Last Events at Struwig

Date Written: 8/14

These past few days have been bittersweet at Struwig. This is our last morning at the reserve and tonight we're headed to bush camp again. From there, tomorrow at 5 am we're headed off to Sodwana  for our PADI (Open Water Diver) certification. Just like the high school students that were with us the first week, we had to put on a presentation/play about an animal we thought played the most important role in the ecosystem. We were supposed to do it as 2 separate groups (this is how we've been working out in the bush, instead of being in one large group of 11). We didn't want to do that though. We wanted to document our time here at Struwig. A lot of our scenes could really only be understood by the staff that have been with us the whole time, but it seemed like the new uni students seemed to be amused by the scenes anyway.

(Us practicing a scene where the giraffe broke in to camp)

We tied our skit together with the original theme by saying that humans have the largest impact on our ecosystem. The staff got a huge kick out of all of our jokes and loved our impersonations of them, which is god since Toby, the South Africa OpWall manager wanted our skits to be funny from the start. We've set the bar a little higher for the new uni students! A little while after that, Orla (our lecturer for the ecology/animal/conservation lectures) did her last presentation on the biomes of South Africa that we requested to learn about. I'm happy that Elme (the woman who gave us the insect lectures and showed us the process of insect/bug collection and processing them onto mounts) gave us the morning off to relax and pack before heading off to bush camp.

(One of the traps used to catch flying insects. They would fly up the sheet and get caught in the bottle on the top left, where gas would 'knock them out')

(Another was a ground trap with a bucket in a hole we dug in the ground. It had either rotting meat, fruits, or nothing in it)

The bugs were caught so we could learn how to mount them in the same way when they are being put into a collection

Earlier in the day before we presented, a herpetologist came with snakes to present about their physioology and issues facing the field. 

The guy lives with a black mamba he keeps as a pet (for those who don't know snakes, a venomous bite from a black mamba can kill a person in 20 minutes!).  

(The Black Mamba within a wooden box.. I'm glad there was that separation!)

To an outsider, this seems crazy, but he has raised it since it hatched, so it's more like a pet to him. He also brought along other venomous snakes: the Mozambique Spitting Cobra and a Puff Adder. He did bring along non-venomous snakes for us to handle. One was the Brown House Snake and the other was a Cape File Snake. They were both very docile and friendly.

Cape File Snake

Brown House Snake

I was surprised to find out that little research is carried out on snakes. Given how much people are afraid of them, I would've thought more research would be carried out to figure out how to control them and prevent unnecessary encounters. It was definitely worth the 100 Rand ($10) per person for the herpetologist to come out and teach us.

- Erin