11:21, Tuesday, 18 June, 2013

Late November – Mid December (Continued)

Fig Tree.  We couldn’t find them.  And it wasn’t for a lack of trying.  Charlie and I went out one night without much hope.  Yet hope, never hard to reignite in myself, awaited us.  Rohan!  We found Rohan all alone, fat, lumbering along the high road on the north side of Buffalo Lugga.  Rohan!  The clan’s highest ranking female.  Rohan!  Whose spots were fun to match because although she had some lovely patterns, they were faded with age.  Thus we knew Fig Tree was in fact still more than just Einstein, and our hearts started pumping, but combing the area for others was to no avail.  Dark fell, a glorious moon arose, we still hadn’t seen anyone else.  Once we reached Buffalo Lugga, I saw some eye shine on the other side.  The eyes looked a bit big for hyenas, but I could tell they were of a carnivore.  Lions perhaps.  So I drove over to cross the lugga.  That’s when I nearly ran into an elephant, moonlight illuminating its thick gray outline; I was glad for the moonlight, and even gladder for the company of such marvelous creatures.  A herd of them was dispersed all along the lugga, making crossing it a bit challenging.  They even met us on the other side.  Once through the elephants, we found the lions.  It was Cascada, with four other members of her Prozac/Fig Tree pride, including her son Chumbawumba.  I was happy to see them.  We drove around, doing our best to get pictures of the stubborn beasts who seemed to play games with us by turning their heads just as we were about to snap the perfect shots.  Cascada and Chumbawumba never needed pictures, the right side of Cascada’s face still deformed from what we guessed to be a tussle with a warthog, and Chumbawumba (minus the fact that he was always with his mother) with his left ear permanently folded back against his head.  How he had grown!  Whereas in October he had barely any fluff to enlighten us on his sex, now he had the considerable starts of a very blonde mane.  I loved knowing so many individual animals, recognizing them and acquiring snapshots into their daily lives, watching them grow.  One of the many great rewards of this job.

The lions were fat and lazy.  Clearly they had just eaten something.  Had they killed it themselves?  Probably not.  Charlie started picking up Einstein’s collar a little further down the lugga.  We could hardly hold still for our excitement, and panicked every time we nearly lost the signal, driving to and fro.  The giggles of nearby hyenas helped us know which way to turn, anticipation mounting.  And so we found them!  Fussing over a dead wildebeest, originally thought to be a snake as the remains Lu chewed on consisted mostly of stretched out skin, and most of which had likely been thieved by our Panthera leo friends.  Moma, still alive!  Another Foxtrot story, mother having assumedly died as her sibling Smithsonian disappeared, and the night of the aardvark we happened upon her skinny form eating alone on a most unappetizingly disintegrating wildebeest carcass.  Lu, Moma, Marlin, Einstein, Fort Worth, Nikk, and I met the beautiful (but rude and bossy, exercising her rank often) Mordor.  They were alive!  We labored over ID’s, poor Charlie always stuck transcribing nights in Fig Tree where we would end up driving in a thousand circles to get everyone, the Fig Treeites as yet much harder for us to recognize than our Westies.  The action eventually slowed, we had everyone IDed, and we drove home with smiles and animated talk, for once not thinking about Joseph’s waiting dinner.  As though in applause, we ran into Rohan waddling to the northwest further along the high road, her shape and faded spots limned by the cloud-dimmed moonbeams.

13:50, Monday, 17 June, 2013

Late November – Mid December (Continued)

There are many things we did that could finish the sentence, “There’s nothing quite like…” in the Mara.  And truly, there’s nothing quite like standing on a fallen log that juts out from a riverbank over a pool of hippos.  I had been to this particular pool before, but it had been 3+ years now, and the feeling upon returning was one of those strange ones that makes you feel like life is just a nostalgic search for good times and places of the past, and here was one such gem I had been searching for.  All four of us were out together, and Benson suddenly stopped by the pool.  I didn’t know where we were at first; all I perceived was a well-worn track off to the side of Fig Tree territory amidst a bushy area of the Talek’s riverbank.  But as he got out of the car and led us over toward the water, it clicked.  Beneath us, a pod of the most dangerous animals in Africa, so goofy-looking and acting as to make you wonder how an animal that makes smiles so effortless is also the one most likely to bite you in half.  I still remembered the first time I was there, on the Behavioral Ecology of African Mammals study abroad course the summer after my freshman year of college.  We were crouched down taking notes on hippo behavior.  Suddenly we heard the crazily loud, characteristically throaty belch of an enormous hippo, sounding as though it was right behind us.  Even one of our instructors admitted that she briefly thought we would die.  Thankfully the noisy big male we knew would take us to whatever comes post-Earth actually resided in a pool around the bend, one we were previously unaware of, still safely in the water.  I chuckled at the memory as I ventured further out upon the thick log, appreciating this new vantage where such scares seemed unlikely.  It seemed to me (perhaps erroneously) that a hippo would not venture onto a fallen tree.

