10:11, Sunday, 17 June, 2012

Happy Fathers’ Day Dad!  You’re the best dad anyone could ever dream up.

Well, Kay gave me a driving check and I passed, so I’m official now.  Drove Joseph to Talek to get a haircut the other day, a list of errands in my hand that I meandered through town to complete.  Got tons of fruits and veggies at Mama Kristie’s; I like her more every time I interact with her.  She gave me free mandazi to eat on my return trip – they are these delicious pocket bread things that are sort of like a donut but much less sweet and thinner and better.  While walking back toward Rafiki Auto Garage, where Maina was fixing a pipe under the cruiser, a line of great commotion - men on little motorcycles and standing in the backs of stick-shift pickups - came parading and honking and hollering in a circle around town.  I asked Maina, and he said it was a group promoting the Maasai man running for senator.  Fun way to promote him – like something out of the early 1900s in America, before the “My name is so-and-such and I support this utterly slanderous message” commercials.

I was finished before Joseph, and so sat in the dirt and talked with some little girls.  They spoke perfect English!  One’s name was Caroline.  “What a beautiful name you have,” she told me.  I told her I think hers is lovely as well.  They played with my hair and smiled real and sweet.  I had hoped to return to Serena to work because it is wilder over there, but then I think how I would have missed these interactions with Homo sapiens.  We really aren’t that bad a species.

Went to a primary school to drop off the donation from the BEAM program, the same school I visited three years ago.  The head lady was very grateful, and said the money would help to buy new chairs for the cafeteria.  Students in uniform were everywhere, and the children against the backdrop of the African plain and poor simple lines of single story schoolroom buildings seemed like something out of a book.  It awoke a nostalgia for something I never knew in the first place, as though I was somewhere I’d visited in dreams when a little girl, a past I’d forgotten, warm and nice.  Maybe I was connected to this place before I knew it existed, went to school here a long day or two in long ago nowhere.

Joseph and Jackson’s half brother unexpectedly died of an aneurism after knee surgery, and of course they went home for a few days.  Sad.  Old Joseph has left, and so lately Benson has been doing the cooking and camp caring instead of coming out with us.  His friend Wilson has come to help, along with a very quiet but hard-working guy of about the same age named Joseph.  Kay is thinking of hiring them, which would be great fun!  Wilson is wonderful; I don’t know as I’ve ever met anyone so kind.  For example, I all-out kicked him in the shin on accident while playing soccer the other day, and as he was falling over in pain all he could say was, “Are you okay?  Are you okay?”  Of course I am okay, Wilson!  I just walloped you in the shin and you’re worried about me, you crazy?

Wilson and Joseph may be much envied if they secure a position; fisi camp jobs are apparently a golden thing out here.  Just the other day I had two separate men ask me to please get them “kazi” (work) at Fisi Camp while I ran.  Wish I could have said yes, but Kay is already employing capacity.  At least camp will never be wanting for employees!  On the same run a clump of at least eight little kids ran out joyous from beside their mothers’ manyatta soon as they saw me, shaking my hand and smiling.  It’s a bit like being in a fishbowl sometimes, but the kids melt the shy and make for a happy fish.

More new people: the IRES undergraduate students have arrived, one from Duke named Tyler and one from Swarthmore named Ian.  They are both truly pleasant to have around, always wanting to help, AND they love Disney music so naturally we get along just fine.  Michelle, they, and I want to tweak the words to some good songs to be about hyenas.  Looks like we might have some darting help too – during practice yesterday, although neither had shot a gun before, both were right there next to the bull’s eye.  Nice! 

Speaking of darting, we darted Pan’s cub Mino the other day, and I can survive anything if I can survive being hit with that amount of cute.  So soft, so little, 14 kg.  Measuring his teeth would have been fruitless because he still has baby teeth.  We all got to hold him as though he were a little baby human, and I couldn’t help myself – I kissed his small sweet black muzzle before I handed him away.  I never wanted to let go.  But thank God I finally got to cuddle one of those cubs; it’s torture not being able to get out of the car and hug each and every one to pieces. 

We also darted Neon, and it doesn’t get any better than riding in the back of the hilux with a sleeping hyena, because the hilux is like a pickup: open to the wind and sun and fresh view of rolling Africa.  I was reclined back bracing Neon against myself, looking back out over it all while petting her beside me and feeling everything worth feeling.  So happy, a contentment I forgot could be ever since I was eight and my mind learned to endlessly prattle.

