psycho-babble

New York is where it’s going to begin, I think. You can see it coming. The insect experts have learned how it works with locusts. Until locust population reaches a certain density, they all act like any grasshoppers. When the critical point is reached, they turn savage and swarm, and try to eat the world. We’re nearing a critical point. One day soon two strangers will bump into each other at high noon in the middle of New York. But this time they won’t snarl and go on. They will stop and stare and then leap at each other’s throats in a dreadful silence. The infection will spread outward from that point. Old ladies will crack skulls with their deadly handbags. Cars will plunge down crowded sidewalks. Drivers will be torn out of their cars and stomped. It will spread to all the huge cities of the world, and by dawn of the next day there will be a horrid silence of sprawled bodies and tumbled vehicles, gutted buildings and a few wisps of smoke. And through that silence will prowl a few, a very few of the most powerful ones, ragged and bloody, slowly tracking each other down.
-Nightmare in Pink-

Heavy stuff...Thanks to Ruth’s Mamaw (how did you know I would like it so much?) for sending me John D MacDonald’s Travis McGee series of novels where I found this gem and so many more apocalyptic contemplations on our modern society. Published in 1964, John D MacDonald was obviously way ahead of his time. Didn’t he know we’d still be bumping into each other filling in wetlands and paving over fields without complaint for another 50 years at least? Something happened in the early 70’s which killed our awakening conscience just as we were beginning to ask the right questions, and it wasn’t disco. I think that the answer can be found in the documentary Century of the Self (thanks to M.G.A. for sending us that BBC video!). If you haven’t seen it then you must! It describes the development and application of modern psychology to mass marketing resulting in the CREATION of product driven consumers. I.E. the products and advertising define and shape the consumer rather than the other way around. The result is sort of a host/parasite relationship where critical decisions and unique thoughts are no longer made by the consumer. The TV head zombie above represents this concept, but it can also be found in nature.

Which brings us to Mdudu of the day- Woohoo! I felt real sorry for this little zombie bug because a parasite had invaded its body, exploded out the top of its back (as you can see) and was steering the zombie body around forcing it to eat endlessly on this leaf. It thought that it needed to consume MORE and MORE leaf and had no other reason to live -so I drove a sharpened stick through its head- poor bastard.



Sorry that I haven’t posted much in the last couple of weeks but we have really settled into a routine here and so there’s not much exciting stuff happening. Got the rash under control- so I’ve got that going for me- thanks for your concern ;). Ruth’s Aunt Carolyn and cousin Caitlin visited us for a week, which was really nice. They are some real troopers and were up at 5:30 in the morning with us and not back from forest until 7 at night and still full of energy. We had hours and hours of good conversation and I think Greenwald will have a couple of new readers when they get back to the states. I know what you’re thinking!- I hope I didn’t scare them off either.

Each day, we’re reminded that we’re in Africa in so many ways. Many times it’s just the incredible beauty of the SKY-



Other times it’s the color of sunrise across the train tracks which we cross each morning on our way to work-



But mainly its feeling like we’re Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus and every day is the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade…every day. To watch the video, right click play button.



If ANYBODY reading this blog happens to have an old soccer ball lying around that you don’t need any more and want to donate to the kids- please deflate it, put it in a manila envelope and send it to:

Jack Mock and Ruth Steel
Udzungwa Ecological Monitoring Center
c/o Udzungwa Mountains National Park, PO box 99
Mang’ula – Kilombero, Tanzania

We’ll give it away to one of the villages and post a video of the kids going insanely happy over your gift!

Thanks-
Jack

Happy Mother's Day

Happy Mother’s Day-
I miss you mom! Have a Guinness for me, eh?
Love,
Zombie Slayer

Two straight days of tromping around in the rainforest has me feeling a little delirious. The welts on the arms have only migrated around, but I think that I might know what it was. I showed Aloyce and he said that it was the hairy caterpillars!? I know, it’s crazy but those suckers sit on the undersides of leaves and as we pass through the undergrowth with our arms up to push it out of the way they are probably brushing up on my arms and some of the hairs are getting through my shirtsleeves. Anyway, that’s the theory for now, but really it could be anything. There are just too many bugs to keep track of. I’m not insane because of them yet…..Not like when I was living in the moldy basement room on Newell street in Durham and had cave crickets splatting up against the walls and my face in the middle of the night! It literally got to the point where I was waking up from nightmares while slapping them off my head. Cave crickets have a special place reserved in hell. They live off of mold and each other’s body parts and they’re BIG. Killing them makes a disgusting huge mess. They’re breeding in basements all over the US Southeast, preparing to unleash some kind of radical new biological plague on mankind. Any self respecting zombocalypse survivor should heed this threat. They all must be killed before its too late…. .Anyway, my current insanity isn’t that bad yet. Being attacked while I’m awake makes it much easier to deal with.

I actually LIKE a lot of these bugs. Some are just amazing in the way they have adapted to surviving in the African forest. If you sit on and watch the ground long enough (and I do) the hustle bustle of the bug world is more entertaining than a PIXAR film. In a single cubic foot of ground space there are any number of dramas being played out- little highways of travelers, epic battles, helicopters buzzing overhead, supersonic jets roaring by and monstrously strange creatures materializing from unknown faraway lands past the nearest bush. Occasionally, one of the these busy creatures is lifted into the stratosphere on the end of a tectonic plate, blinded and disoriented with bright flashes and loud rumbles from the sky and after ages and ages cast back down into foreign lands. The result: mdudu of the day. This little tiny guy tried real hard to hide from me by camouflaging itself with bits of wood and other matter- didn’t work though.

