21:42, Sunday, 23 September, 2012

The days have passed wonderfully since I’ve returned, as well as quickly.  There is always something to do, which causes time to fly faster than I like.  Yet it’s good to have a rhythm, especially one filled with things I so love.  It’s a rhythm, and yet I have completely lost all sense of time in terms of what day of the week it is; nature writes time without a calendar.  It’s a fantastic turn around from America’s obsession with schedules. 

Good thing I returned when I did; Lord knows I missed enough while away!  Charlie and Julia (the other graduate student doing two years of work in the Mara, along with Dave, and who will be switching between camps) saw a leopard kill.  Not only did they see a leopard kill, but they saw a water mongoose, an animal I had no idea even existed.  Not only did they see a leopard kill and a water mongoose, but they saw a puff adder smack dab in the middle of the path to the lab tent.  (After which time Eli proudly informed them that he had moved it off the path with a stick!  I can’t believe anyone would try that.  Only Eli.)  It was high time I returned to see the hyenas and other explosion of life and unexpected happenings.  Enough of this Nairobi stuff!

The young man I took to the clinic to have his knee wrapped brought me some smoked Maasai yogurt in thanks.  He was all smiles, so different than when his eyes were glazed over in pain and fear, and I was touched by his gracious gesture. The yogurt itself was  pretty tasty, especially considering it is concocted by leaving milk sitting in a gourd with smoke for an extended period of time.  The thought doesn’t exactly scream delicious.

I can hardly keep my eyes open.  I have switched to writing before bed so that I can focus on other work during the day, but thus far I haven’t been able to stay awake for long enough to get much down.

21:59, Monday, 24 September, 2012

Hyenas are my joy.  I never fathomed I could love them so much.  The Talek West clan is doing excellently overall, although we are starting to worry over some individuals we haven’t seen in a while, including Sukuma, Violet, Centaur, Lyle, Sloth, Foxtrot and more.  On the upside, we saw Lust the other day!  I shrieked in joy when she stood and I realized who she was. The dead cub can’t have been her like we thought; I’m wondering now if it was Violet, Foxtrot, or even Sloth, the sibling we thought was fine.

Unseasonable rain kept us in layered clothes and playing board games for a few days after I returned, but eventually it let up enough for us to go out.  At this time I was greeted by the sight of  Minotaur and Crimson playing tug-of-war over a wildebeest tail.  Most of the wildebeest have moved on, but carcasses are still plentiful, resulting in a need for over half of the hyenas to invest in a gym membership.  Julia and I saw a couple of healthy little 4-week-old black cubs at Dave’s Den, doubtlessly benefiting from the wildebeest transformed into milk within their mothers’ bodies.  I am ecstatic that we have some new little ones!  We suspect they are Carter’s cubs, but Charlie stubbornly holds that they must be Tilt’s.  We see both Carter and Tilt at the den all the time now; the race is on to see who is nursing the newest little furballs, temporarily called “Riff” and “Raff.”  We all kind of hope Carter is the mother so that we can name them Princess Peach (PPCH) and Toad (TOAD); Carter’s lineage of Mario is much more fun than Tilt’s lineage of “famous children,” of which the most recent member is Blue Ivy.

Julia’s research is superb, one part involving putting out novel objects to see how different cubs and subadults react toward them.  The first object she has been using is a little blue stool.  We set it out at the den one night; at first none of the cubs gave two hoots about it.  But as soon as one kid showed interest in it, the blue stool became the toy to have.  Scamper came over and started to sniff and chew, and eventually Xena decided all the commotion was worth her time and got a hold of one of the plastic horizontal bars, lifting it and carrying it in the air, the stool about 3/4^ths her size and awkwardly shaped. 

A laughable sight to behold!  Very different from Penne’s reaction the previous night; he looked at and bobbed his head, sniffing for a few seconds before moving on.  Variable personalities are hard to measure, but they’re certainly not hard to see.

