Not All Fun and Games

11.24.10

Day 5 in the field

My day wasn’t very exciting, but other teams in my group had some craziness.

The team that calls themselves Ay Bay Bay (baha - if only you could hear our advisor attempt to say that) had to stop their transects due to being surrounded by elephants. They were trying to go around the first herd they saw, but kept running into other groups! The elephants were pretty on edge ... because there was an elephant carcass in the area. Ay Bay Bay could only smell it and ran into scouts who confirmed the death was due to poaching.

Crazy. And so unsettling.

Another team, the Kilimonsters (ha ha) ran into the carcass. Exhale. It had been poached last week, so it was somewhat decayed, but it was further along in the face - in other words, the tusks had been taken.

This is one of those things that just silences me. I have nothing more to say because I don’t have solutions and I don’t know what more to say about the issue itself. I am just silenced. Because it is that upsetting.