10:20, Tuesday, 24 July, 2012

Wow!  I am finally caught up on my work and simultaneously have a little computer battery to spare.

We have had indecisive weather the past week.  On the afternoon of July 17^th, I felt uncomfortably hot in shorts and a T-shirt.  I rarely become uncomfortably hot in any capacity, and I certainly hadn’t experienced that feeling in the dry heat of Kenya before.  Then, on the 18^th, I stayed in three layers for almost the entire day.  Benson gets especially distressed when it’s cold.  He wears a wool hat and pulls his hood up tight over and around it, rubbing his hands together and repeatedly exclaiming, “Cold!”.  Clearly, he needs to come to Michigan.  THEN he will know cold (given global warming doesn’t shift all of that in the near future).  The 19^th reminded me of autumn at home.  It was a lovely feeling, the earth blanketed in low gray clouds, the air cool just above discomfort.  It even smelled right, and the trees about my tent tend to drop lots of yellow and brown leaves on windy days, which it was, so they drifted down as if to convince me that home is here too. 

Moving beyond temperature, the dry season is definitely upon us.  We are half choked with dust driving down the Mara roads, and vehicles in the distance throw up a fantastic cloud as though Taz the blue devil is about.  My contacts quickly become uncomfortably coated in grit, so I blink like a swooning flirt throughout obs.  But hey – we haven’t been stuck in ages!  My rainboots are collecting dust bunnies under the bed, and I haven’t been down to the river to wash mud off my sandals in over a month.

Charlie received a big welcome from who we have now christened Gerald the Elephant (we saw who we think was the culprit next morning).  I had to dodge an enormous pile of ele poo walking down the path right in front of Charlie’s tent one of the first mornings after our return; I guess we don’t have to wonder what Gerald thinks of him!  I was so upset to see that I hadn’t woken up AGAIN to an elephant, with tall tree bushes half-smashed and branches everywhere announcing that Gerald’s visit had not been a quiet affair.  When I glared at Charlie, shaking my finger and saying, “You lucky lucky you,” he assured me he’d gladly trade.  “I thought I was going to die!”

We have been trying to dart a Talek East hyena, since it’s a good idea to practice on a different clan from that which you study.  That way, if it’s a bit shaky and the hyena has a lasting impression of the vehicle as a monstrous beast, we haven’t lost the confidence of one of our study subjects.  (Behavioral observation of carnivores does not work well if the subjects are scared of the car.)  Trying to dart Talek East comes with what I view as a sizeable bonus: half an hour of extra sleep.  We don’t have to leave until six as the territory is that which surrounds camp.  Since Nairobi, I haven’t been keeping up on my target practice much, so for now Benson is our main man.  He’s become quite the marksman.  On the 16^th, I was in the driving seat as we searched for a hyena.  Trekking through a new territory, albeit exciting, was not easy.  There is a topography shift across Sunrise Lugga, that which nearly constitutes the border between Talek East and West.  Instead of continuing with traditional grassy plan, the land becomes more bushy and hilly, with some areas of enormously tall grass.  I felt like someone out of one of Gary Larsen’s The Far Side cartoons as we chased a doubtlessly snickering hyena through grass that was taller than the roof of the car, expecting at any moment to fall into a hole and see the hyena dart off with a witty thought bubble making fun of our human oblivion placed perfectly above its head.  Eventually I decided the peril was too much for the car, and abandoned the adventure for the road in pursuit of someone less clever.

We finally discovered where all of the hyenas were, naturally across the lugga in an area of appreciably shorter grass on a comfortably flat plain.  Ten of them, plus the most beautiful hyena I’ve ever seen – light with striking black designs including a perfect circled triangle on its left shoulder (since I first discovered it in a territory we are newly charting, I quickly grabbed rights to name it José after my brother Joe - Joe was taken long ago in the master list), were gathered around a big male lion covered in blood, majestically licking the ribcage of a wildebeest carcass that he and his comrades had no doubt stolen from the surrounding hunters.  A couple of subadult male lions, adult lionesses, and subadult females were also present.  One of the subadult females needed to work on her stereotypical majestic lion appeal, as a long string of God-knows what organ hung grotesquely from her mouth as she unsuccessfully attempted to chew.  A subadult male lion wrenched my heart; he had an enormous bloody hole square in the middle of his forehead, and sat a bit off to the side blinking in the sunlight, clearly in pain.  I can only think an antelope or warthog horn could have resulted in such a gapingly deep wound.  Our old hyena Moon Pie’s broken jaw and this lion’s suffering remind me that hunting is perilous even for the fierce predator, whose prey ceaselessly fight to the death to protect their most prized possession of life.

Needless to say, this was nowhere near an ideal darting situation, and the story has remained the same since.  We just aren’t having any luck!  Yesterday was the first time we had the perfect situation – lone hyena, no lions, middle of a flat plain -  but then we discovered that hyenas can either army crawl or have secret underground bunkers; we watched our target sack out in the grass before being nowhere to be found when we drove over to the very place we watched her go down.  Another even more plausible hypothesis is that she had some of J.K. Rowling’s floo powder at hand.

