21:29, Monday, 1 October, 2012

Phew!  The compiled notes and lists for June-August have finally been sent to Kay, and the whole lot of the lab tent boards reorganized with fresh information.  I feel like I can breathe a little now.

I think I will continue with hyena stories, and maybe each time I write have some other animal and people stories on the side.  Writing in a day-by-day style is starting to wear on me.

The other morning Charlie and I happened upon a border patrol.  Many of our hyenas were there, pasting and bristle-tailing and social sniffing up a storm in order to mark their territory.  It all seemed quite uncalled for; just goes to show that the hyenas have an agenda beyond our perception.  Endor decided to poop in the middle of it all.  We hated to pass up the opportunity for a poop sample, but hyenas were everywhere.  Therefore I decided I would attempt to do a drive-by poop scoop.  This was made difficult by the fact that the poop was “enkorotik.” (Joseph came out the other night while we were scraping a poop sample and randomly started writing something on a piece of paper.  When he stepped away, we read three Maa words: “ingek”, “ingolom”, and “enkorotik”.  Funny the things different languages deem worthy of a word; “ingek” means soft poop, “ingolom” hard poop, and “enkorotik” liquidy poop.  Go figure!)  I awkwardly lowered myself to the floor with the inside-out plastic bag at the ready, falling onto my bum below the driver’s seat and reaching with all my might to collect what I could.  The hyenas, apart from observant Buenos Aires (who intently watched the car), hardly flinched.  I reached to pull myself back up, very proud, when my arm landed on the horn.  Because of the position I was in, my weight was stuck there for a prolonged moment before I could hoist myself the rest of the way up.  All of the hyenas, and everyone in the tourist cars nearby, immediately turned their eyes on us.  Charlie just busted out laughing as I struggled, because there wasn’t anything to be done.  But the joke was on him when I tossed him the bag of Endor’s enkorotik; as he zipped it, a small portion squirted onto his hand.  No hand sanitizer to be found, so he wore a latex glove for the remaining duration of obs.  Satisfaction.

There are three little black cubs!  It looks like we were all right, because one is definitely Tilt’s, but I think the other two are Carter’s.  Tilt’s is a bit younger than the other two.  Technically, I shouldn’t be calling it Tilt’s, because we haven’t seen it nursing yet.  Shadowfax ruined that.  Tilt finally felt comfortable enough to sack out in front of the den while we were there, and the little cub was all nosing up to her belly when Shadowfax came groaning in and displaced Tilt, causing the little one to run back into the hole.  I don’t know what it is with Shadowfax, but she seems to be enthralled with the little black cubs.  She is always groaning up a storm around Tilt, groaning into the den, wandering about and refusing everyone peace and quiet.  Because we haven’t seen the smallest one nurse, it cannot yet be christened “Blanket,” the only famous child name we can think of that seems halfway appropriate for a hyena.  Instead, its temporary cub name is “Adorbs,” because indeed it is adorable.  Riff and Raff have been changed to “Teenie” and “Weenie”; we couldn’t resist when the idea of teenie weenie came to mind.

As if Carter and Tilt weren’t enough new moms to have in the mix, Amazon has started to hang around the den as well.  She lost Rotifer (the first member of the newly decided marine invertebrates lineage!) back in June, but hyenas can conceive amazingly quickly following the death of a cub.  Could there possibly be more little black cuddlebugs stuffed in those den holes?  I suppose “stuffed” is an inaccurate verb; the underground network of a hyena den is quite extensive. Just the other day I saw Marlin, a Fig Tree cub, go out of sight into one of Pallet Town Den’s holes before popping up out of another in the same minute.  Amazingly cool given we are seldom offered direct proof of den holes’ connection!

The males are all about the females lately; there have been several instances of bowing, an act in which the males cross one leg over the other in front of a female, a prelude to mating if she accepts.  Kyoto leg-crossed furiously for Adonis, Hendrix is never seen without Oakland 5-10 meters away, and Wellington stole my heart one day by braving his way to the den hole, where he stood perfectly still (very gutsy for a male to remain so close) with one leg crossed over the other for an unbelievable duration while looking at us.  I’m sure there was a female we couldn’t see in the bushes, but to us it looked like he was just standing up there all alone with crossed legs, and since our car caught his attention I felt I was the object of his wooing.  Woo no more, Wellington!  Sorry Gaza.  Charlie made a list of all the males and females in the Talek West clan, and while driving one evening we matched everyone up, of course leaving some females unmatched given their numbers.  We had reasons and stories for all of them: Mork is a nice guy, so he should be with shy, sweet, snare-necked but beautiful Obama, while El Paso is a newby who needs someone like Juno, chill and relaxed, to let him do his own thing.  We agreed on a few pairs, but argued over whose match was better for most of them.  The best pair of mine was Gelato and Frisco, two outcast-type wild rough-edgers, but Charlie put Frisco with someone so ridiculous that I can’t even remember who it was.  Glad he’s not a matchmaker!

Another ongoing argument is whether or not it is rare to see an aardvark.  I told Charlie sometime mid-August, at which time he told me how much he wanted to see an aardvark, not to get his hopes up.  I had seen one when I studied abroad in the summer of 2009, and our driver told us that in his 30 years of driving tourist vehicles he had never once seen an aardvark until then.  Similar stories are everywhere.  Benson, Charlie, Eli, and Amyaal go to Prozac like two mornings later, and what should run across their path but an aardvark!  Since then Charlie likes to get me riled up by saying, “Oh yeah, sooooo rare to see an aardvark.”  So we are driving to Fig Tree one evening, and the issue comes up.  We go back and forth for about 20 minutes.  “You just watch.  It’s so common, we’ll probably see one tonight.”  Yeah right.  An hour later we are driving around searching for the hyenas; I took to driving out into the grass because we were desperate to find them.  Still broad daylight.  Suddenly Charlie’s jaw drops, and I follow his pointing finger.  An aardvark moseying about in the grass directly next to us.  No. Joke.  The probability of seeing an aardvark is extraordinarily low, but the probability of seeing one in the daylight is somewhat unheard of.  God, you think you are funny.  We couldn’t believe it, and laughed until I cried before realizing we were scaring it without even having gotten to look at it.  We followed it around for a bit: what neat creatures!  The ears are so much more like rabbit ears than I’d ever thought, and the body like that of a rounded, small-boned bulldog.  It bumbled along, although I don’t know if bumbled is the right word because it was somehow quick, and we soon realized we had completely blown our chance for a photo.

Near a week later, I begrudgingly disclosed that Julia and I had seen an aardvark by Pothole Den.  It was beyond odd, at least 10 hyenas about, and then here comes this aardvark as though it had an entrance in some unannounced play.  We didn’t get to see it for too long before Mork chased it off.  But by golly, I cannot believe that I have seen 3 aardvarks!  It really is rare, I swear.  Yet Charlie won’t have it, and given the 0.0001% lottery ticket circumstances blown to the wind, who can really blame him?