21:46, Sunday, 27 May, 2012

So sleepy!  Good thing I love hyenas so much, or I might resent them for being crepuscular.  Gosh it’s rough when that alarm goes off at five in the morning!  But Grandpa and Dad, I will have you know that I manage to get out of bed every time. 

We have accomplished three more dartings each of the mornings this Friday and weekend:  Endor, Buenos Aires, and Cy.  One of the current lab projects is to sequence the genome of hyena bacteria.  I felt sort of bad while sticking a q-tip up the nose of even a sleeping hyena, let alone while swabbing the anus, anal sac, and prepuce.  The mouth and ear weren’t so bad, but someone needs to teach hyenas to clean their ears.  After all, they seem to have the tooth brushing down.  We snip off most of the q-tip stick and leave just the cotton end in a little glass vile, labeling where each came from.  Just another thing in addition to taking blood, tooth and body measurements, and weight.  After we had weighed Buenos Aires and were trying to determine a good recovery spot, I held my hand against her paw.  There is just something about the look of a human hand against an animal paw that depicts solidarity among species.

We are pros at blood work by now.  We could have won a contest the way we whipped through Cy’s this morning.  Wabam!

Michelle and I went to Talek the other day to run a bamillion errands.  One of the errands was buying some produce from Mama Kristie’s shop, and we got to play with her baby named David.  He is extremely adorable – about eight months to a year old, I would say, and although you can tell when he is happy his smile always stops when it is halfway up his face and remains in his eyes alone.  Michelle has a new mission to make him smile.  We also visited Maina for a new universal joint.  I am liking Maina more and more as I get to know him.  He is very quiet with English and doesn’t smile much, but I can tell he has the best of hearts.  And you can get him talking if you speak in Swahili – sometimes so fast that I can hardly catch a word he says!  Then I had a very interesting time trying to explain to the butcher what a “fillet” of meat was.  We almost ended up with kidney and liver, but caught the mistake just in time.  We picked up some internet credit, transmission fluid, and refilled our soda and beer crates.  The last thing we accomplished was to pick up a few new bookcases that Kay had the “furniture man,” Mama Kristie’s husband, make for us. One of them was for me, and my tent is so much more homey now!  But the furniture man insisted he ride home in the back of our cruiser and support the bookcases.  Michelle and I squinted every time we hit a big bump or went through a water-filled crossing on the way back to camp, but he beamed and said everything was “sawa sawa” each time we asked.

Friday morning I had a heck of a time transcribing.  Pantanol came running from near the den with a fresh tommy kill that we must have just missed, as we were with her not fifteen minutes before.  Helios, the head hancho, began chasing Pantanol so that she giggled loudly over and over while avoiding her.  Pretty soon hyenas were arriving from every direction; there were 16 of them, behaviors occurring left and right.  It was of course amazingly cool to watch, but very stressful attempting to record everything! Helios ended up stealing the food from Pantanol, and the high rankers got to eat most of it, although none of them were bloody, indicating they had not contributed to making the kill.  Only after the high rankers were finished were the others allowed to eat, others meaning other females, subadults, and cubs.  A few of the lowest rankers didn’t get a share, least of all the male Wellington, who sacked out about 100 meters from the whole thing.  He knew it was a lost cause to try and get even a smidgeon of a scrap.  Stinks to be male when you’re a hyena.  But by golly, it’s about time females had the upper hand somewhere!

The speed with which hyenas eat is quite amazing.  They made extraordinarily fast work of that gazelle, and when all of the good stuff was gone, the two horns were carried around so that they stuck straight out from the hyenas’ mouths like narwhal tusks. 

Benson and I saw Chips nursing from Scrabble!  Now that we knew his/her mom, we could assign a proper name.  Scrabble’s lineage is national parks.  Chips’ sibling has died, so one of the two names lined up had to be discarded.  It came down to a tie in the votes between Tuli and Great Smokey.  Mama Kubwa had the final say – when we told her she had a problem to solve, she looked so unhappy (Kay has been solving many bureaucratic issues lately).  She was overjoyed to hear what the issue was, and happily yelled “Ready?  Smokey!” (arms thrown up in the air).  Eli and I were happy with her decision, although I felt kind of bad since Benson and Michelle really liked Tuli.  Also a cute name indeed.