13:11, Sunday, 17 June, 2012

Everyone told me it’s a circus your first day out alone, and my experience did nothing to contradict them.  I set out with Tyler; I wasn’t alone by definition, but I was both driving and transcribing, with no one to look to for reassurance or correction.  First, our maglights both burned out, so it was “unIDhyena1” and unIDhyena2”, 3...4...Then one with a collar started sprinting after a tommy – I had never seen a hyena do anything more than lope, at most gently test out an antelope; you’d never guess one could have so much get-up!  It matched the frantic zig-zags of the tommy, and I was sure we were going to see a kill – something not often seen and important to transcribe!  I made a move to follow the competitors.  Well, while it probably would have been hard to follow whoever it was in the light, we hadn’t a chance with a burnt-out maglight.  Shortly we were trucking back to get a location and dejectedly continuing on, having seen nothing, only to come upon more hyenas at once than we had seen in days.  UnID’s 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10....missing behaviors, incomplete CI’s (critical incidents) all over the place.  At last it started to get light, and we could videotape for later identification.  Once it was appreciably light, I recognized my first hyena with no one there to help me, and it did indeed feel the promised good, like finishing a race or something. Thanks, Alderaan!  With a new boost of confidence we headed to the den.  Well, there is an enormo deep hole there that every other time has terrified me enough to give it an unnecessarily huge berth.  But today, what the heck?  I’ll just forget about it.  Good day to do so, with someone who has never been out on obs with me in the car, while the others are darting and can’t pick up the phone.  It’ll be fun, sitting lopsided in a hole for 40 minutes.  (Tyler claimed to still be having a great time.  You’ve never met anyone with such a splendid attitude.)  Eventually I remembered Benson was at camp, and he came to rescue us.  Tootling along again, the car starts to make a funny sound.  Out we hop, looking under the hood, checking all the fluids, but we could find nothing wrong.  Kay drove up while we still had our heads stuck under the hood.  Great position to be in when your boss drives up.  But thank goodness it’s Kay; upon hearing of my morning she laughed and merely assured me that’s how it goes.  And nothing was really wrong with the car; my mind had been playing tricks (can you blame it?).  One way or another I had completed the infamous maiden voyage, of which there can be only one.

The den is not so cheerful as usual.  We watch Foxtrot and Echo sacked out against one another, gradually growing skinnier and weaker.  They still wait out by the track as though expecting Drake to come back.  My eyes are welling up writing this; it’s no picnic to witness, and more than once den sessions have ended in tears.  I have decided to pray that some miracle adoption occurs; after all, we now know nursing from unrelated females is possible!  It could happen, right?  Still no Humphries, and shortly we are going to have to head up in a balloon with the tracking wires to locate Samburu’s collar – most likely without Samburu.  Haven’t seen Centaur or Gobi in ages; still haven’t seen Zenny at all, last summer’s favorite.  Good thing this job has an excess of rewarding aspects to outweigh the heartbreak! 

On the upside, I have discovered that one of my favorite things in the world is watching hyenas play.  Pantanal, Endor, and Crimson were really going at it the other night, wrestling and flopping on top of one another, ranks to the wind as Endor and Crimson were allowed to chew on Pantanal. Yummly bravely joined in the tussle with the big kids.    They get us all laughing so it sounds like I am watching “Everybody Loves Raymond” or “Frasier” at home with the family.

My love for these animals on a whole progresses, as though that were possible.  While I have always loved seeing hyenas, they were on par with other animals.  But now, while I am still outrageously excited with any animal, it’s special with the hyenas because I know them individually.  When we see one from afar, it’s like, who is it gonna be?!  Who am I going to get to see today?!  What are they going to be doing?  Are they looking okay?  It’s a whole different feel when you know a group of animals by name and have discerned their personalities.  While I used to have favorites, it’s getting harder and harder because they are all so perfectly unique that you can hardly say you love one more than another.

Saw a leopard this morning!  Lord, they are gorgeous with their light blue eyes and rosette spots, this one with black lines across its white chest.  It was balanced on a short limb of the aptly named Kay’s tree, jumping down and shyly refusing to return to the tommy it stashed there until we left.  It slunk about, poking its head up to see if we were gone yet, so that eventually we decided to leave it in peace.  We had followed Helios to this leopard from about a mile away, and I was surprised to see the leopard hiding from her.  Kay says that hyenas can actually steal food from and do some damage to leopards!  (So different from lions, who have as of late been staring fixatedly in pounce-position at the hyena decal on the hilux, so that I half expect them to follow our car in circles like last summer.)  Of course hyenas can’t climb, so we wondered why the leopard didn’t just stay in the tree.  Kay thinks Helios probably smelled the tommy from way far away, and hypothesizes that there is in turn some high frequency sound undetectable to our ears that antelope make when being killed; she has followed a group of suddenly perked-up hyenas four kilometers to a fresh antelope kill!

Saw one of our lab tent bats nursing!  All nestled up next to its reluctant mother, who flew away to a different area of the awning pole the first three times it attempted. The monitor lizards by the trash pit and river continue to crack me up in how skittish they are.  They make so much noise trying to get away from you that their run can hardly qualify as an antipredator strategy.  Granted, they are somehow very quick, if only in an awkward undulating primitive horizontal-upper-arm-and-leg fashion.  I did have some success as I lay on my rock peering over the edge at a lower outcrop last Sunday, finally getting an agama lizard to chill out enough for proper observation.  But that’s a far cry from the monitors, who have no meditative ability whatsoever.  Every anxiety order under the sun rolled into a species right there.

Well hello talkative baboon eating outside my tent window!