2 days to go … Studying

For my year off, a lot needs to be learnt. When thinking about southern Africa and Safari, I mostly thought about the Big 5 and other common animals. But deepdiving into my lectures, I realise that it´s much more. It is not only about all kind of animal and plants, but grasses & grazers, ecology, rocks, astronomy, geology, and far more. I am not that kind of person that sucks knowledge out of books. I need to see and experience, so today I went to the Senckenberg Museum, Frankfurts archeological museum, to get to see some examples of those birds, mammals and other animals that I up to now just read about. I took the chance to meet a friend who works there as a palaeontologist and who has already been to Africa for excavations. As happy as he was for me that I am doing this course as much he also expressed his doubt that it is possible to learn that all in a year.

Hm … not very motivating 🙂 But luckily, I didn´t follow my first impulse to run away and cancel the whole thing immediately. Instead, I reminded myself that my “Field Guide” Course is not supposed to be equivalent to a full biological study course! But he´s been awesome and shortly introduced me to some interesting evolutionary facts and indeed helped me understanding some things better.

I am aware that I know so few about the African wildlife, and that I should have studied more in the last two months, but when I walked through the museum, I also had some highlights by remembering some of the bird´s and mammal´s name – and not only the common ones, also the one or other latin one. This is a fantastic feeling!

My today´s fun story:

I recently read “Whatever you do, don´t run” from Peter Allison. It contains interesting as well as funny stories from his active time as Ranger. As the title promises, a main and important lesson out in the wild (not only in South Africa) is that only prey runs. So whatever you do, don´t run. But when I came to the lions exhibits, those two stalking big cats freaked me out. I know they would be faster so running wouldn´t help at all, but standing ones ground when looking in those eyes … guess that could definitely be tough 🙂