Hydrogen and Helium are getting big, starting to develop spot patterns so that we can reliably tell them apart.  Their older sister Xenon always seems to be hanging around the den playing with them, and big brother Neon has made several appearances recently as well.  We even periodically see Yogurt, miraculously, for more than two seconds at a time before she runs off.  She was with the cubs at Pothole Den this evening, the new den we almost named Paradise Den because it is out in the middle of Lone Tree Plain, a fair distance from any pesky luggas or bushes that get in the way of IDing individuals and observing behavior.  Not to mention it’s a stone’s throw from Dave’s Den, which is directly through Teapot Tree Crossing on the opposite side of the lugga.  The newly christened subadults (only Hydrogen, Helium, and the little black cubs haven’t graduated),  frequent the area between the two dens, while the adults who don’t have young ones are hanging out at a beautiful rocky area named Den One Creek’s Dip, or “The Dip,” as we call it.  There is a lovely little thin pond in a lugga lined with a few trees and bushes, and everyone likes to laze about there.  Roosevelt has even been there; she is so beautiful.  Being one of Navaho’s gang, she previously wasn’t seen much, but now she, Obama, and Carter are regulars.  They are all three becoming some of my favorites, although I still don’t think I can be said to have favorites (apart from possibly Alice and Rebmann).  

20:41, Friday, 21 September, 2012

That wasn’t the end of our car adventures.  Oh no, it was just the beginning.  A couple days later we had seven guys plus me all pushing our tiny car in the parking lot of Galleria (where we get our groceries) while Michelle sat inside trying to jumpstart it.  Little Miss Sunshine style.  Annnnnd after going around the entire section of parking lot (turns and all) it still wouldn’t start, that is not until mechanic #9,567 at the nearby gas station came over and fixed the problem.  A night or two later we are on our way to have Michelle’s last night dinner with some of the balloon pilots who happened to be in town.  Bumper to bumper traffic, and our car stops.  Honks all over the place, although I don’t know what anyone expected us to do.  Thank the Lord, apparently there is a mechanic everywhere in Kenya (and I’m starting to see why).  An hour spent at a garage right there on the side of the road with mechanic #9,568, a mechanic who happened to double as a pastor of a nearby international faith Christian Church.  Interesting combination.  Back in traffic, and after not moving even a kilometer for two hours, we realized we were doomed.  We called the balloon pilots, and ended up eating the dinner that was supposed to be in a fancy restaurant at a Kenchic Inn next to an Oilibya gas station, all dressed up.  We were so hungry by that time, and demolished a chicken and huge stack of fries between the two of us.  You never knew a Kenchic Inn meal could taste so good.  And honestly, it was fitting.  Michelle and I aren’t fancy pants girls, and I’m glad our last proper meal together was just so.

It was hard dropping Michelle off; I missed her as soon as she walked out of sight.  Luckily I could look forward to meeting JACK DARWIN, a name we had pronounced with boisterous strength all summer.  Honestly, with a name like that, how can you not exaggerate things?  He turned out to be a kind person with a good sense of humor, 32 years old when I would have guessed 22.  I was glad to be the first one to introduce him to Africa, even if it was in the form of Nairobi for a couple of days.

Jack is from California, and after driving him downtown to get health insurance, I was informed that driving in Nairobi is crazier than driving in San Francisco.  I couldn’t understand how that was possible, but Jack made a good point: in San Francisco there are rules.  Here, I would get honked at if I didn’t run the only red light for ten kilometers in either direction.  Yet there’s something satisfying about the ordered chaos; it always feels fantastic when you are driving back, perhaps because you’ve accomplished something you never thought you could, perhaps because you are simply high on the fact that you’re miraculously not dead. 

We stopped on the side of the street to pick out a new choo for Serena Camp on the way back from the health insurance expedition; baboons destroyed their, TPing the surrounding trees in the process like a bunch of mischievous high schoolers.  Following the purchase, I got to witness Jack wielding a choo over his head as he sprinted through traffic.  Not a sight you see every day.

On the big drive back to the Mara, I had my first legitimate experience with the high lift jack, a phobia of mine.  We got a flat tire about 13 kilometers out from Narok, thank goodness after we had passed the freeway, Great Rift Valley escarpment and major hills.  Because I cannot pull the jack’s lever down without throwing my entire weight on it, I instructed Jack on how to use his namesake and prayed the entire time he was cranking.  We managed to get the tire changed, and when we had secured the jack back into the car, an enormous relief washed over me.  Self-sufficiency is a good feeling, and I found the experience overall quite fun – after all, it was an adventure!

