1000!

Just to say that today the blog reached 1000 page views! Thank you everyone for reading it so far- it will get even more interesting once I'm actually at Okonjima!

Cheetah Adaptations

Cheetah are highly evolved beings. They are the the fastest land animals, reaching speeds of 70mph, speeds they can achieve because their bodies are finely tuned towards sprinting.

As I mentioned in the last post, cheetah claws are not, unlike other cats, retractable. This is so they dig in, like running spikes, in the event of a chase. Their tails are very long and broad, acting like a rudder to help make sharp turns whilst running. Their jaws are unusually small, to make room for air cavities in the skull for increased breathing capacity. When cheetah run at top speed, their strides can reach nine metres, half of which they spend airborne. To enable them to make these huge strides, their spines are very flexible, curving exaggeratedly as both the forelimbs and hindlimbs stretch out in opposite directions.

Cheetah can accelerate very quickly, reaching 45mph from a standing start in just two strides, and making a mind-boggling four strides every second at their fastest. Of course, as with people, some cheetah are faster than others; the fastest ever recorded covered 100m in 5.95 seconds (compared to Usain Bolt's 9.58 seconds).

Whilst cheetah are faster than any of their prey when they sprint, they must endeavour to catch it quickly- they can only maintain a sprint for a couple of hundred metres, and once they are exhausted, it takes half an hour to recover!

My First Brush With A Cheetah, Okonjima August 2008

On my first visit aged fourteen, I spent a day at Africat, helping out with Leprechaun the cheetah.

Me with Leprechaun

Leprechaun was an elderly male cheetah living permanently at Okonjima (who has probably expired by now...) who was darted and brought in for a vaccination and a brief check up. Whilst he was still heavily under the influence of the dart, I groomed him. It may surprise anybody who knows about cats to learn that cheetah are quite dirty; whilst most cats groom fastidiously, Leprechaun's fur was full of matts and burrs, he was covered in flies, and absolutely stank. I was able to get some of the tangles out with a wire brush, and exorcise the flies with fly powder.

The reason for this unusaul behaviour is that cheetah are not actually very cat-like; in the feline family tree, they occupy a separate branch from the rest of all other cats. In many respects they are almost more dog-like, with slack hygeine standards, straight, slim bodies and limbs, and dog-like feet with un-retractable claws. Their most definitively feline feature is their skull shape.

All these features make cheetah highly adapted to speedy travel. I will explain each feature and its function in my next post!

Driving a Landcruiser,Okonjima July 2010

Today is exactly one year since I passed my driving test (although if it had been snowing then like it is today, I wouldn't have been able to take it!)

I actually did my first proper bit of learning at Okonjima, in the summer holidays after my GCSEs. Wayne and Yolandi kindly took me out and were very patient with my utter lack of understanding of how the car worked. The Landcruiser was a very big car to start off in, but with as much space as I had crawling around the wide roads and tracks near Main Camp, this really didn't matter; in fact I still drive quite a big car.

I remember being very excited to reach the heady speed of 20km/h! Most of the people I told weren't quite as impressed as I was...

These pictures were taken by my mum, the first time I drove her anywhere:

Leopard, Okonjima February 2011

I think these pictures are of MJ, a collared female leopard, but I don't quite remember. These are from a leopard tracking activity I went on two years ago in February (the last time I visited). She put on a perfect performance- once we found her lying in the grass, she got up, walked across the front of the car, jumped up  into a tree a couple of metres away from the car and proceeded to stretch and have a look around for ten minutes. It was quite the 'textbook sighting'!

Little Canyon, Big Canyon

Sesriem Canyon

Above is the canyon at Sesriem, near Sossusvlei- this picture was taken whilst standing in the canyon. Sossusvlei is a mud and salt pan close to the sandy desert, so provided no relief from the intense sun during the day. Being in the shade of the canyon was surprisingly and refreshingly cool; some parts contain permanent water holes which are invaluable to the local lifeforms. Sesriem canyon is thirty metres deep at most, rather slim with parts only a metre or two wide, and about a mile long.

