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!