Exploring the lake and the wildlife (May 14, 2011)

I have now settled into my summer home in Naivasha.  Actually, the my new summer home is beautiful!  I get to walk out my door every morning and see the biggest expanse of green space I’ve ever seen in my life.  What’s more, the green space is full of gorgeous exotic animals, like zebra, giraffe, water buck and more! 

Papyrus reeds are gorgeous!  They have long, thin stalks up to 5 m long, which support a head of spiky leaves at the top.  Not only are they eye catching, but they are also great natural water filters for water running into the lake.

The flip side of this beautiful exotic wildlife is all the new exotic BUGS!  Yesterday, we discovered a visitor in our house.  He was the largest, fuzziest spider I’ve ever seen.   I first advocated that we save him by catching him and putting him outside.  I then approached him, saw that his fangs could probably penetrate the plastic container I was holding and I promptly discarded my tree-hugging ways.  Megan squished him with a shoe and he literally exploded.  Barf.

In addition to adventures in my own yard, I also got to get out on the lake today with Irena.  It was so refreshing to actually get to see and touch all of the things that I’ve been reading about for 8 months.  I even found the infamous papyrus plants intriguing.  Check out the picture… these plants line a good portion of the shore line here and filter the incoming runoff.  They are much taller than I ever imagined!

Like the scary critters we’ve discovered in our house, the lake also has its own scary critters.  The one small difference is that the scary critters in the lake are 2000 lbs hippos, known to be the most dangerous animal in Africa.  I have also discovered that pods of these guys oh-so-conveniently inhabit the shorelines of half the places we want to take samples… Great.  AND… if guarding the my sampling sites wasn’t bad enough, we also have a hippo who enjoys feasting on the flowers in our garden.  We stumbled across our friend one day while returning home from dinner.  He was at least half the height of our house.  He looked up at us, tilted his head and then very slowly waddled his way deeper into the backyard.  It was quite an amazing site!

Hippos are beautiful, but not terribly conducive to science.  They seem to enjoy bathing in many of the sites we want to sample!