22:09, Monday, 17 September, 2012

This Nairobi trip was very enjoyable considering how much I miss being in camp when away there.  Michelle and I went out dancing two of the nights.  One reason having her around was so excellent: it forced me to pop my comfort bubble.  Without her I doubtless would have stayed in and read or worked, and I definitely wouldn’t have been convinced to wear mascara for the first time ever (first, and probably last the way I couldn’t itch my eyes when I needed to).  Hilarious Michelle: we talked to a couple of, well, interesting British guys on the dance floor, and as soon as we turned away she crossed her eyes and said, “I am so not excited to go home.” 

Not as wild as camp, but still way more so than any city I’ve ever encountered, Nairobi was full as ever of hyraxes screaming bloody murder, skinks crawling up the curtains, ibises cawing like there was no tomorrow and monkeys balancing on telephone wires.  The ibises had Michelle and I up at 6 one morning, their obnoxious “WRAAAAA WRAAAAA”s jolting us out of sleep and holding us captive there.  We ended up so desperate that we opened our window and cawed back at them in an attempt to simultaneously shut them up and blend in so as not to wake the neighbors.  The result was a horrendous impression that did no more than to make us giggle like maniacs.  I entertained the idea of going out and running beneath the tree trying to scare them before Michelle wisely talked me out of it.  At long last, someone began throwing stones at them from the courtyard, and they flew off to leave us in peace.

The monkeys on the wire were adorable.  First, an adult female went tight-roping over, having only slight difficulty keeping her balance.  But then her young one followed, flollaping about all over the place so that I seriously worried it would fall.  Once it finally made it to within about a foot of its mother (waiting on the post at the other end), it all out leapt into her arms, and she hugged it tight for a prolonged moment before looking about and continuing on to the next wire with her kid hanging from her belly.  Now that is talent.

This was the trip I had to learn everything, so I didn’t hesitate to take the keys, even when we went downtown.  Coming back from an errand downtown, and everything was going fine.  I was still breathing: cool, calm, relaxed.  But wait, that’s not how my life goes.  It violates some rule written high in the universe that nothing should be a piece of cake.  So out shot our spark plug, and our car shuttered to a stop on the side of Kenyatta Avenue, a rushing highway.  I locked the doors and prayed while Michelle took the boiling hot plug off to find a mechanic; thank God there was one right around the corner, because neither of us had any idea that the thing was even a spark plug.  A kind mechanic came, Michelle got in the driver’s seat, and the mechanic and I began to push.  What a feeling of utter hilarity to watch your shadow push a car across three lanes of traffic, holding everyone up.  Then, at the top of the next hill, Michelle started to slip.  I began tugging the car the other way, desperately worried she would go whizzing uncontrollably down the hill.  But the mechanic looked at me and said, “She’ll be fine, she’s got brakes.” So it was: there goes Michelle.  In downtown Nairobi with nothing but brakes and a steering wheel.  I freaked out and attempted to run after her, but the mechanic just walked as though out for a Sunday stroll, making me feel obligated to slow down. Michelle told me later that she was wondering why the heck we weren’t sprinting after her.  But she managed to grace the turn into the center block.  Some dude who was selling newspapers or something randomly started to help us push back across the street (I love people who just pop out of nowhere and help you out), until finally we made it to the mechanic’s and had the plugs tightened.  Phew! 

23:03, Tuesday, 11 September, 2012

Avarice has come back!  When I first came she was always around, and then she seemingly disappeared until recently, a few days before Michelle and I left for Nairobi.  Avarice is the delightful subadult with a light color and calligraphy “M” on her side.  She always seems to be poking about in everyone’s business, even though she’s a low-ranker – kind of like her sister Vanity.  I’m glad we’re seeing her again.

