Busy, busy, busy. My boss, Dr. Alexander, has finally arrived. She is a really cool lady, but my workload has definitely increased, as I had expected.
Unexpectedly, though, she let me know that she plans on shutting down operation of our organization for two weeks around the holidays, which means that Jason and I get to go see some of the rest of Botswana! It is really short notice, so we may be completely winging it for most of the trip, but that will be a lot of the fun of it. Our plan is to head 10 hours south-west to the town of Maun. From there we can visit the Okavango Delta, head south to visit the San tribe settlements, and possibly also to Tsodilo Hills see the San rock/cave paintings that are thousands of years old.
Spent most of the day today bird watching. We belong to an organization called BirdLife Botswana, which also has a Kasane branch. Today was “Big Birding Day” in which all of the BirdLife branches in Botswana gather teams and have a friendly competition to see who can spot the most species in one day. Our team spotted 71 in a 5 hour trip, which seems like a lot, but we got blown out of the water by one of the other Kasane teams who got 195 species! We did spot some extremely rare and endangered birds, however - some that dedicated birders here want to see but likely never will, so I feel pretty lucky!
Had a cool new experience yesterday. My boss has several beehives on her property, so I have been learning a bit about beekeeping. It’s something I’ve always been curious about, so this has been a neat opportunity. Yesterday the guy that manages the hives came out and brought me along with him to open the hives to assess the colonies and collect any honey that may be there. He had me hold on to one of the hives as he worked so it didn’t tip over – I was completely calm until the last minute or so, when the box started getting covered with bees and they were gathering on my hands and arms, and when the low, constant ‘zzzzzzzzzz’ noise started turning into an irritated, loud ‘ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!’. Just had to breathe deep and be brave - made it through without any stings!
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