Bird Ringing

Last weekend, two of my American friends and I went bird ringing with a biology classmate. It was a celebration of 30 years of bird ringing in that location, so there were quite a lot of people there to see the birds. The sun rises at about 5am here, so we had to wake up at 4. We went to a nature reserve and in the morning darkness, they put up these 3m-high nets.

(This picture was taken a few hours later.)

Then we waited for birds to get caught in the nets. It didn’t take long.

Over the course of the day, dozens of birds were caught. The people remove them by first untangling their feet, then grasping them around their bodies, and finally releasing the beaks from the net. Then they put the birds in little bags to wait.

Two of the experts took the birds out of the bags, impressively identified their species, sex, and age (juvenile or adult), weighed them, and measured the length of their tails, wings and beaks. They also recorded the age of each wing feather; the old ones are tattered and faded, and the newest ones that are just coming in are still short. Then they put a metal ring with identifying numbers around the bird’s leg. They have to be careful with this bird because it can make your fingers bleed if it bites you. I got to release a few of the birds after everything was recorded.

 

There’s some huge database of all the birds that are ringed so people can learn about the distribution and abundance of various species. They also often catch birds that have already been ringed so they can learn about how birds migrate during their lives and how long they live (someone found a robin that lived for 33 years). The guy who was ringing seemed to have the motto “All birds are interesting,” but here are some of the prettiest ones.

 This is a barn swallow. These migrate from Europe to Africa every year. Once they found a bird in South Africa that was ringed in England, and birds ringed here were found as far away as Latvia.

 

 This male weaves nests on cattails (I saw them in the wild at the same place I saw the zebras a few weeks ago).

This is a sunbird. They eat nectar like hummingbirds in the Americas.

 These kingfishers are my favourite. They move their heads back and forth in a way that reminded me of a panning security camera.

school email

The school email accounts are very different here. My inbox was full after about 12 messages, and because I've exceeded my allowed disk space, it won't let me forward the emails to another account. I never thought I would miss oncourse, but it gets a bit cumbersome to have the professor email us every powerpoint. The content of my official university emails is also quite different from what I get at IU. Here are some interesting samples from Friday and today.

"The pressure of water supplied by Msunduzi Municipality is currently below normal due to reactive maintenance in Scottsville. This in turn adversely affects the reticulation within buildings especially in Golf Rd. Subsequently there is difficulty in New Arts building to provide water to basins & toilets.

We have brought this to the attention of the Water Section of the municipality & await their positive response."

"The CAPRISA study of tenofovir gel, at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, provided the first evidence that an antiretroviral drug used in a gel form can reduce sexually transmitted HIV and herpes in women.

This finding has been hailed as one of the Top 10 Scientific Breakthroughs of 2010 by the journal Science. The journal, Nature, also lauded the research finding and listed it among their top science news for 2010. 

This week, the eminent medical journal, Lancet has announced that the CAPRISA research paper was voted a close second as the Lancet paper of the year for 2010."

VICE-CHANCELLOR’S COMMUNIQUÉ
[after a JFK quote about doing hard things...]

"Seven years ago the University of KwaZulu‐Natal (UKZN) took on a similar challenge. Rather than bemoan what was described at the time as the impossible task or a task doomed to failure of merging two very different institutions, the founders of this institution committed UKZN to becoming internationally recognised as the premier institution of African scholarship.

A ridiculous endeavour many claimed at the time. There is no such thing as African scholarship. It was said that UKZN must continue the role of the old University of Natal, in other words a colonial teaching institution forever servile to the Oxbridge tradition. Others preferred the dysfunctional model of the apartheid institution that was the University of Durban....

There are unfortunately always some who fight change and in UKZN’s case these naysayers unfortunately have friends in the newsrooms of some of South Africa’s press. The result is the crony journalism that has appeared on the pages of the Mail and Guardian of late. Thus one finds an absence of reasoned analysis and a disrespect for the truth and in its place a campaign of propaganda and personal attacks.

The Mail and Guardian has in recent weeks run a series of articles accusing UKZN and its

Vice-Chancellor of suppressing a report that they allege makes adverse findings against the university. This is proof, or so it is suggested, that academic freedom has been replaced at UKZN by “authoritarian corporate” dominance manifesting in the cult of the Vice-Chancellor....."

"Some students have embarked on protest action at UKZN's Edgewood campus. Protesting students have gathered at the main gate of the campus preventing staff and students from entering the campus. Students have raised various issues and some of the concerns are over the meal allowances and the administering of the Funza Lushaka bursary scheme.

Reports from Risk Management state that students began pelting bystanders with various items and the South African Police Service (SAPS) was called in to control the situation. Some students were injured during the fracas and are receiving medical attention.

UKZN is aware of the financial challenges facing many students and will make every attempt to assist students wherever possible."

(This isn't on my campus, but a professor said today that it's likely to spread.)

Life

I’m reading Nelson Mandela’s autobiography Long Walk to Freedom. I highly recommend it, though it is quite a long book (I guess Nelson Mandela has had a busy life).

 I just finished reading about the trial of Mandela along with several other leaders of Umkhonto weSizwe (an organization that was founded in conjunction with the ANC for the purpose of waging acts of violence against the state because decades of nonviolent protest had only resulted in harsher legislation from the government). They were charged to have “recruited persons for sabotage and guerrilla warfare for the purpose of starting a violent revolution,” and they were prepared for the death penalty, “not because we were brave but because we were realistic.”

Perhaps in part because of pressure on the court from the rest of the world, they were instead sentenced to life in prison. There was so much commotion in the court room when the judge announced that they would not be sentenced to death that the wife of one of the prisoners didn’t hear the actual sentence and called out to her husband asking what it was. “He yelled back grinning, ‘Life! To live!’” 

This happened the year my dad was born. Four months before I was born, Nelson Mandela was released.

Questions I’ve been asked about the United States

Are you from New York too?

Do they have cats there?

Do they not use them [cell phones] there?

What do you use to clean your pots?

What is the experience of prom like?

Is America in the same time zone as Canada?

Is Christmas still in December?

What do you call American football?

You don’t eat mealie meal? Do you just eat rice every day?

Is it?

Indian Ocean

I realized that the past three times I’ve been to the beach have been three different oceans in three different countries: the Atlantic in the U.S., the Pacific in Costa Rica, and now the Indian in Durban, South Africa. They’re all awesome, but it’s really nice when the water is warm. The waves were huge at the beach.

I had an awesome time jumping in the waves and getting pushed towards shore by their force. I love feeling the power of the water being sucked away from land and the sand being pulled out from under my feet, and then jumping and being carried several feet up with the wave.

The building on the right with the arch is one of the soccer stadiums built for the World Cup.

I found these cool animals (maybe if I had been paying attention in the boring part of AP biology, I would have some idea of what group they belong to, but the best I can do is “snail-ish”).

 They use the foot thing to burrow into the sand to prevent being washed away by the waves.