I had some company running for the first time!  Dave stayed in Talek for a while around the 25^th of August to start his censuses on this side of the park, and he came running with me!  I always work harder when running with someone because it increases consciousness of my pace.  We made it further than I ever had before, reaching a lovely bush thicket something like that surrounding camp but not quite as dense.  A little path ran down toward the river, and I’d like to return and explore.

Michelle and I took Vanessa and Delorance, some girlfriends of ours from Talek, out to see the hyenas on the night of the 25^th.  They absolutely loved them, and it did my heart good to see some Maasai so excited about fisi.  One mind at a time.  All we have to do is change one mind at a time, if only the biological world can continue to gasp air in the meantime.

The same night Michelle and I returned home to find a dinner of chipate, guacamole, lentils, and salsa (probably my favorite meal here).  Dave and Charlie had gone to give a talk at a lodge and were invited to stay and eat; therefore, Michelle and I had the whole chipate dinner to ourselves.  I ate three chipate, which gave me a horrendous stomachache afterwards.  Michelle also made me spit up my tea by making some funny comment whilst I still had my mouth full.  I’d known it all along,  but somehow it really hit just then how much I am going to miss her.

22:23, Wednesday, 12 September, 2012

On the morning of August 26^th we saw a lion/hyena interaction, or at least the aftermath of one.  Seven lionesses and a whole bunch of our hyenas were way out by Euphorbia Lugga, the lugga which appropriately houses a couple of prominent euphorbia trees.  The lionesses soon walked off, and our hyenas dispersed shortly thereafter.  I’d never seen so many full-grown lionesses together all at once; it’s a shame I couldn’t get pictures to see if some are the same from last summer.

Michelle had her leaving party that night.  We ate with the balloon pilots at G and G’s, the little restaurant in Talek that makes delicious kuku choma (grilled chicken).  We have to call ahead so they can go outside and catch a chicken to kill, a chicken that has lived its life as it should – roaming free outdoors and behaving like a chicken.  (I’m currently reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollen, and am abhorred at the food system in America.)  After G and G’s, we went to a tiny bar in Talek and danced.  Something about Africa has got me liking to dance, which is a feat level with moving mountains.  Or maybe it’s just Michelle; I guess we’ll see now that she has left.  Also at the party, I hit it off with our mechanic Maina (who I mentioned meeting back in May), and that is all I’m going to say about that.  Well, that and sorry Kay, but no discounts on car repairs yet!

On the following evening, we saw Carter at Dave’s Den!  I have never seen Carter before, the mysterious bottom-of-the-hierarchy hyena from Navaho’s presidents’ lineage who disappears for months at a time.  I really hope we can get a GPS collar on her, because everyone is dying to know where she goes.  We hardly ever see her cubs, either.  Michelle did see her sister Obama the next day though!  Her snare scar is enormous and black, but it’s looking better and better every time we see her. 

Back to G and G’s for goat with the boisterous balloon pilots on the 28^th.  As the others finished their food, I went off to Rafiki Garage (Maina’s place) while our car was getting fixed; the gas tank had to be completely removed from the bottom and cleaned.  Those gas tanks are amazingly huge.  It makes me ache to think of all the fumes we put into the air with carnivore research.  You just can’t win 100% toward conservation in a world so sunk in oil.

Michelle had a rough go that night on her final obs.  She told me she doesn’t know as she has ever cried so hard.  I started to cry when she was saying goodbye to Benson; good grief, I’m gonna be a wreck when my turn comes.  Don’t really want to think about it.  Jackson made her a goodbye cake, and on the morning of the 29^th we set off for Nairobi.  Wrenched away from the hyenas yet again.  But I’m glad I got to spend some quality time with Michelle, that’s for sure.

Along the way, we gave a ride to two Maasai guys and a young girl of probably 15.  I tried not to nod off as Michelle drove and the man in the back talked endlessly about his insecticide business.  When he finally mentioned the reason for their trip, that the young girl was feeling ill in the stomach, I didn’t think anything of it and asked, “Oh, and is he her father?”  The other man had to be at least 50.  “Mume.”  Oh, mume, not baba.  Husband.  That old man was her husband.  I know it happens regularly in this culture, but to witness that beautiful girl with such an ancient husband who is very possibly older than her father gave me the urge to knock both men’s heads together and ask them how this is acceptable.  I can’t imagine she’s happy or wanted such an arrangement, and briefly entertained ideas of throwing the two males out of the car and driving her away to a place she might smile.