Bones' Birthday

Scientists love to collect dirty old skulls and leave them lying around the house gathering cobwebs. Ruth has brought home baboon and red colobus bones. She’s really proud of the condition that both are in- you can still see the sutures on the skull! The bummer is that Ruth can’t bring any of these back to the US since it’s against the law. These monkeys usually meet their end from leopard or eagle attack (which we saw once!) or from falling out of a tree. We’ve also seen colobus slip and fall twice already after missing spectacular leaps between trees in the rain, but somehow they were OK. I keep expecting to see one lying on the ground injured and that Ruth and I will have to just leave it there. Ruth is NOT supposed to be saving animals, it’s part of like the scientific code or something, but I can’t even imagine her walking away from a baby colobus that needs help. That will be the day. Speaking of which, wadudu the little research center dog is pregnant! Uh-oh.

It doesn’t take long for the dead bodies to turn to nicely cleaned skeletons thanks to today’s mdudu. This is the Ciafu, which are all over the place. Big armies of them, birthed by queen ants and kept in line by soldiers, marching around looking for food. I hope that the movie plays for you (click it).



Yesterday was my b-day, not the BIG one, but getting damn close to 40. Ruth took me on a really nice hike up to the Sanjii waterfall where we could see most of the Kilombero valley below. On the way there, we saw a chameleon crossing the road that I wish we had stopped to help. The hike was a killer on the knees- I played way too much basketball back in the day- but worth it. Afterwards, we had a big dinner at the Mountain View hotel and a beer to take the pain away. Here are views from the falls-Peace-



Of course there’s a rickety bridge above the falls just 100 feet back….



..from where the river plunges over the edge.

Pictures

Thanks for the interesting discussion about overpopulation in response to my last blog post- and I hear your requests for more photos. I’m still trying to get a picture of one of the local fish or of the swampy bog that they inhabit in Magombera for my old fishing buddies. I haven’t done any fishing here and probably won’t, but I am sure that you could catch some crazy stuff in the Ruaha river if the crocodiles didn’t get you first. Here’s a photo for my brother Mike and the rest of the Mock family. This is Aloyce and I putting a numbered tag on one of the trees which is used by Ruth’s red colobus group. Aloyce smiles all day long until you get out the camera.



Ruth must number and identify all of the trees used by each of the groups she studies. We’ve marked about 250 trees in the last two forest days, both with a metal tag number and on the handheld GPS unit. Eventually, Ruth will have tree maps of the red colobus group range from which she can draw conclusions about their tree preferences. Sometimes the monkeys lead us on high speed chases through the forest. They’re up in the canopy and we’re hacking our way through the kamba vines and marking the trees as they go. I was going to be the tag nailer, but Aloyse commandeered the hammer on the first day, in the same way that he grabbed Ruth’s backpack and slung it over his shoulder which left no room for debate. He’s a super hard worker. So instead I try to watch the monkeys to mark which trees they are on. Ruth is operating the GPS and writing notes in her book and when we’re being led on a fast move, we can barely keep up. Other times, when the monkeys sleep or stay in a single tree and eat, Ruth watches them with her binoculars and we take it easy. Some of the trees on the edge of the forest and also at the research center are filled with snug looking little bird’s nests inhabited by these weavers.



We bought 4 soccer balls in Dar es Salaam to give away to the local kids. That was a great idea, unfortunately though they were such cheap soccer balls that one exploded when we tried to pump it up! The rest aren’t likely to last long so we have asked Ruth’s aunt to bring a couple of nicer soccer balls, when she comes to visit, that we can give to the adult soccer teams of the Magombera village and the Mang-ula village. We think Aloyce plays for Magombera and that their rival team is Mang-ula but we’re not sure since some of our understanding is missing from translation. However, I am certain that they cannot seem to muster a proper ball- although re-use of plastic bags gets a big !thumbs up! from the zombie slayer.



It’s true that I am technically on vacation, and this is Ruth’s research project so I basically just tag along, read, practice Sawahili with Aloyce and do all of the 4wd driving! Woohoo! This is a slo-travel trip meant to give me plenty of time to consider our surroundings. While we’re here I am also a walking, sweating bag of hot blood - a meal ticket for every creepy crawly, mozzy, spider, fly and no-seeum out there and a decoy to lure the bugs away from Ruth. Today is a bad day for me in terms of the % of skin covered by itchy red welts. Not sure what, but some tiny bug – maybe a spider or maybe something more numerous and sinister- has been penetrating the defenses and getting under my shirt and having its way for the whole time we’re out in the forest. I have been coming back covered in welts. Crap balls. Today I washed my clothes and rinsed them with tea tree oil in the water. Maybe this will help?

I far prefer the big bugs* - bugs that you feel the weight of when they crawl up or fly on you. You can hear them coming, you can swat them off, usually no harm done. I guess that’s why bug of the day is always huge! This one looked almost exactly like a goby fish that I kept in my saltwater tank in San Diego and I was half expecting to see it swim away.

*- except cave crickets