21:39, Sunday, 20 May, 2012

Time limit to the wind tonight!

Yesterday morning Michelle and I ventured off to do regular morning obs, while the other three went in the darting car.  I got some good practice tracking, and picked up the signals of both Moon Pie and Pan.  It is always a feeling of great fun when you see a hyena you have tracked, as though you didn’t expect something so nifty to really work.

Many of the cubs were out at the den, and the subadult Zion was there too, looking up at us nearly full-grown amidst the much smaller cubs.  She really looked quite absurd towering over them; Michelle says she likes to hang out with the cubs still, and is still “a cub at heart.”  I like that.  Zion and I would get along well.

Trying to keep an eye on Hendrix so we could call Kay and the others should she be in a good position for darting, we received a call from them instead.  They had successfully darted Baez, and wanted us to come to the scene!  I was so excited to see my first darted hyena.  On our way over to the top of Lion Hill (where they were with Baez), we saw a buffalo with about eight leafy branches stuck behind its horns.  It looked absolutely ridiculous, and we couldn’t help but laugh, poor thing.

Touching Baez was like nothing I have ever done before.  We pulled up beside where Kay, Eli, and Benson had her lying on a stretcher while taking all sorts of measurements and samples: several teeth and body measurements, bacterial swabs in the ears and anus, paste, milk, etc.  The blood samples had already been taken by the time we got there.  I almost immediately asked Kay if I could touch her.  She is so beautiful, and I could not stop stroking her, a real live hyena.  Her belly rose and fell as she breathed.  I touched her bristly tail and squishy paw pads.  Such a handsome thing.  We fitted her with a collar and weighed her: 56 kg!  One group of the BEAM students arrived and got to see the end of the process.  Then Kay, Eli, and Benson loaded her in the back of the hilux and took her over to a group of bushes where she could come to in safety from lions and other hyenas.  As they were driving away, Michelle and I noticed two approaching hyenas, and quickly motioned to the others.  They drove back, and Kay got out of the car over Baez, hands on hips, scaring the pete out of these other hyenas.  Nobody messes with Mama Kubwa.

Needless to say, my feelings on darting have changed, and Baez will always be very special to me.

Michelle and I had to drive the car into Talek to get the universal joint fixed.  I met the mechanic, Maina.  He is wonderful, and we talked Swahili for a long time.  I also met John, a Kikuyu down in Talek for mechanical training.  He is 18 and loves animals, desiring to go to a university and study animal science.  He wants to come on obs with us sometime, which I think is a great idea!  Africans fear hyenas very much, sometimes for good reason, but I think it would change anyone’s opinion to see the side of them that we see. 

After the universal joint was fixed, Michelle was off running some errands, and I thought the hub was also supposed to be fixed as it kept unlocking.  I gave Maina the go-ahead to take apart the wheel.  Apparently we hadn’t settled that he was supposed to fix it, and I regretted my mistake after we sat in Talek for almost five hours, no breakfast and out of water while getting good and baked by the sun.  But it turned out later that evening that it was a very good thing I made that mistake...funny how things work out.  And in the meantime, I made some wonderful new friends, met some children, and Michelle and I bonded since we had a good chance to really talk.  I honestly don’t think she could be any more wonderful.

Back in camp, the vervets were out and about, mischievous as usual, their eyes with the depth of a human shifting this way and that as they refused to look me in the face for more than a fraction of a second.  They are not fond of people because others chase and yell at them when they are near the kitchen tent.  I wish I could let them know that I like their presence, even if no one else does.  Slender mongooses with the tips of their tails dipped in black paint have been trotting about through the camp bush as well.

The evening brought the type of adventure I live for.  We headed out of camp and started seeing loads of hyenas, including a perfectly recovered Baez (we were worried for a moment when we saw a lioness walking very near to her recovery bush!).  The collar didn’t seem to bother her at all.  We also saw Spaz, a cub who hadn’t been seen for two months, alive and well!  But the entire time we were seeing all of these hyenas, ominous dark clouds with sheets of rain shown over camp.  We decided it was necessary to cut obs short, and began to head back toward camp.  The sheets of rain came pouring down long before we could even reach the proper crossing (a “crossing” out here is a place where we go through a lugga, or sort of a dip in the land that often holds water and shrubbery).  All of the antelope braced themselves against it, entire groups turned so they were facing away from the blowing rain.  I worried for the giraffes as lightning began to streak across the sky.  When we reached Middle Sunrise Lugga Crossing, it was terribly flooded.  There was no way we could have crossed.  We called Kay, and she said we could either drive the car to the top of the nearest hill and attempt to jump across the crossing so she could pick us up, at which point we would be soaked through, not to mention run the risk of being swept away by the growing river.  None of us were too attracted by that option.  She also said we could wait and see if the water went down.  Or we could drive and try to hit a track she knew of that would take us up to the main road, but if we got stuck we would have to spend the night in the car.  We chose to go offroad in search of the track.  Eli did a heroic job driving us for the next hour or so in the dark grass, the chance that we could get stuck racking on all of our nerves.  I actually half wished we would, just because it would be so thrilling to spend the night out there, minus the cold and our growling stomachs.  We searched long and hard, but could see nothing, much less find a track under the circumstances, and decided to trace our tracks back to wait at the crossing.  Just as I was thinking it would probably be bad to run into any overly large animals at this point, given there was no way we could get away from a charging elephant under such circumstances, lo and behold we found one in our headlights, and after shining around us discovered it was not alone.  Michelle decided this was the opportune moment to enlighten us that someone in a national park had actually been impaled by an elephant tusk through their car and died.  Well, at least that was good for my unhealthy inability to fear elephants, and definitely added to the adventure.  I had a plan for us all to line up front to back in the center of the car, out of reach of its tusks, should we get stuck and an elephant come charging. 