I drove up the escarpment, along the freeway, and later on in the week downtown with something akin to confidence.  Don’t know where that confidence came from, especially with some of the stories I have to tell (coming soon...), but I wasn’t much scared this time.  My knuckles didn’t turn white as Newt Gingrich’s hair like before. 

20:46, Monday, 10 September, 2012

The 22^nd was a day to remember, for better or for worse.  We were following Gaza near Dave’s Den when I looked at the ground and started; there was a dead hyena staring up at me.  It gives you a jolt to see your species of study as the one dead, seeming so out of place that the animals who are always chewing on the dead remains of other species should ever be the dead carcass themselves.  Then comes the realization this isn’t only a member of your study species, but that you probably knew this animal.  All of this fires through the neurons of your brain before you know what you are thinking, and within a second of seeing that hyena head I had the strangest of feelings.

It turned out it was a biggish cub, at least a couple days dead judging by the maggots and rotting green body.  We could not tell who it was as hair only remained on its head; the rest of its body had been stripped of it.  Tufts lying around teased us by promising a clue, but the pieces of a puzzle are worthless by themselves.  Our current best guess is Lust, since we hadn’t seen her in a while and had been seeing Sloth by himself.  Charlie and I took turns macheteing the head off while Amyaal looked on; chopping that head off was upsetting on so many levels.  It felt very violent and wrong even though I knew the animal was dead.  Then there was the added influence of the horrendous smell and pieces of rotting guts that periodically flew at you, not to mention we worked up a disgusting sweat in our morning attire of long sleeves.  Harvesting a skull is no easy work!  I’m thinking it was better exercise than my periodic runs. 

There was no way we could do a full necropsy on such a rotting maggoty mess, leaving me insanely curious as to how the cub died as there were no external lesions, and it would be extraordinarily rare for a hyena to die of disease.  While Benson, Wilson, and Charlie got to work scraping flesh off the skull, I drove back out to where the corpse was with some measuring tape.  I scared away some vultures and got as many body and leg measurements as I could, then held my breath and rolled the green hyena form onto its back in an attempt to tell what sex it was, but the phallus was long eaten away.  The midday sun made the whole thing smell even that much worse, and I was relieved to return to the car, although the feel of being out in the territory midday with no other people around was new and exciting.  I got to go collect some paste further up the hill following, walking about the car with the GPS to find the location we had earlier marked.  It was like the savanna was my oyster, the way it rolled out kilometers beneath me to the far mountains.  However, it took me way longer than it should have to find the stalk in question.  I had sniffed up nearly every stalk on the plain before I finally discovered that the right one was bent beneath the car.  Brilliant moment on my part. There was a lot of good paste on that sucker though!

To make a rotting green maggoty corpse story that much more gross, we saw Yogurt poop that night, and the smell of the poop was a little too familiar.  My first thought was that it smelled like the carcass from that morning, but Michelle was collecting it as I stood back so I wrote it off as a bad smell eliciting recent bad smell memories.  That is until Michelle hollered over that it was chuck full of dead maggots and hyena hair.  Yogurt had almost doubtlessly been feeding on the dead cub, situated right around the corner from where she is nursing Hydrogen and Helium. Well, hyenas are nothing if not resourceful, and sure enough the carcass was nowhere to be seen when we drove to check.

And so went down the first poop sample we kept for the Kenya Wildlife Service, who had recently asked us to fill an extra tube with each fecal sample and bring it to them.  That one isn’t going to do much for the hyenas’ reputation.

At dinner Amyaal entertained us with stories of his climb up Mount Kenya when he was young.  I am determined to climb it before I leave; even though he said it’s terribly uncomfortable as the oxygen decreases and horribly cold at night, I was enchanted by his description of the flora and fauna at the top: like nothing you’ve ever seen, he said.  Huge sunflower-like plants and rock hyraxes that will climb into your hat, a view at the peak of nothing but clouds and the peak of Mt. Kilimanjaro.  Charlie and I are seriously considering making this a priority.

