21:23, Tuesday, 14 August, 2012

Sunday morning a big tractor/bulldozer came whipping down the road way faster than anybody should drive anything, let alone an enormo thing like that.  I quickly pulled to the side, and the driver waved vigorously at us as he passed.  Dave shook his head, “Oh, now that makes sense; it’s Segurian.”  It was Segurian!  The character from last summer.  By the looks of things, he hasn’t changed a bit.

Sunday night was wonderful, because it was the first night I went out on obs, out in the car onto the Maasai Mara, entirely alone.  It was just the hyenas and me.  I pinched myself, but when I opened my eyes I was still driving, free as a bird through a conservancy in Africa.  I sat at the den with Waffles, Sauer, Peepers, Sauer’s two little cubs, Digs (who has a beautiful right D-notch that makes her unmistakable), and a new hyena named Angie until well past dark.  I talked to them more than I otherwise would have, but I think I did the best job I’ve ever done recording behaviors; ended up with seven pages of data!  Angie’s apparent anxiety disorder really added up.  She was constantly groaning and sniffing Sauer and Peepers as they were sacked out, ears back head-bobbing away.  I almost got out of the car and t2 lunged her myself for being so pesky, but I guess Sauer and Peepers are used to her constant need for reassurance; over half an hour of near constant groaning and in-your-face sniffing, and there were only about four aggressions!  Mind-boggling; I didn’t know hyenas could be so patient.  And Angie, you are one of a kind.

To my despair, Philimon left for his 2-week leave yesterday morning.  I gave him a big hug, and he said he’s not worried because we will see each other again.  I miss him already, but found out he has five kids: three girls and two boys.  He was so excited to see them, therefore I couldn’t help but be excited too.  Jorji, who looks about 30, has six kids: four girls and two boys.  He says he misses them when away.  It would be hard to be far from one’s family for four week stretches at a time, and when these guys go home, it isn’t to rest.  Philimon has tons of corn he will planting throughout the two weeks; he says he has to rent a tractor and hire help.  It makes me tired just thinking of it!

Moses returned Monday night!  It was super to see him.  Jorji told him I was coming, and he said he remembered everything about me but my name as soon as he saw the picture I had brought for him in the kitchen tent.  Moses is less quiet than the other two; the amount of chatter in camp has considerably increased. And he has a perfect smile.  Unlike Jorji and Philimon, who have one wife, Moses has two and many kids.  When I asked after Moses’ break, he said he and almost his entire family had malaria and were in and out of the hospital.  Planting fields of corn as a break suddenly looked mighty attractive!

Last night was a happening night in Happy Zebra.  At poop o’clock, we collected four poop samples within five minutes.  Mumbai, Shangri-La, Snapper, and Sawtooth.  There was nowhere safe to put them but in the back of the Maruti.  Oh.  My.  I very nearly died of asphyxiation by poop.

Poop smell aside, it was excellent watching Queen Pike at the den.  Poor Pike just wanted to play with her subjects, but they were so nervous playing with the alpha.  She attempted to play with Ojibway, but Ojibway looked terribly uncomfortable the entire time, ears flat back and open-mouth appeasing throughout.  Then Pike tried Muon, Ojibway’s cub.  Muon was even more nervous, continually trying to combine ears back submissive posture backing off with sneaking away, but Pike just lumbered blithely after him.  She was like a president at a social event, wanting nothing more than to be treated like a normal person.  But as a president’s dinner guests probably watch every word they say, so Ojibway and Muon were cautious of their every move, almost begging Pike to instead aggress and get it over with like a typical ruler. 

After dinner, we hauled out tubes to pack in the poop.  Sitting poking at Mumbai’s impossible hair-filled liquid mess, I had to contemplate what my life has become.  The stupid stuff wouldn’t go into the tube no matter how much I shoved with the popsicle stick.  Then, perhaps the grossest thing that’s ever happened to me, I actually flung some spatterings of it onto my forehead! UGH!  Leaping up, I rushed to the toilet paper, making a huge fuss as Dave stopped scraping his poop sample, very confused.  When he discovered what had happened, boy did he ever laugh.  Hilarious, Dave.

