This coming Saturday (Oct. 1) I will complete the 23 hour airplane trip to Uganda, so this is likely my last pre-travel posting. I want to record some of my expectations for the simple reason that pre-trip imagery is soon erased by reality. Basically, I want to record my current impressions before they are obliterated.
Of course, the current visions are necessarily thin soup, conjured mainly from web-posted photos of my October home, the Pakuba Safari Lodge and Murchison Falls National Park. They are colored also by my two previous visits to Africa (South Africa in 1977; Tanzania in 2016), but I have never set eyes on Uganda, much less a shoebill. Nevertheless, my mind’s eye features a huge Lake Albert, a vast area of shallow marshes choked with papyrus, and days of sitting in a small boat with collaborator Kenneth Tumusiime watching individual shoebills as they hunt. In my vision, the water is typically flat once we are in the bird’s vegetation-choked foraging habitat. This is surely wishful thinking, since our intention is to observe hunting behavior (with 8x binoculars or a 20x spotting scope mounted on tripod) and a rocking boat would make that difficult. But, hey, it’s my dream, so hope gets free rein.
From the meager published descriptions of shoebill hunting, it’s clear that they spend most of their time impersonating statues. As it happens, I’ve spent lots of my own field time staring hard at motionless objects. Goliath herons, for example, are also large ambush predators on African fish, standing rock-still nearly all the time and striking into the water an average of just once an hour. But those Goliath herons hunted in great open shallows a hundred meters apart, and it was possible to sit a half-mile away and monitor 6-8 at once. I am not optimistic about our being able to see more than one hunting shoebill at a time, so copious waiting seems inescapable.
On the plus side, I am anticipating that we’ll be a LOT closer to the shoebills than I've been to Goliath herons! Tourist boats visit them often at Murchison Falls, habituating them nicely. Kenneth is optimistic about our being able to sit quietly 60 meters away without disturbing them. If so (and if the water lies flat!), I anticipate getting high quality video footage of the hunts, not BBC Nature quality footage necessarily, but footage that can later be analyzed frame-by-frame for key behavioral details. To that end, our primary tool will be a high-quality stabilized telephoto lens (100-400 mm zoom) and a modern digital camera that makes many key decisions (focus, aperture, etc.) automatically. For those unfamiliar with telephotography, a 400 mm lens enlarges the subject eight-fold, so a bird filmed from 60 meters away looks as if only 7.5 meters away [(60 m)/8]! Imagine watching a 5’ tall bird less than two car lengths away.
So that’s the dream scenario.
Other than that, my picture is lacking in detail. For the study, we will be commuting by boat from the mainland, either an hour each way if we dock at Pakuba or just a few minutes if we can arrange a boat slip down near the Nile delta. Either way, the “daily commute” will be entertaining, as the area abounds in fantastic wildlife. Fish eagles, storks, flamingos, ibises, spoonbills, hamerkops, and a dizzying array of my dear old heron friends, (including Goliath itself, which I haven’t seen since 1977), just to mention a few of the many birds. And of course, Africa is most famous for its mammalian megafauna, so lions, giraffes, wildebeest, zebras, Cape buffalo, hyenas, hippos, cheetahs, rhinos, etc. will be abundant. I have never seen a leopard under field conditions, but Kenneth assures me that this lacuna will be filled. So, all that will be an embarrassment of riches…a bonus over and above the research itself.
Giraffes: my pick for most impressive mammal
African fish eagle: an accomplished kleptoparasite
Still, I would be remiss if I didn’t also share some apprehensions. Perhaps most obvious is that some of these marvelous animals are flat-out dangerous, thus must be given wide berth. We’ll be wary of working in the vicinity of Nile crocodiles, hippos, Cape buffalos, and various other neighbors. Fortunately, Kenneth has had lots of experience keeping people alive as they marvel over the natural beauties of East Africa (and Murchison Falls, in particular). As well, I have my share of worries about the scientific project (what if we can’t observe shoebills in the detail we hope? What if we can’t find any active nests with siblicidal broods? What if the cameras get wet?) or mundane logistics (What if I get covid on the flight?).
In short, it is quite possible that this quick-and-dirty field study will fizzle and flop for any number of reasons. I do not expect that to happen, but my slogan is simple: take whatever the field conditions will give you. It’s not as if you have a choice…
Finally, I want to share something I wish I’d been told when I started field research in 1970: much of the daily work is a lot more tedious, even boring, than one would assume from watching nature shows on TV! Sitting in a boat in the rain and trying to keep equipment dry is likely to be a hassle, glorious surroundings aside. Sitting in a Texas egret colony watching for siblicidal aggression (as I did for several summers) mostly consists of watching baby birds sleep! Sitting in a car, watching a house sparrow nest box for 1-3 hour samples really does mean staring at a wooden box 99% of the time, but that’s how we quantified male and female partner’s contribute to incubation.
When I first began doing my own field studies, I had never heard ANY field biologist mention tedium, thus initially assumed I was ill-suited to the challenges! At conferences and in lecture halls, students hear compressed summaries of research decked out as a tidy story. A 5-10 minute synopsis may be all that’s needed to describe years (literally) of data-collecting, but you never hear about all the efforts that didn’t work for the obvious reason that failures aren’t interesting. Observational studies of behavior simply require that you train yourself to wait patiently. That patience took me years to develop, so now, a half-century later, I pass the unspoken secret to you. This is not a job for anyone with a short attention span.
All caveats aside, I’m fired up!
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