The next few days I began to proofread my June notes.  It was a forlorn feeling to read over the names of Humphries and Echo; it seems like so long ago that they were alive!  I had plenty of time to ponder my time here and just how wonderful it’s been as I sat in the back of the hilux for the first time in ages, neither driving or transcribing.  Charlie, Michelle, and I decided to go in one car on a pleasant evening.  At first I kept reaching for my DVR on impulse.  I relaxed after a while though, and was able to watch a patch of rain in the distance go from pink to purple to gray with the setting sun.  It was incredible.

The next morning Charlie and I went to Fig Tree, and engaged in a wild chase after a mystery cub who (several kilometers later) finally stopped loping just long enough that we could get a quick shot of some spots.  The picture didn’t match anybody in the book.  We seem to have overlooked a cub altogether!  And no wonder given how spooky it was.

Moon Pie and Tilt are hanging out at the dens.  I am thrilled by the thought that there might be more cubs on the way.  Since the original surge of little ones are all graduating, I really want some more to be on the way for when my family comes.  It would be a shame if they didn’t get to see many cubs!

20:53, Saturday, 8 September, 2012

We drove to Prozac territory earlier than normal on the evening of the 19^th to try and view a wildebeest crossing over the Mara River.  While Benson, Charlie, Eli and Amyaal left at 4 in the morning to see it earlier in the day (and saw an aardvark!!!  I still don’t think they realize what an insanely rare privilege that is), Michelle, Wilson and I went later.  We were too late for any actual crossings, but what we saw was unreal. Last summer I never saw this stage of the crossing.    Wildebeest and zebra carcasses were piled on the banks, floating atop or being swept downriver. Vultures formed great twisting tornadoes up into the sky, whirling from one side of the river to the other.  Some vultures perched atop the floating carcasses, nibbling at bits until an enormous crocodile would come swimming up and scare it off.  I saw what must be the world’s most gargantuan crocodile lying on the bank.  This thing had to be at least 18 feet from head to tail, and it was full to bursting with the migration.  A zebra carcass rocked to and fro as another croc took pieces out of it; we would see its great head surface above the water as it threw the meat up for itself to catch before submerging again.  Very soon we noticed that this zebra had a fetus falling out of its belly.  Fetuses must be extra tasty, because that crocodile bypassed the rest of the zebra and went to great lengths to wrench the fetus out.  Pretty soon the whole zebra lodged free and started floating downstream, where three different crocodiles met it and started eating it in the same manner. 

At one of the crossing sights, four exhausted juvenile wildebeest couldn’t find the strength to climb the bank.  They stood in a huddle with their heads low.  Another wandered by the water, looking confused.  An adult in the pile was still alive, slowly dying.  It was like witnessing the aftermath of a great war.  And through all of this, I look over at Michelle, and what does she do?  She shows me a picture she’s just taken of the fly sitting on her window!  I guess no one can say we don’t appreciate the small stuff.

We had an interesting night driving about in the tall grass and dark attempting to ID the three Prozac hyenas we saw, one of which was the female Oscar.  On the drive back, which seemed to take ages, we all became rather loopy with tiredness.  Michelle and I sounded like a couple of drunkards digging the dinner left for us out of the kitchen tent, eating it like a couple of our giggling hyenas before falling over ourselves on the way to the tent.  It’s a wonder we didn’t wake the whole camp up! 

