It's a little hard to believe I've already been here four days. I haven't had much time to write anything down: after making recordings, rushing back to my laptop to analyze the spectrograms, and going on game drives, I've had little time to reflect. At least to reflect on non-scientific matters. The superb starling songs look incredibly interesting. Like European starlings, there's a superficial similarity to the vocalizations, but a few days of careful listening combined with analysis of the spectrograms leaves me in little doubt that there's a lot of complexity and probably quite a bit of individual variation. Unfortunately I've only been able to record the birds from the territory around the center, as Dustin's car is being used to finish up another project at present, so some of these hypotheses may need to be modified once I start sampling from other groups. I also have yet to really get the hang of reading the bands off the birds' legs, which is a fairly essential part of the project since this is the only way to really establish individual variation, and whether it correlates with any aspect of the birds' social organization, breeding quality, or kinship. Still, I've got over two weeks left and I am fairly confident I can get a good data set.

The diversity of life here is completely overwhelming. The people here know so much about it, too.