15:11, Tuesday, 22 January, 2013

It feels unrealistically wonderful to be writing again.  Just as it was unrealistically wonderful to have my family here.  When they left, I had a pile of work to return to, and thank God my mom brought me a yoga DVD therapeutic for back pain!

Now let’s see if I can’t reach back and patch together at least a rough picture of some of these bullet points I have, running now on a list that looks like that of Santa the year no child was bad.  I must maintain a concise journalist (or perhaps auctioneer would be better) voice in order to catch up to the present before my eightieth birthday.  Plus, it’s much easier to create a picture with the full emotion of an event if it’s recent.  Before I launch, here is a quote from the intriguing book True at First Light by Ernest Hemingway, which my Aunt Chris sent along with my family for my birthday.  I find it perfectly true:

“Something, or something awful or something wonderful was certain to happen every day in this part of Africa.  Every morning when you woke it was as exciting as though you were going to compete in a downhill ski race or drive a bobsled on a fast run.  Something, you knew, would happen and usually before eleven o’clock.  I never knew of a morning in Africa I woke that I was not happy.”

And without further ado, here begins the disconnected blurb of things I was hoping to share.  I’ll try not to cringe, but rather think of it as a new, artistic writing style I’m experimenting with (one with no flow whatsoever).

Something new we are doing is focal animal samples (FAS’s).  These samples are when you watch one or a couple animals alone, focusing only on them and transcribing only their behavior.  Behaviors other than our normal critical incidences might be added based on particular studies.   For example, we have begun to do paste FAS’s for the graduate student named Kevin, who is studying the bacterial composition and behavioral significance of paste and pasting.  We pick a hyena at den sessions to watch for ten minutes, recording every critical incident it participates in, as well as any time it “intently sniffs a stalk,” and who else has pasted on a particular stalk that the hyena might paste on.  Someone other than the primary transcriber does these FAS’s, so they are a bit of a pain to insert into one another’s notes, but overall I have found I really enjoy doing them.  It feels much better to know that you are catching every behavior you have set out to catch since you only have to focus on one individual, it’s much less stressful, and you catch some interesting nuances along the way.  Julia does FAS’s for 30 minutes on mothers and their cubs, since she is studying (a rough description indeed) the development of cubs under different circumstances.  There you have it, FAS’s.

One morning Benson and I were in Fig Tree, back in the days before we hopelessly lost the whereabouts of the clan, and we were watching three of the young subadults playing.  They ran about in the sun, and Benson said something that made me smile.  “They seem happy,” he said.  And I thought yeah, they seem happy.  And anyone who has nightmares of anthropomorphism can just step aside, because they did seem happy, and it was good to be with someone who wasn’t afraid to admit the obvious.  “Yes, they do,” I responded.

Still back in Fig Tree, still in the good ole days, Mr. Darcy became fond of chewing on our car.  We had to bang the side to make her stop when she would explore beneath it; I would be watching Jar-Jar or Zurg, and suddenly the parts beneath the car start to move about of their own accord, or so it seemed.  The curiosity of hyenas never fails to amaze me.  One of my favorite things in the world will always be looking out the car window to see the small face of a hyena cub staring up at me.  It’s priceless, although the chewing bit is not allowed, because that can become quite pricey.

One morning Julia and I were out, and I saw something I will never forget.  Our hyenas started to play in a pool of standing water by Magic Culvert (or maybe Culvert 13 Lugga South, one of the two).  The adults completely lost all vanity and pride, any need to maintain rank seemed momentarily blown to the wind.  Probably about seven or eight were in the water at one time, and I could have watched the scene forever.  How they splashed about and mouth wrestled in that water!  Good thing our collars are water resistant.  Pan wrestled with one of the males, who it was I can’t recall – perhaps Oakland or Kyoto, and he just played back without appeasing.  Periodically one of the subadults present would burst out of the water and run away and back, full circle, defining why it is we love to be alive, perhaps one of the saving graces that allowed evolution to relentlessly strive for survival, even succeeding the development of a more complicated brain.  I have heard several times that mating often involves water, and that the male and female might play in some water before and after mating.  It makes me happy to think that hyenas can have such fun in water; water is not something I pegged them as enjoying.  It’s also always brilliant to see adults playing.

Prozac clan:  they FINALLY came back to this side of the river, so no more hour and a half excursions of bumping over rocks in a smelly part of the river from all the hippo dung, a hippo or two lazily watching you with its eyes poked just above the water as you pray you don’t get stuck in the dark in the water with a hippo twenty meters away.  Exciting, but exhausting, and so when we realized we could stay on this side of the river it was a slice of heaven.  And the place they were denning was like another piece of paradise, rolling hills and little pools of water and a den OUT IN THE OPEN for once so “Incomplete CI’s due to bushes” is not a necessary addition to every session.  And I look around and think, good for Blue Bomber and Red Rocker and all these little new cubs who can’t have names because Lord knows who their mother is that get to grow up here.  I could grow up here.  It’s almost like Serena sometimes the way we can get close enough to hear and wonder what that enchanting trickling sound is…nope, not the lovely babbling brook that would fit in here, this hyena is just peeing in the water two feet from our vehicle.  But at the same time, although I enjoy Prozac every time we go, woe to the transcriber.  With how little research assistants have been able to visit the clan in the past years, we haven’t learned the animals as well as we should, and you’re looking at 6+ hours going through pictures, some of hyenas who refused to hold still or turn so their side is facing you, and by the end of it you’d better stay away from the high rocks by the river. 

Charlie and I are way too proud of some names we have given a couple new dens in Prozac.  Prozac now sports a “Den Tist” and a “Den Tary Bone,” (both mine), and the next one is going to be “Ash Den Kutcher” (Charlie).  The simple joys in life; I laugh every time I transcribe “@D Tist” or “@D Tary Bone.”  Dad, you have really gotten me too attached to puns.

Dave has been sending us the points from the GPS collars, each of which sends a point every hour except during the middle hours of the day when hyenas are usually just sacked out sleeping.  These GPS points are incredible!  Dave has constructed a map of the territories, inserting all our landmarks so we comprehend full well where the points are. The cumulated points are amazing, opening doors to all imaginings of new discovery.  The high rankers, like Helios, stay tight to the territory.  They don’t need to venture away as they can just steal food, etc., or so that’s what would seem to be the main cause of their unwillingness to leave Kansas.  But then you have lower rankers like Baez.  She travels amazing distances, further than here to Serena in some circumstances.  We joke that on one of our trips to Nairobi, while shopping for food in Nakumatt, there will be Baez in one of the aisles.  Yet when the migration was here, Baez stuck much more tightly to the territory, assumedly because there was ample food during that time.  Remarkably fascinating trends.  But then there’s always the outlier, in our case Magenta.  Magenta is fairly high ranking, so you might wonder what incentive she would have to spend 40% of her time outside the boundaries of the reserve.  Perhaps a preferential taste for garbage?  Recently we gave a talk at Riverside Camp near Talek, and when the head of the study abroad told me she had a night motion-sensor camera and that she’d like to show us a couple hyenas (one with a collar) to see if we knew them, I guessed right away who one of them would be.  Sure enough, there was Magenta, the big shoe-thing I see on her side glaring in the flash of the camera.  She had better be careful given snares and spears. 

In Serena, two hyenas have even been observed (through GPS points) to climb the escarpment!  I would love to know their incentive.

That’s all for today, more to come!  One of my new year’s resolutions is to write more, and I intend to keep it if at all possible.  I like to think I’ve gotten better at managing my time since coming out here, because without that skill this job would be impossible.