21:13, Sunday, 9 September, 2012

The following evening I went out on obs with Benson, Eli, and Amyaal.  We found two wildebeest carcasses about 100 meters apart, and pretty soon the hyenas were in a mass of superhyena whose hyena pieces would occasionally jump  off at the sides as a result of some inward aggression or submission.  It was near impossible to transcribe, but was it ever good to see everyone!  Among the more interesting interactions, Burger continuously aggressed on Scrabble.  And when I say continuously, I mean I wrote “BRGR t2 lunge (food) SBL, bo” (bo = back off) probably 20 times, no exaggeration.  Burger is one of the cubs who was nursing from two mothers, Centaur and Alfredo.  Centaur hasn’t been seen since I first came; we suspect she is dead (possibly killed by a herder since Dave saw her chasing a cow earlier this year).  Centaur was ranked above Scrabble, so it would make sense for Burger to be her cub; Alfredo, on the other hand, is ranked below Scrabble.  What interests me is that hyenas learn their rank, so  Burger must have learned her rank while fairly little, watching Centaur interact with clan members while still alive, then somehow knowing to carry that over as her rightful rank.  We still see her nursing from Alfredo, and it fascinates me that she wouldn’t adopt Alfredo’s rank even after all this time.  I wonder if she somehow knows Alfredo is not her mother?  Or maybe Alfredo is her mother, which would make the picture even more complicated.  Only genetics will tell for sure.

Then, another interesting tidbit, low-ranking Alice was allowed to feed next to Pan, with no aggression whatsoever!  This was before the majority of the hyenas arrived.  A few weeks prior we had seen Alice aggress upon Ted, a considerably higher ranker.  If two of us hadn’t seen it exactly as it was, we wouldn’t have believed it.  And here was more evidence that just maybe, somehow, Alice is making a rise.  Maybe they are both fluke occurrences, but it excites me to think my Alice might be going places!

Speaking of Alice, I thought Rebmann was Penne because she has grown SO BIG.  You leave for 2 weeks and everyone shoots up like those grow-em whatevers you put in the bathtub.  Reading over my old notes from June, I feel like an empty-nesting parent; twenty or so cubs, the whole crew, used to be at Riverbend Den every morning and evening.  Now everyone is everywhere as graduated subadults, awaiting their photos to be moved from the “cub” to the “sub” section.

We saw Alien 403 at the carcasses that night, third sighting and interacting, so it was time to give him a name.  We let the Israelis name him, so he is now Jerusalem.  Welcome to the clan, Jerusalem!  He is a gorgeous hyena, that’s for sure. 

Also out that night: spring hares, everywhere!  We caught them in our maglights a few times, and got some great views of the boing-boings.  They are one of those animals that you just can’t see enough times and could watch forever, therefore making every sighting blog-worthy (perhaps to the despair of the reader).

Returned home to find Kelsey and Verna at the dinner table!  It was sure good to see them after having been gone in Serena for so long.  Kelsey loves those avocados, licking every last morsel off of my fingers. 

On the afternoon of Tuesday the 21^st we went to Fig Tree Lodge to play poker with the balloon pilots.  Ray, the head poker pilot, is very serious about the game.  I’m not so good at poker, and was sweating bullets every time I attempt to bluff – let’s just say I was not inspire Lady Gaga’s songwriter.  Three thousand shillings down the drain (approximately 83 shillings to the dollar). Still I had fun, although Michelle opted to sun herself by the lodge pool so I was left alone with Charlie and a gaggle of crude sailor-mouthed old men.  Yet I like them, and I WILL be beating them next time.

Charlie and I went to Fig Tree territory once poker was over with.  We have decided that Mr. Darcy is perhaps the sweetest cub ever; she is always grooming anyone and everyone.  This evening she was giving an especially tender bath to the male Nikk, who was sacked out near the den.  Pretty soon two other cubs came over and started grooming him, until he looked most uncomfortable but couldn’t do anything since he is lower-ranking than all of them.  When he finally attempted to get away, the three cubs would have none of it, and bristle-tail t1 looked him back into a lying position, where they again started to vigorously groom him.

The night ended in chaos as hyenas arrived from every which-way in the dark.  Suddenly everyone looked like Nikk for some reason, and Charlie made fun of me for having told him that four different hyenas should be called “Nikk?” in the notes.  Not even the stars, surrounding us in every direction save for down, could give us any hint as to who was who.  It’s the moon we were needing, and for all we know Nikk could have budded three clones then and there.

SEPTEMBER! What on earth?!

The good news is that I’m in Nairobi, and I can actually write! I will have to refer heavily to my notes to remember what I have wanted to write about for so long.