The little things make each day its own, no matter where you are in the world.  Likely the same morning we went to the hippo pool, we saw a wee baby tommy fussing about.  It ran around within a herd of adult females, craning its head beneath each one’s udder in what looked to be a questioning manner, before moving onto the next individual.  At last, after several mistaken udders, he found his mother.  The little one knew her the moment he checked her, beginning to fiercely nurse from his beloved and long sought-after udder.  What a beautiful illustration of the biological bond between mothers and their offspring.

The frustrating lack of rain throughout November caused unwarranted excitement and expectation every time the sky showed even the smallest sign of cloudiness.  Early morning after early morning followed by evening after evening of work, no days off without self-imposed guilt, were enough to wear us out and beg God to shed some tears. One evening we were positive it must rain.  The entire sky was blanketed in bluish-gray clouds, a feat even in the rainy season.  Maybe the much closer, very white clouds that strikingly stood out from the blue-gray, drifting over it in the most ethereal, eerie and exquisite way should have clued us in that these weren’t normal rain clouds.  Indeed, they gave us not a drop, but what a show and a feel that blanket with thick white wisps gave to the savanna.  It felt like the sky was a warm ocean over our heads – an ocean with sustained white-capped and slow-moving waves.  It was all so otherworldly and peaceful, giraffes’ necks reaching up so that their heads were even with the lowest of the cloud waves.  Then, out of nowhere, we were attacked.  Don’t worry though; it was an attack of cute.  Because it just doesn’t get cuter than nursing and yawning baby bat-eared foxes.  Little puffs of love with gargantuan ears – what a find that was, back on one of the short grass plains that used to be long pre wildebeest and drought.

The morning following the white-capped heavens brought fog.  We couldn’t see over 10m ahead and behind.  Droplets jeweled more spider webs in the tall red oat grass of Fig Tree than you would think could possibly be woven sans an overpopulation of the eight-legged carpenters, and yet somehow the silky whorls didn’t seem at all crowded.  Billows of pure cloud visibly diffused into the windows of the car, floating through and filling it, surrounding us in chilly mist and serving to keep us awake.  Not a great day for chasing down an alien male in an attempt to get pictures, so of course we found one.  His left ear was damaged wonderfully, reduced so that it appeared to be a lopsided “3” with its innards filled in.  Alien 413, and we all hoped he’d stay with such a telltale ear.

12:14 (Eastern Daylight Time), Friday, 7 June, 2013

Mid-May, early June.  Turns out I needed a bit more time than anticipated to readjust before feeling ready to write.  But as always, better late than never, and here goes the further documentation of my adventures in Kenya!

Late November – Mid December

It was late November, the 26^th to be precise, a Prozac morning, so naturally we were barely able to keep our eyes open.  4:54, leave camp, I all but moaned into the DVR.  Benson, Wilson, Charlie and I: the whole crew was there, since extra help for IDing the Prozac hyenas was never a bad idea.  We bumped along in the dark, grateful to make it through Talek West and Fig Tree territories without seeing any carnivores.  Not that we didn’t love our carnivores, but poor Prozac never received enough attention, and the opportunity to get there unhindered was always appreciated.  I worked to pry my eyes open in an attempt to ID the male that loped out of nowhere past the border by Nubian Tree, an inconclusive “Bowtie/Alien 417?” to be later transcribed.  Then, as the dawn began to break and light announced her way across the tall grass and interspersed acacias, awakening me yet again to my dream, we found someone to keep up with.  The often fat and nearly spotless Maree, today very fat indeed, loping frantically to the west, her daughter/son (still unknown, as wont to be in Prozac) Daisy following close behind. Daisy was bloody, and likely killed the baby zebra whose fresh carcass Maree was now carrying, stopping every few moments to readjust and avoid tripping over its awkward form.  Good thing for us she had to adjust, because keeping up with running hyenas through tall grass that can hide any number of rocks and bumps is challenging even for a pro driver like Benson.  Excitement already tingled on the taste buds of the morning.

After fifteen minutes of constant pursuit, I was delightfully introduced to a hyena I had been wanting to meet.  Because really, who doesn’t want to meet a hyena whose abbreviation in the notes is, quite simply, “BUTT”?  Bilal Butt of the geographer’s lineage, named after our good friend and now traitorous rival University of Michigan professor, the same one who had helped us out of several vehicle pickles (one particular mess unwritten for the sake of the driver’s pride - but that might just have to change in the future, because such amusement as that evening posited is hard to let drift to the wayside).  Yes, there she was, the adult female who produced such ticklish transcriptions as “0848    BUTT poop” followed by “NOTE: We collect BUTT’s poop for hormone analysis”, discovered earlier in the year amongst old files.  Maree ignored her and loped quickly past, but Daisy was polite enough to stop and exchange phallus sniffs with Butt.  “0611      DASY BUTT grt”  (grt = “greet”).  We passed the two greeters to keep up with Maree, who stopped in the middle of nowhere and dropped the carcass on the ground without further ado.  A minute passed, and we couldn’t understand why Maree wasn’t picking up and continuing to wherever she had been going.  But then, like little apparitions or whack-a-moles, Red Rocker and Blue Bomber popped out of a hole that had escaped our notice – a new den!  Maree was provisioning, bringing food to her little ones.  Blue Bomber and Red Rocker, who had already lost all trace of blackness and grown into fine, adorable little cubs with distinct spots, underwent their formalities, acknowledging their high-ranking mother.  Then, as though from a volcano spitting big chunks of intermittent lava, Rocky popped out of the hole.  Rocky is a cub whose parentage we hadn’t discovered, and about a minute after he/she emerged, his/her sibling Bullwinkle popped out of that magic hole too.  Before long, all four cubs, along with Maree and Daisy, were tearing at the carcass.  Maree was oddly tolerant of Rocky and Bullwinkle feeding by her cubs, but Daisy knew the laws of hyena society were being disobeyed, and soon stepped in to lunge away the two lower-rankers. 