Luckily we made it through the elephants, only to find that the water had greatly risen at Middle Sunrise Lugga Crossing as opposed to going down.  We almost resided to spending the night out there – I figured we could all stretch out in the back and tell ghost stories.  Michelle quickly extinguished that idea; our talk earlier included how horror movies and the like totally freak us out.  Since she uses a spot pattern that she finds looks like a ghost to identify the cub Bata, she promptly declared, “I sawr a ghost on Bata’s shoulder.  That’s my ghost story.”

Then we realized that we might as well try the somewhat treacherous camel crossing, given it probably wouldn’t be covered with water, and as we could just as easily spend the night somewhere else.  So we drove back up toward there, and no one can say we aren’t dedicated scientists, because amidst all the dangerous storm we still stopped to record the locations of some bat-earred foxes and jackals and attempted to identify a few hyenas that crossed our path.  Honestly.  Once we reached Camel Crossing, we all braced ourselves, holding the handles on and over our doors as well as our breath, and Eli plunged the car into the bumpy water and mud.  The ole girl cruiser struggled and pushed, and would you know it, we made it up the other end!  We were home free, as we could now make it to the road that would take us home, although it would take an hour.  Benson was so excited that he kicked the ceiling with his feet!

I kept the window open on the drive back.  The rain on the grass smelled absolutely delicious.  We found a delicate, oddly-proportioned serval along the roadside.  As we drove further, I tried to stay awake for Eli since Michelle and Benson were falling asleep.

Kay was very glad when we made it back to camp.  She had said she felt awful for us, never having spent the night out on the savanna herself.  We were all high on adventure at dinner.  I’m very glad I wasn’t the one driving, however.  Eli was brilliant.  My nerves would have cracked after about two seconds under the pressure.

The rain offered us a much-needed sleep-in.  It felt wonderful, but although I tried to make it until ten, there is so much happening here that I find it hard to stay in bed.  We prepared for a “lecture” we are going to give the BEAM kids tomorrow; they’re coming to camp.  I am going to be teaching them about tracking.  We took the unidirectional antenna off of the car, and set it up so that we can hide a collar around camp and the person with the antenna can track its location.  We practiced to see if it would work; Eli and Michelle hid the collar throughout camp whilst I attempted to locate it.  It was great fun, like a scavenger hunt, although it took me some time to master the technique.

Tonight we climbed onto the cruiser’s roof on top of a hill in the middle of the territory to do a routine tour-bus count for Kay, done weekly.  The view was phenomenal: rolling green plains with mountains in the distance, the sky a perfect mix of sun and clouds.  We also drove through an enormous herd of buffalo filled with calves, found ten lions to record, witnessed an impala totally clear a rather tall bush, and happened upon a group of 22 giraffes, some not far from camp (please God, let them come here).  We saw oodles of our hyenas.  Every time I see one, especially up close to the car, I realize just how beautiful they are, so contrary to what people normally think.  Maybe it’s an acquired taste, but up close it is especially hard to miss.  Rebman followed our car around; wherever we drove, Rebman was sure to turn up.  I wish I could hug him to pieces.  (We actually discussed around the breakfast table how weird it is that the universal reaction to something really cute is wanting to squeeze the devil out of it.)  We witnessed Spaz nursing from Aqua, meaning that she will lose her cub name and become Babe, as she is now for sure in the baseball players lineage.

Around the dinner table, two genets touching noses and puffing softly to one another got scraps of meat; one was Kelsey.  The other was more skittish, and I wonder if it was her mother.  A baby bushbaby stole my heart, and another accepted a string bean from my hand only to toss it unhappily aside.  Suddenly the craziest amount of yelling, hooting, hollering came from across the river, mingled with barking dogs.  At first we laughed because we thought it a Maasai party, but very quickly we became worried as our askaris Lasingo and Steven, along with Young Joseph and Jackson, began to run toward the sound and cross the river.  We heard little pikipiki (motorcycles) driving toward the sound as well.  Anxiously awaiting news, Joseph and Jackson finally returned to tell us lions had been found within a boma full of cows.  Luckily they had been chased off, and lions, humans, and cattle were all unscathed.  I was very afraid for both the people and the lions.

While all of this was happening, Kay told a story of a little boy who was decapitated in a park in Botswana by a starving hyena about seven years ago, and she was flown in as an expert in the matter due to a pending lawsuit.  The timing of stories out here!  The boy had fallen asleep beside his bed with his tent open, and the rest of the story is too gruesome for me to recount here, but probably also good for my unhealthy difficulty fearing hyenas.  Nightmares are expected tonight, but I am still delighted to hear lions roaring and hyenas whooping very nearby.