When I came back from Serena, one of the world’s greatest wonders stretched out before me as far as the eye could see.  I thought I had seen the migration; I was so wrong.  The plains were covered.  Imagine dividing the entire territory I have been researching into a grid of squares of side 1 meter.  Then put a grazing wildebeest into each square; they were so perfectly spaced! I couldn’t believe it!  Granted, wayward ones here and there galloped about bucking out excess life. Wildebeest grunts became the staggered drum beat of the savanna.

Not only did the wildebeest permeate our research site.  A couple mornings later we took a rest, and I woke up to very close sounding grunts.  Excited, I quickly threw on some clothes and walked beyond the brush. The wildebeest had spread right alongside camp, like the fingers of an unstoppable river.  I crept as close as I could before one finally saw me.  The amazing thing was that only one of them saw me, and it didn’t even seem that alarmed, but it must have communicated somehow because seconds later the whole herd was thundering away.  Talk about feeling influential!  Further along in the day I wouldn’t even have to leave my tent to see them.  Right beyond the brush they grunted and grazed away, one of them attempting to wander into the bush before becoming entangled and thinking the better of it.

Once the wildebeest moved on, I truthfully had trouble orienting myself, even after having driven the area for some three odd months.  Where once the grass had been so long, now it was worlds shorter, eaten away by the herds.  I knew it would happen, but it’s something else altogether to witness the change.  Seemingly overnight the landscape had been dramatically reformed.  Our hyenas are much easier to find now!  Guess we have the gnu to thank for that.

Our work has been confounded by the arrival of about seven alien males all at once.  We were dumbfounded until Kay told us this is a common occurrence during the migration.  My first night back I spent probably half an hour trying to ID a couple of hyenas, dismaying that apparently I had forgotten spot patterns while away.  Turns out they were hyenas I had never seen; I was terribly relieved!  We now have Jerusalem (Amyaal and Eli picked that name), a potential Detroit, and some others waiting for their third sighting before being inducted permanently into our ID book and the master list with a name.

My second morning back we found a beautiful female cheetah in Fig Tree.  She sat looking about her, tail twitching.  I wonder how many such cheetahs were made invisible by the long grass prior to the full onset of the migration.  The coat pattern begotten her by evolution made her blend in even amidst the shorter grass.

That same morning we had the delight of witnessing little Karen trying to sort out her rank.  As the female Einstein approached her at the hyenas’ new den (now named “Cub the Place” after a pub called “Club the Place” in Talek), she tentatively head bobbed.  But perhaps she had recently witnessed her mother Lu aggress on Einstein, because all at once (perhaps with a surge of courage, if I may say animals experience courage as a scientist) she bristle tail t2 lunged at Einstein.  When Einstein became submissive, she must have felt further empowered, and did it again and again.  Our little girl discovering the amazing hold that rank has on hyena society.  Good for her, maybe not so good for Einstein.  But Einstein dutifully followed the rules.

The bushbabies came to dinner at night, and I was overjoyed to see them!  Karma and Vladimir’s (newly named) presence at the table was not so welcome by all.  Michelle had at least one thing in common with Eli; he was against feeding the babies, something Charlie had communicated to me.  I promised Charlie I wouldn’t be shy about reinstating their invite.  Eli didn’t know I knew of his viewpoint, and I very naughtily offered him some of my bread to feed them, a feigned innocent “Would you like to try?”.  That got the argument rolling, slightly heated before returning to friendly.  In the end the babies got as much of my food as ever, and Eli chuckled when I admonished them for going near him, “You won’t get any food from that side of the table!”  I fully understand the argument that it’s important not to make wild animals helpless and dependent on humans, but I can’t see any harm in preserving our interactions with the bushbabies and genets.  People are not meant to have no interaction with wild animals, and though I am not normally an advocate of food being involved in such interactions, I can’t condemn what has afforded our completely safe and ongoing relationship with the bushbabies and genets, one of the most special things I have ever experienced.  I think anyone would be hard pressed to find any real harm or danger in the matter.

A whole troop of banded mongooses came twiddling through by my camp on the 19^th.  Haven’t seen baboons and vervets for a while, but now I have wildebeest and mongooses!  If Mamba Mia is still around, she had best be careful.