We picked up Nora the same day we saw the lions and hyenas in East. Hooray!  She has returned to get a better feel for the Talek clans, made possible by Kay’s now-empty tent.  Therefore, we get Julie AND Nora, and are therefore one big happy Fisi Family.  Poor Joseph, Jackson, and Wilson have to cook heaps!

Was introduced to the Fig Tree cubs the night of the 16^th , against the backdrop of a mounded gently-dark gray and pink-topped cloud castle; the hyenas in the elusive Fig Tree clan are finally showing their faces.  The first hyena I named as a research assistant – Jar-Jar of the alien lineage – has grown into a beautiful little thing!  There are so many others to keep him company now – Pyro, Zurg, Marlin, Moma, Smithsonian, Mr. Darcy, Karen, and of course Elmo.  Little Karen’s face is so cute I had to be physically restrained from jumping out of the car and cuddling her; it’s becoming quite a worry, really.  While we were sitting watching the cubs, I got a most exciting text from Julie.  They had seen Yogurt nursing the two little black cubs at the den!!!  They knew I would be especially excited, continually mocked for my elaborate plans of “hiding the car in the bushes with everything but the headlights turned off” in order to confirm her motherhood...hard to effectively hide a bajillion-pound cruiser when you must see what’s happening, but I had to try for something.  Naturally no such plan was in place when Yogurt’s motherly stance was effortlessly happened upon, but I’m not complaining!  The little black cubs finally have names, although we had to expand the lineage to naturally-occuring gases in general since the only noble gas left was helium.  So now we have them: welcome to the master list, Hydrogen and Helium!

Speaking of Yogurt, we need a new category of morbidly obese since the night of the 16^th; I have never seen such a butterball hyena – I don’t even think any of the hyenas at the night of the bush buffalo feast  could have topped her.  She came loping (God knows how) into the den with the leg of some poor antelope, big as a hot air balloon with legs poking out below.  It was beyond ridiculous, and had us all in fits of laughter.  Good thing Alfredo stole the leg, or Yogurt might have had a coronary disaster on her paws.

The record-long transcription of the people in camp goes to me: 11 pages.  The clan war followed by a lion interaction and non-stop hyenas wandering in between honored me with a title that one can only appreciate after the fact.  UGH.  It took what seemed like forever to sort through everything on my chaotic DVR recording.  I earned the title on the 17^th, three days after the actual occurrence.  The same night I woke up to some strange dream rather than the sound of the elephants around my tent, but who cares how I woke up; the point is that I was awake, and they were there!  I beamed away into my pillow at their stomach sounds oscillating through the canvas as they munched on leaves.  I was hoping to hear them rumble to one another, so happy my heart could burst, but before I knew it I had fallen asleep to dream about elephants back home in America.  Maybe I’ll have to fly some home – no chance they'll exceed the weight limit.

It’s not only been elephants; our camp has been Grand Central Station lately.  A night following the elephants, I woke up to the thrilling presence of a sawing leopard directly outside my tent.  Of course it was wonderful and amazing, but my blood went cold at the thought that maybe I’d attracted it by sleep-talking, and it would know a gourmet cousin to its favorite foods of baboons and vervets lay but a canvas-width away.  But as usual, it moved off and I soon returned to one of my senseless dreams.  I nearly hit a giraffe pulling out of the driveway yesterday, a lion roared rather close during dinner last night, a very close elephant trumpet at dinner the night before.  Safari ant lines weave throughout camp; just when we thought they had gone, Maina was over working on one of our cars, and started doing a bit of a jig after lying under it.  He was full of the things, poor guy!  Yet I am endlessly fascinated by the sentinel lines and ladders they create around the manic flood of a main procession: two lines facing outward on either side or an encompassing tunnel interlaced like the metal nettish domes made out of interlocked triangles at a kid park.  The warriors, three times the size of the others with giant heads, look particularly menacing as they rear up on their hind legs and wield their pincers.  Charlie’s introduction to the bite of a warrior safari ant came the first day we returned from Nairobi...the wildlife sure isn't giving him any chance to get acclimated!

Also exciting, pair of white-tailed mongooses is hanging around Fig Tree, which is nice since we don’t get to see them all that often.  Until now I’ve never seen more than one at a time.  Further, spring hare have boinged by following emergence from Suicide Crossing a fair few times lately – I will never forget how big they appeared in the Natural History Museum after being dwarfed by the savanna out here.  Such delightful creatures, their locomotion exactly that of Tigger. Ah!  Just realized the time and I have to run; we are giving a talk to the Talek Schoolchildren (ages 3-16) about hyenas.  Since I haven’t posted in so long, I am going to forego proofreading and ask any readers to forgive undo wordiness and dragging on (my two main offences), plus spelling mistakes, typos, etc.