18:36, Wednesday, 15 August, 2012

Yesterday morning we saw Judas in South!  My ex-hyena boyfriend.  Sorry Judas, but I’m a one hyena at a time kind of girl, and Gaza’s got me now.  But my story stays that Judas betrayed me for a cuter hyena (and maybe 30 pieces of silver too).  Either way, it was sure great to see him!

It was our last chance for darting before Dave had to switch to doing his monthly prey transects in the mornings, and we had no luck.  We saw about every hyena in the clan minus the three targets, no joke.  Pala has grown an awfully lot since last summer!  But she’s no less playful.  During the patch of time we didn’t see anything, we exercised our brains by translating everything we said into both Spanish and Swahili.  The Spanish was exceptionally difficult / difícil/ ngumu, but we were both surprised how much came back when we tried. 

I appreciate the laundry mamas very much after washing my underwear yesterday.  The guys here prefer not to wash women’s underwear, understandably so.  It was good for me to remember how much work goes into hand-washing something; maybe I’ll be a bit more careful with the barbeque sauce from now on.  However, it was a nice feeling of Laura Ingalls Wilder-accomplishment once they were hanging out to dry.

Yesterday I cried.  I cried because a gecko found its way into my shower towel, and I didn’t know it was there.  When I whipped it off the wooden stick wall, I found wriggling bits of what I thought must be some worm or parasite.  Looking down,  I realized they were bits of a tiny gecko’s tail.  I not only deprived him of a stellar defense mechanism, but he had a big hole scraped on the side of his head.  I tearfully brought him to my tent, lay my towel in the water basin I had earlier washed my clothes in and put him there.  I’m not sure how much geckos need immediate water or what their favorite food is, but I put some water in the cap to my malaria medicine and tried not to think about what I was doing as I profusely apologized to three innocent ants while swiftly squishing them for him to eat.  Returning from obs, Patrick was gone, and I felt hopeful.  Then this morning I saw his tiny tailless form plastered to the roof of my tent!  But he had fallen to the ground gone by this afternoon, and is now buried beneath a pretty white stone outside, much like the poor spider Janie and I accidentally killed in our attempts to move it safely outside for Lia’s sake.  Sometimes it’s awful being so big! I did have a look at Patrick’s feet before burying him: what a triumph of evolution!  I could see the little pads that were magnified a thousand times in more than one of my college biology books, little propagators of the Van der Waals attractions which allow these little guys to stick to things. 

All in all, yesterday was just hard on the heart.  Nature can be cruel, sometimes to an unsettling point that awakens philosophical questions with no apparent answers.  We drove by where a wildebeest crossing was occurring on evening obs.  There, just up from the river, was a zebra, walking with its intestines literally hanging out of its left side.  It seemed to be in shock as it slowly walked forward, and I could hardly bear to look at it.  If only it hadn’t fought so to survive against that crocodile it might not be suffering anymore!  I prayed that something would make a meal of it soon, and tried not to think about it any longer.  But when I see a creature suffering, I feel somewhere it’s wrong I should so lack suffering that I can conceivably forget about their plight as they exist alongside me in such horrendous agony.  It’s not like when I saw the wildebeest dying last summer and felt a quiet calm and beauty in its natural passage.  This suffering was violent and gruesome, and I just wanted to erase it despite its being part of nature.  There is nothing I love more than the natural biological world, but it’s easy to forget that it’s not all hunky-dorey.

Then, at the den, I got to see more baby pigs.  But these baby pigs, the tiniest and cutest I’ve ever seen, were bacon for our hyenas.  One minute we were watching everyone lounge by the den, the next Waffles wanders off to return about ten minutes later with a freshly killed baby warthog.  Droopy had another, although I can’t imagine he’d killed it.  Dave was disappointed that Waffles didn’t aggress on Peepers when Peepers came up and took some of her hog without a fuss from either; he’s desperate to know who is the true alpha.  I think it’s neat that they’re so tolerant of one another.  I saw my first maternal interventions when Peepers chased subadult Polar (bears lineage) away from the feeding Droopy.  Peepers had no interest in eating anymore, but she wouldn’t tolerate someone stealing from her kid.  Dave thinks she’s a bad mom, but I think she just has different mothering tactics; she didn’t leave Droopy’s side the rest of the evening, guarding him as he ate.  Maybe she doesn’t enjoy nursing much, but that doesn’t mean she can’t provide in other ways.

