23:35, Saturday, 19 May, 2012

After breakfast, I decided it was time for some exercise.  As I walked out to the firebreak, I caught a glimpse of a huge monitor lizard that quickly scrambled off of my favorite rock.  I snuck down to try and get a better look, but he was long gone.  Those things are so skittish!

The altitude had me going about the speed of the PE shuffle from high school gym class.  I’m pretty sure I glimpsed the mother tortoise of the nest Jackson showed me passing on by.  But one triumph; I got two dik-dik at the end of the firebreak to stop from running when I came near, because they fast understood that I would just turn around and go back the other way.

My first shower back in the bush was interesting.  I forgot that there is a switch that must be turned on to draw the river water out of the bucket, and I already had all of my sweaty clothes taken off by the time I realized that I didn’t remember how to work the thing.  Therefore, given there was no pitcher about either, I just plugged my nose and plunged my head into the freezing bucket of unfiltered river water to wash my hair.  Then I did a little dance every time I had to force myself to splash water on my body.  It was so cold!

Night obs were spectacular.  We saw Nora the lioness courting a much younger male!  You would think her a cougar as opposed to a lioness.  It’s so neat to recognize individuals, and I am learning to identify more and more of the 130 hyenas I have to learn spot patterns for as we encounter them one by one on obs.  I feel confident in my abilities to identify at least one side of about 20 of them now, two sides on at least 10.

The oddest imaginable occurrence became apparent while we were driving around.  On the plain past Den One Creek (I think it was) there were no less than 80 elephants, 80 elephants, spread across that one plain.  It was as though they were antelope!  None of us could believe it!  They had all broken into separate groups again by the next morning.  What a curious happening!  It makes you realize that we know so very little about the lives of animals.  What could have caused them to congregate in that same place, peacefully, all at once?  It’s a mystery; although, elephants are known to be able to communicate subsonically.  But why would one group call to another and another and another?  I wonder if they detected something seismically undetectable to us, akin to when some animals moved to the top of mountains before the strike of giant tsunamis.  However, I feel like if it was something worrisome, they wouldn’t have moved on out.

At Res (spelling) Den, I witnessed the most intense display of hyena behavior ever.  Shadowfax, a subadult who was just a cub last I saw her/him, got into a huge scuffle with Aqua.  Aqua is lower-ranking than Shadowfax, and she must have refused to show a submissive posture or something in an attempt to move up, because before we knew it there were great screams coming from beside a bush to our right.  Holy guacamoses, were they ever going at it!  I think some ear damage must have been produced, as Shadowfax held onto Aqua’s ear for the longest time, refusing to let go as she deeply bellowed and growled.  All of a sudden, Morpheus (who had been nursing her cubs nearby), the adult female identifiable by the white virus spots on her face and witnessed earlier this year committing the first case of known hyena cannibalism on two cubs she had killed, charged in and began biting Aqua as well.  Such a ruckus you have never heard!  So loud, so many simultaneously deep and piercing screams rang into the fast-approaching darkness.  A young cub refused to miss out on the action, and kept getting in the middle of things all bristle-tailed, while another sprinted in wide circles this way and that around the action.  Pretty quick the hyenas were recruiting others with their throatily wonderful whoops, and before long at least twenty hyenas were present, all biting and interacting and giggling and growling like mad.  Parcheesi came running in, probably excited to get in on the action, before possibly realizing that no one there was of lower rank than her.  Doing the smart thing, she left the scene almost immediately after she had arrived; “I’m getting out of here!”.  Eventually, after probably 20 minutes, the action started to slow.  Shadowfax had held her/his own, but both he/she and Aqua were bleeding, which doesn’t happen without a substantial scuffle indeed.  I can’t imagine what it must have been like for Helios to overthrow her younger, and therefore higher-ranking, sisters.  After watching that show, I know it took guts!

Spotted some bat-earred foxes on the way back to camp.  More carnivore data!  (And very adorable carnivore data at that.)  And finally, while driving down the driveway, we all felt thoroughly terrible because we had to drive through the most magnificently constructed web, stretching about ten feet across its width from one bush to another.  A hugely beautiful red/orangey black plump spider with a body circumference about the size of a quarter was still busy at work finishing it up, illuminated in our headlights.  Eli carefully lifted the side strand through his window in hopes of doing the least possible damage, but it must have gotten the memo, because it was gone this morning.