The driving lessons continue.  I can shift up and down no problem, but I still have trouble starting and reversing.  Dave (one of the Rhode Island visitors) and Eli rode to the lodge when we got water, and made very good instructors.  Along the way, we found two leopard tortoises in the road.  I got out to move them to the other side – I had no idea they are so heavy!  Used to painted turtles.  One of them narrowly missed soaking me as it pulled in its head, hissing and peeing.  I kicked myself afterward though; I sure hope that tortoise is okay, because it is quite dangerous for a tortoise to lose so much water all at once.  Pray he’s alright!  Two other adventures of the Keekrok Lodge water expedition: we attempted to go bait grass rats for the BEAM students to catch and measure in a few days, but the people at the lodge staff’s living quarters had no idea we were coming.  Interesting trying to explain to these people that we were from a hyena camp but wanted to lay out oats to attract rats so that students could come trap and let them go.  Didn’t really work – more bureaucracy for Kay.  Then we found some tourists whose drivers had driven illegally off-road to get a better view of some lions in a bush for their customers, only to get stuck and scare the lions off.  Not one cruiser stuck, but two, and one of the tourists waved out of the top of the vehicle in distress when we were within about ten meters, as though we couldn’t see these two ginormo cars on the side of the road.  We managed to pull one out, although the tourists had to evacuate because there was a very close call during which the car rocked so hard it almost fell on its side with all of them aboard.  Oh dear.  Not to mention that this whole time our car was already weighed down with huge jerry cans full of water.

A quick wildlife rundown before I let myself sleep.  Antelope everywhere still, although it has finally dried out quite nicely.  Michelle has named the one-horned impala we sometimes see by the den “Derrick.” I saw a topi and a hartebeest laying together tonight.  I think they are rafiki.  I also think jackals and hyenas get along exceptionally well for some reason, as I have never seen them do anything but interact peacefully.  Parcheesi lay in the road today when a jackal approached her, and merely watched it with ears perked forward.  Saw some bat-eared foxes playing the other day, all puffed out like scared cats as they leapt sideways this way and that in our headlights.  I have a gecko that pitter-patters across my tent again, and the crazy bird that is always singing in the most hilarious chortles at five in the morning has become quite fond of singing at nine to ten at night while I am getting ready for bed.  I wonder if that thing ever sleeps.  Found out dik-dik make noises like squeaky toys when they stot.  I also noticed that many of them have the funniest little tufts of hair between their horns that look something like the poorly styled haircut of a human boy.  About twenty giraffes walked majestically in a single-file line across the plain tonight, towering over us as we drove within some meters, especially since we were in the tiny Maruti, which makes you feel absolutely dwarfed in comparison to even an ostrich.  For two nights in a row the frogs in the river sang no more restrained than Luciano Pavarotti on a climax note.  Oddly, they are quiet now, as they were before.  Gorgeous birds absolutely everywhere as usual; Michelle and I have a plan to learn them on the side.  I have seen two little kingfishers in the past couple of days.  Lord, are they beautiful!  Brilliant blues and oranges and a very sophisticated head with a smart little beak.  And how they shine in the sun!  Butterflies everywhere too, big and small, white and orange and black and blue. And would you know – we saw a porcupine disappearing into one of the den holes!!!  My first wild old world porcupine!!!  Just hope the cubs decide not to use that particular hole.

Oh, and I cannot leave out last evening’s sky!  It was rainy in patches, so sheets of gray that spread like sunrays slanted here and there, while the sun itself simultaneously lit everything around them.  A very clearly defined rainbow shone bright, eventually arcing halfway across the sky in a stretch of mist that covered the mountains.  And off to the south, just above the horizon, were mountains of puffs of billowy clouds.  I’m afraid this sky lessened the quality of my work; it’s hard to find hyenas when you cannot stop staring upward.