On our way back to camp, we had to drive through what has been termed the “Hippo Minefield” in order to check on the whereabouts of some lions we hadn’t been able to accurately count due to tour cars.  There were hippos everywhere on either side of the road, crossing the road, making us nervous by standing as though wanting to cross the road yet refusing to do so and forcing us to sandwich through them.  Once through the minefield, we shined around only to find the lions had gone.  The gauntlet had been for mere glory.

Today I rode in the car for 9 hours with Dave as we drove all of North Territory, counting every mammal and ostrich we saw, taking a detection distance with a range-finder and a compass bearing for each group.  Maybe it doesn’t sound like much fun, but the drive was beautiful, and I loved being out in the day for a change.  We got to hang with the diurnals; the treat of seeing a lilac-breasted roller was a commonality at this time of day.  Big crocs lounged in the sun by the river, those who weren’t participating in the migration crossing that had drawn about twenty vehicles, and a juvenile one floated in Stank Ho (I had no part in naming that water hole).  I got a picture of a little snake, rustling as it climbed up a patch of grass; it had a pretty white belly and was otherwise black.  I fully intend to look it up in our reptile book later.  Saw three baby warthogs, just about as small and this time thankfully alive, doo-doo-doodling after their mother across the road, tails straight in the air.  All of the antelope were out and actively feeding/wandering about.  Baby hippos stood amongst their parents who slept in a perfect row of lazy lard along the bank.  And we saw an elephant coming up out of the river, the lower half of its body darkened from its recent swim, approaching a group of eland who nervously backed into the woods, dewlaps characteristically swinging side to side.

The most exciting sighting of the morning was a black rhino!  I almost fell off my seat in joy; my first rhino of 2012!  No tourists had yet spotted it, and it was just wandering about through the grass and amongst the bushes.  I watched it until it was out of sight, which is a while when you consider the size of a rhino.

We got out for brunch a safe 350 meters from the nearest herd of cape buffalo.  The morning was gorgeous, the sky blue, the green leaves at the top  of the little woods trees lining the road contrasted against it.  Boiled eggs, avocado, tomatoes, onions, bananas, oranges, and Jorji’s amazing cinnamon rolls.

Counting the zebra and wildebeest around the crossing area was a challenge, and the vocalizing zebra did nothing to keep me from losing my focus.  I’m always so fascinated by what makes them vocalize upon reaching the other side; are they worked up in the form of an adrenaline rush over what just happened, looking for a lost conspecific, shouting relief or victory?  We may never know, but we hear their prodigious yells in the distance even from camp during the crossing time.  I was also distracted by three lost-looking wildebeest calves.  They sweetly hung together; I don’t think a-one of them knew where its mother had gone.  Further down the river two wildebeest, probably drowned, floated in the rapids.  I assume a fair amount of calves are orphaned by the river and its scaled prehistoric inhabitants.

Driving the last part of North territory made me want to lie down in the tall grass and take a nap beneath the puffy white clouds that had gathered.  There was only tall reddish brownish amber grass, butterflies, big hills, and some distant elephants as far as the eye could see.  A much deserved break after a morning of laborious counting.

Miss the Talek hyenas.  There is no winning with traveling; upon my return, I know I will miss these hyenas too.  It’s much as I couldn’t be happier here in Kenya, but ache to see my family, friends, cat and Grandpa’s horse again.  Sounds like Julia and Benson will finally be returning from Nairobi tomorrow, and I will catch a lift back to Talek camp on Friday.

Wonder if the lions will be talkative again tonight.  Their roars have replaced hippo munches as my most recent lullaby.