Tse Tse Fly Massacre

Today we had to get up extra early to go to Tarangire National Park. It is two hours away so we had to be at breakfast at 6:30. I slept in the car though so it was okay.

Our assignment today was to look at animals and do a distance survey to use to estimate the number of animals in the park. We had to write down every animals that we saw, the number of animals, the distance from the car that any animals were and any other species that we within 50 meters of those animals. We had 3 hours to do this.

We saw lots of animals, including herds of zebras and elephants, groups of giraffes, wildebeest, buffalo, ostriches, secretary birds, and a little peak of a lion cub. I got pictures of a zebra rolling in the dust and about a million pictures of elephants. I couldn't get pictures of the lion cubs because they were hiding in the grass. All you could see were the tops of their heads and their backs for a few seconds when they passed through shorter grass. It was disappointing but awesome to see them at the same time. Some of the other cars saw a cheetah kill a dik dik. I am super jealous of that!

The biggest event of the day however, was fighting the tse tse flies! I had no idea they existed in East Africa but they definitely do. In case you don't know, tse tse flies are the ones that carry sleeping sickness. They have gotten rid of them in many places here (that is part of why deforestation is so prevalent) but they are very common in the park where we were today. Their bites sting like black fly bites too so it's not fun to get bitten. Also, they swarm you (especially if you are wearing dark colors) and they are extremely fast and aerodynamic so even when the jeep was speeding along they kept landing on us and/or sticking on the sides of the jeep. I was fortunate because I took our staff's advice and wore long pants and a jacket with long sleeves but they were still biting my hands and feet. Then I put socks on and pulled my sleeves over my hands but they were still managing to find my fingers! I was better off than a lot of other people though. The people in the front of our car were so busy trying to kill tse tse flies that they weren't looking for animals and you heard the constant smack of a fly swatter. At sometimes Abel, our driver, even stopped to shoo them off of him so he could concentrate on driving. At the end of the day there were at least 15 flies smashed all over one of the windows and the girl  who was killing them was very proud of herself. We probably missed a lot of animals because we were so busy battling the flies.