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.