Monday July 19, 2010 - On bats and xrated photos

Monday July 19, 2010

A day of meetings and final preparations for tomorrow’s training. Mike Cranfield, Benard, and John Bosco and I started it off meeting the Dean, I had a session with a tour guide who gave me some suggestions on routes and activities, and then I taxi’d and boda’d into town to catch up with them, Julius the PREDICT coordinator for Rwanda, and Fred, the Mountain gorilla vet for Uganda. We ate at a nice outdoor restaurant- tables under umbrellas with a flock of tame guinea fowl wandering about as an added touch. The entrance guard was searching bags and purses on the way in, which is a new thing. Just inside the parking there are a number of absolutely gorgeous huge orchids - someone must have a special interest. Half-way through lunch Fred got a call that there is a dead gorilla in Bwindi forest, apparently a result of a scuffle involving a pair of males and an interaction with a wild (not habituated) group. So off he went on a 10 hour plus journey back to western Uganda to coordinate the post-mortem, which I guess will happen tomorrow. The rest of us headed back to our respective offices to finish the agenda for tomorrow and fuss with organizing other things.

On bats

I came back to the University tonight at exactly the right time to see the fruit bats. I’ve heard them chirping and chittering up in the trees before, but tonight the dusk was just perfect to actually see them swooping about the tree tops. Kampala region was picked as one of the PREDICT sampling sites because of the number of bat colonies here, and their proximity to large populations, and the bad reputation bats have as carriers of nasty diseases.

Don’t read further if you are squeamish

The front page of the local english-language newspaper today had photographs of two men who they think may be the bombers. Rather odd looking reconstructed photos. Well, turns out that actually they just found the heads of these two guys, one at each bomb site. And no one has come to claim them or report them missing (the people, not just the heads). So - the thought is that they were suicide bombers who blew themselves up and somehow popped their heads off in the process. No wonder they look a bit strange in the photos! Photoshop to the rescue.