10:36, Monday, 18 July, 2011

During breakfast on Saturday morning, one of the pretty little brown birds with a yellow underbelly that we see all over the place flew down and started to eat some of the food on our tray :). There is a multitude of birds in this camp; the days are filled with color and song. I need to get Benson to take me around and identify them. He knows loads about birds.

The vervet monkeys first came to camp Saturday afternoon, and of course I had to sit and watch them. They were hilarious, bobbing their heads down, over, and up again while looking at me with their crazily human expressions. I pretended to forage and mirrored their head movements; eventually they relaxed. There were a couple of juveniles that gently played, and a female meticulously groomed an old male that I named Arthur. He didn’t seem to have a very distinct sense of hearing, because when I would move, he would perk up but look in the completely wrong direction; I don’t know if he ever became aware that I was sitting about a meter and a half away from him. Pretty soon the vervets permeated camp, and I could work from the desk on our tent porch while watching them, as afore mentioned. My favorite thing is being able to convince them that you are of no harm enough that they continue to go about their business: foraging, jumping from tree to tent, and interacting with other individuals.

On evening obs, we saw a cheetah! I decided on Calcite for its name; I don’t know if I mentioned it, but I let Lia pick the lineage for cheetahs, and she picked stones and minerals. The one we got pictures of back in Serena is named Obsidian. The cheetahs out here have it worse than Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, and Clint Eastwood combined; there was a point in time at which EIGHTEEN tourist vans surrounded it. I’m glad people are so enthused about cheetahs, but geez-a-lou!

I can officially say I have stuck my hand in hyena poop. While collecting a sample, I accidentally let my finger slide into the rancid mess. If hand washing wasn’t one of my compulsions before, it became one for the next couple of hours. I have never done such a disservice to the prevention of bacterial resistance. Ugh! To make it worse, I have to deal with people like Eli while putting it in tubes for hormone analysis, who describe it to the person with the pen in very graphic terms, such as “fudge brownie with orange jello”. The people here make everything fun :).

A second sun rose in the sky that night; holy cow jump, was the moon ever wide and glowing! It reminded me of the harvest moons back home, just phenomenal. It’s tilted sideways here, so that its mountains look more like an imitation of the continents than a man in the moon. By the light of that moon, we watched an un-ID hyena dig frantically in a den, a behavior out of the ordinary repertoire. Maybe it was just feeling particularly ambitious that night, because dirt clouds flew up every which-way. For a while I thought it must be Gopher from Winnie the Pooh. Periodically the hyena would stick its head up and stare this way and that; eventually it went to work on another hole before walking away. Perhaps the hyenas had decided it was time for some renovations- new family room or patio.

We returned from Obs about an hour later than we used to in Serena. The hyenas have become markedly more nocturnal here due to human influence, adding to the ongoing conservation implications of Kay’s study.

Yesterday morning we drove out to Prozac, the territory named for its seemingly blasé hyenas. It takes an hour to drive there; no other job in the world could possibly make that 4:45 AM alarm worth it. I really like Prozac; it is directly across the Mara from South Territory in Serena, and it is where the first hoards of wildebeest caused us to rejoice from across the river. There were still many remaining wildebeest, giving me a further taste of the migration. The hyena cubs in Prozac are ADORABLE. We got to feed them popcorn because they have become skittish of the cars, and Eli needed to learn to identify them. Cholera and Ebola from the infectious diseases lineage were present, as was Wings. Curby was a little fatty, hogging all of the popcorn, and Platinum is just beautifully pale. I tried to distract Curby with lots of popcorn so that she could get some, as she was clearly subordinate to him. I accidentally got some popcorn stuck to his back in the process, and when we left he was still walking around with a white kernel sticking out of his fur.

We stopped in Talek for groceries on the way back. I met Mama Kristy at the grocery store, and talked with her daughter Kristy who had just recently traveled to Michigan State (the Mamas often take on the name of their first born, so Mom, you would be “Mama Joseph” out here). Kristy was the most modern-looking Maasai I have ever seen, with long hair and knowledgeable about other parts of the world. Goats, dogs, and donkeys walked throughout the dusty, littered dirt streets and courtyards between the little shops. Three little kids came up to shake our hands, smiling and giggling. Mama Kristy laughed and said that they were playing with the mzungu. We gave six Maasai children a ride in the back of our car on the way out. They were smiling from ear to ear, chewing gum, all with shaved heads. One of the girl’s fingernails were painted bright red, and she was just gorgeous with her pierced ears, dark skin and eyes. I really liked another of the older girls, probably fourteen or so, named Ana. She pointed to the other kids, telling me that they were her sisters and brothers, and walked back to the car to shake my hand fondly when we dropped them off before returning to wave beside the others.