have so much to share! The deserts of Namibia were so different from other places I have traveled, and I wanted to start by sharing about one of my favorite days on the trip.The Namib-Naukluft Desert is considered the world’s oldest desert, and it’s huge — about the size of Massachusetts and New Hampshire combined. It runs up the coast of Namibia.

In the morning, our truck arrived for our first hike — up Dune 45. 

The climb was exhausting, but amazing. There was so much so see, from the little beetles scurrying across the sand, to the expansive views across the desert.

Here’s a little video that captures some of the feeling– sorry it’s hard to hear because of the wind!

After a morning hike, our shoes full of red sand, we headed to another part of the Sossusvlei area — here, we saw evidence of the salt and clay pans that are so common in this area. We took a jeep to get closer to the main area we were going to visit, but then had to walk a ways to get there.

Finally, we arrived at Deadvlei, a dried up marsh where there are trees that are about 2,000 years old. They’ve been dead for about 600-700 years, but they don’t decompose because it’s too dry. It was quite an amazing landscape. 

By the time we got back from here, it was close to 2 pm and we hadn’t eaten lunch yet! My group pulled up chairs around our truck, and tried to find corners of shade to rest. We still had one more hike to get in this afternoon, to the small Sesriem Canyon.

And then stop for apple pie!

We camped that night at a beautiful spot in the desert, arriving just in time to set up tents before the sun went down.

We were traveling in a large group, so the process of setting up tents and getting ready for dinner was quite a process, but we got it down to a science. Our group came from all over the world — South Korea, Kenya, Germany, Israel, Austria, the Netherlands, and guides from Zimbabwe. We were truly an international bunch!

It was a particularly great shower that night, and a delicious dinner (sausage, garlic bread, cheesy squash, corn on the cob, and champagne). Then we hung out around the campfire and chatted.

After dinner, we walked over to the campground’s watering hole, where we watched zebras drinking, as well as a one-horned oryx who pushed all the zebras aside when he wanted a taste. As you can imagine, we were ready for some sleep after this sunny, busy day. Being south of the Equator, it was winter in Namibia, so days were short and we packed a lot in.  It was hot during the day, but got quite cold at night. So we curled up in our sleeping bags and went to sleep.

Not every day was quite this exciting, as some days we spent many hours driving on bumpy roads! But check back soon, as I have lots more to share, and the next post will include more animals.