Below is a picture of Fish River Canyon, surpassed in size only by the Grand Canyon in Arizona. Having not seen the Grand Canyon, Fish River is without doubt the most incredible and awe inspiring geological feature I have ever seen. For me, it was really too big to take in; it looked more like a film set than the actual view in front of me. It is one hundred times as long as Sesriem canyon, spanning nearly seventeen miles wide in places, and reaching up to five hundred and fifty metres deep. During the rains it holds a river, and once the rains cease many pools of fresh water remain. Its origins lie in plate movements hundreds of millions of years ago, which is a good example of how ancient some if the Namibian landscape is.

Due to its terrific size, it is rather hard to do justice with a single photograph, but hopefully the immensity of its scale can be sensed:

Fish River Canyon

'Badlands'

This is the most terrifying place I have ever been. I was told it was an area called the Badlands, because it is a habitat so dry and inhospitable that it can sustain no life. Actually to be very precise, all kinds of life but one: somehow, a type of lichen managed to exist on the rock surfaces. Apart from this, the group of forty or so people I was with were the only living organisms as far as the eye could see. I was struck by the idea that, if everybody else drove away without me, I would certainly die.

If I remember my GCSE Geography correctly, this kind of desert is called 'reg' desert, and on the spot I was standing, it only rains once every ten years- hence the hundreds of channels scoured into the land by running water.

Of course, a person abandoned amongst the dunes of the Namib would also have feeble chances of survival. However around Dune 45 and Big Daddy and the likes, there are usually other tourist parties with their buses parked not far away; and at least the dunes are colourfully stunning. The bare and brutal landscape seen above has none of this beauty to distract the viewer from the harshness of its conditions.

Due to an apparent technical hitch, I can't upload any photos at the moment- hopefully this will be fixed soon, but until then my blog will be sadly bereft of pretty pictures.

On a more uplifting note, I have actually booked my flights, so I now know I am leaving on February 15th, and returning on July 19th!

Giraffe, Okonjima February 2011

I always see plenty of giraffe in Namibia- after a couple of weeks you may even begin to overlook them because they are so frequently present. However they are are remarkably bizarre yet beautiful animals which are always entertaining to watch.

Their elongated limbs and neck can mean that some positions are clumsy and awkward- such as drinking, when they have to spread ther forelegs into a big triangle in order for their head to reach the ground, and must spring up again to bring their legs back together. Yet a running giraffe is extremely graceful; they canter with a long, rolling stride and, despite seeming to move in slow motion, are very fast.

Diversion: David Attenborough's 'Africa'

Last night the first episode of 'Africa' was shown on BBC1. Africa's wildlife have always fascinated me, and Attenborough is a lifelong hero of mine (even more so since I have discovered more about his incredible career, reading his autobiograhpy 'Life on Air') so I was very excited to see his new series.

It will be absolutely no surprise to anybody who has seen any of Attenborough's series before that the program held me enthralled. I enjoyed this episode particularly because it was almost entirely set in Namibia- often in places I have mentioned in previous posts, such as Etosha, the Namib Desert and Spitzkoppe.

Besides being rather stunning, the camerawork was also innovative, showing newly discovered behaviour- in particular, the cantankerous rhino is revealed, by means of night-time footage of delightful clarity, to posess a playful and sociable character. Meanwhile the gentle desert giraffe is exposed as brutally territorial, and a miniscule wasp and spider battle in extraordinary detail. And of course explaining every act of the performance is Attenborough himself, his voice synonymous with the wildlife documentary genre.

If you missed it, watch it now on iPlayer and don't dare miss the next!

Reflections

Here is a vaguely New-Year-appropriate post...i.e, the title is 'Reflections', which tends to be a New Year theme - and that is just about where the New Year associations end.

However, here are some nice pictures of reflections on water.

The scrubland, or veldt, on which Okonjima is based is, like most of Namibia, very dry. Therefore the areas in the park that see the most activity are those around the large dams which hold all the available water. The comparatively lush vegetation and glass-like lakes provide beautiful vistas, especially when the water mirrors the often dramatic sky.

 

This is the image I have used for my backgournd: