21:56, Thursday, 31 May, 2012

Monday night I discovered a new love for Buenos Aires.  Although extraordinarily high ranking, she allowed three cubs at the den to come up and lick her face without aggressing upon them (which is what high ranking females tend to do as a hierarchical reinforcement).  It was very sweet to see such behavior.

Apparently the baboons are back around, as Michelle was startled to find an enormous male in the lab tent one recent afternoon.  Sometimes we hear them making their “ooo, ooo”  short barks at night while sitting around the dinner table.  The baboon researcher named Robert Sipolsky says the only explanation he can come up with for when baboons start barking after waking up in the middle of the night is that they have had a bad dream and are asking for reassurance from their troop members, who often bark in return to let them know it’s alright.  At least this is what they did for Benjamin in A Primate’s Memoir.

Tuesday morning Benson and I assigned two more cubs of unknown motherhood to Baba Ganoush.  Their names (I think their lineage is something to do with Britain) are now Yummly and Galaxy.  We also saw Gaza Tuesday morning!!!  He is a bit more skittish around the car after his traumatic experience, but he looks well, and were we ever happy to see him!  Much needed since this batch of telizol drug is still letting us down – Juno was a difficult dart, and Pantanol didn’t go down at all, yet Eli hit each square in the butt as usual.  Befuddling. 

I have decided that if picturesque were an adjective that could kill the soul mine would have been reincarnated at least a million times since my arrival.  Picture two cheetahs sitting on a long-grass hill, about 20 meters apart, green grass blowing in sunny fragrance, the essence of light temperatures and dreams of days past or unexistably lovely lulling against your cheeks as you stare at those breathing, living works of God and evolution’s finest art.  And then imagine how wild and free the realization it was real and happening a couple mornings ago.  Places like this still exist on our earth.  Pray may we never let ourselves take them away.

My transcription from the day of the tommy kill turned out to be ten pages long!  I feel as though I am getting the hang of the formatting now that Michelle went through it all with me.  Slowly, slowly inching my way to being a fully-functioning research assistant.  I’m in that odd transition phase where I can’t get away with thinking of myself as new to this job, but definitely need more work, so it’s hard to know when to ask questions and when to trust that I am doing things correctly and to know whether feeling a little put out because grad students still turn to Eli and Michelle when asking about the hyenas is acceptable.  Funny how everything involves a journey of sorts.

Played soccer across the river with the guys on Tuesday afternoon.  I was late arriving since I had to finish my novel of a transcription, so Joseph Mzee (old man Joseph) kindly walked me down to a good place to cross, very amused that a girl was going to play football.  I had to calm down my indignation with a reminder that, like any culture, African culture has areas in which to improve.  The river was much too wide at my normal crossing site.  Joseph Mzee’s way involved grass clumps and rocks on a shallow part of the river, followed by a relatively steep climb up the bank on the other side.  One of my legs got nice and cooled off when I didn’t make it all the way to the middlemost clump.  I found Joseph, Jackson, Benson, and Eli on the other side, along with a local supposedly named Ranger.  The goals were two fairly sizeable rocks spaced apart on either end of an arbitrary field.  It was so much fun playing, although I am quite terrible!  Jackson and Ranger took me on their team.  Ranger probably only passed me the ball twice in the 30-40 minutes we played, but I bullied Jackson since I know him.  When he tried to make it so it was just him and Ranger, I yelled that I may be a very bad player, but that he must remember I am part of the team too.  After that all I had to do was yell “Ukumbuke!” (Remember!), and I was sure to get the ball. Bet I cost our team a win (it ended in a draw), but at least I wasn’t made useless.  The heat and altitude and sprinting had me breathing hard for at least twenty minutes after we finished.  Exhilaration!  I have been invited to play again, and play again I will – hopefully with Michelle in tow.  :)

21:45, Friday, 1 June, 2012

Happy birthday Uncle Lee!  Thanks for always being such a great godfather!

I learn so much from Kay when we are eating meals.  Minus the fact that she has the most incredible stories about her wildly awesome life, we often get on topics involving conservation and hyenas (go figure).  The other day we were talking about how one cannot fault the Maasai for killing an individual animal that is repeatedly dangerous to them, but to seek out and kill one problem individual is very different from poisoning or persecuting the whole lot of them.  She made it seem so simple, a solution to something that has always bothered me – what of the animals that endanger people?  How do we argue for them in the face of someone who has lost a loved one or a body part to an aggressive carnivore or charging elephant?  Well, we must be reasonable, that’s all.  And we must hope for reason in return.

Kay also told of some playback experiments she conducted back in the day.  I guess she played tapes of dead hyena’s whoops (for example, one that had been dead for three years) to live individuals, and it was clear they recognized the voice and became thoroughly confused.  The most confused were the cubs of the deceased whooper.  Kay said individuals also recognize their own voice when it is played back to them as their own.  Hyenas are no less than astoundingly amazing!  Animals are not given enough credit.

At breakfast the other day a bird with black and blue sheen, looking something like a grackle from home but slightly bigger, landed by the table; and would you know, I’m pretty sure it made some of the sounds I hear every night and morning!  Just goes to show yet again that you can’t judge a book by its cover.  Such a beautiful song from such a common-seeming bird.  I was also pleasantly startled by a great big ibis the size of a flamingo on my way back from the choo, dark blue with its elegantly curved beak, wading in the last remnants of Lake Choo.

Tuesday I had a walk down memory lane when we went to JK Safari Camp to help the BEAM students with trapping and measuring African grass rats.  It was so odd returning to the place I stayed when I met Africa, the first taste of my dream come true.  Going there made me miss the people I shared it with.  But I certainly didn’t miss the stressed looks on the faces of the students, hunkered down at each available moment working on their final paper due the following day.  Thank God my tassel has made the trip from right to left! 

Tuesday evening we took the night off obs to get drinks at Fig Tree Lodge with the BEAM students.  It was delightful to get to talk with Dave and Julia some, and Michelle and I climbed up into a gloriously built treehouse, where there were habituated vervets galore, young ones tumbling about not five feet from where we sat, a big male sauntering not arm’s length in front of us before sitting on the post and looking very thoughtfully at the forests and river below, totally unconcerned over our presence.  There was one female, looking to be rather young but older than the majority present, who was a human behaviorist.  She was fascinated with us, and twice I swore she was going to jump onto our shoulders.  A magic moment came when I decided to wipe my hand back and forth across the boards of the treehouse, just to see what she would do.  She looked at me, looked at her hand, looked back at me, and copied the motion!  I repeated it, then she did; I did, then she did.  Michelle tried, and she copied her too.  There is nothing more special than a broken communication barrier.  I will never forget that monkey.

Big elephant making one of my favorite sounds close by.