Soon the morning was a difficult one, full of lope arrivers from every which-way, each of which took many pictures and much bookwork to ID as I stressedly tried to keep up with behavior.  But it was glorious, and I would give almost anything to be back on such a scene.  Benson scrambling around to get Charlie good shots from the back seat, Wilson flipping through pages of pictures, I craning my neck to keep sight of the happenings.  Butt hung around, Al Gore showed up: Morales (the suspected mother of Rocky and Bullwinkle), Hooo, Mogadishu, Walter, Lennox, and of course two jackals eventually in the mix attempting some steals.  Once the chaos broke up a bit, the zebra carcass finished, we followed Al Gore off about 200m from the newly dubbed Matira Den.  There, at the quiet of a new hole, Mills, our clever collar-slipper, was found.  Shortly a little miracle popped its head up from the ground, staring at us in a heart-grabbing chuckle-worthy fashion, refusing to emerge past its head.  No matter how many black cubs I had and would see over the course of my research assistantship, the joy of discovering a new little life on the planet never wore off.  Soon-to-be Whatchamacallit of the candy bar lineage, unbearably adorable, looked at us with dark eyes that appeared blue against her baby cub black.  Mills eventually settled down to our presence and sacked out, Al Gore standing by her, respectfully keeping her distance, and if she were human I would say she had gone to find relief with an old friend off to the side of a tiresome crowd. 

After the hyenas had dispersed we moved on to the prey censuses.  Along prey census 1, we came across the three young jackals whose faces were becoming commonplace.  One morning somewhere in the time that corresponded to late summer/early fall back home, we had come across the three of them, small little subadults out on their own.  We never did see them with their parents, which seems a bit odd given the monogamous black-backed jackal society in which the children hang around to help rear their younger siblings.  But I always loved seeing them, the odd group of three, and wished to give them names except that I never felt justified hanging around long enough to learn them apart.

On the ride home, we were ecstatic to discover Marlin and Zurg, two subs from Fig Tree that we hadn’t seen it what seemed like ages, sacked out on top of one another right next to the track.  Apparently the Fig Tree Clan likes to disappear to the other side of the Talek around that time of year, but as none of us knew this our level of despair at losing our beloved small and peaceful clan, the one we were so proud of finally getting to know, was significant.  It was a lucky morning though, because we even tracked Einstein, their mother, to a position near Moon Den.  Since Einstein was the only Fig Tree adult we ever seemed to find (no doubt aided by her collar - but then Carol Doda, also collared, remained elusive), we began to joke that Fig Tree Clan must now consist only of her, the others having undergone some strange and altogether disappearance.  But, to our dismay, the times would come when even seeing Einstein became a feat.

As though all three clans had made a pact that our morning should never end, we tracked a bunch of our Westies sacked out at Fig Tree Lugga.  Some bloody and obese, the whole gang was hidden in bushes, and it became a great treasure hunt driving around the thicket to see who we would find next; I, for one, was super glad to see my girl Alice within the crowd.  The only behavior recorded from that lazy gathering was Bruno going ears back to Oakland, so all in all it was a nice opportunity to have Wilson work on his ID’s, even if our stomachs were relentlessly crying out for breakfast.

Perhaps later that day, perhaps a different day, I sat in my tent doing some work late morning.  Soon I could hear the voices of Jackson, Joseph and Wilson, who had come to fix the tent tarp of Dave and Julia’s periodic residence next-door.  A few minutes passed, when all of a sudden they started yelling that there was a mamba on top of the tent!  Naturally, I was super excited, and came running, inquiring as to whether it was safe for me to have a peek.  They responded that I must be careful, but sure, it would be all right if I came and stood by them.  So I stepped carefully over, Jackson jumping nervously every so often.  The snake certainly wasn't in plain site, and eventually I queried aloud as to where it was, thinking I must be missing the obvious.  Jackson said he'd show me, and took me by the hand, leading me closer to the tent.  He brought his finger up to point.  I was worried at his nonchalance, and begged him to be careful.  And yet I followed his finger with my eyes, and found at the end of it (!)… a tiny gecko.  The whole lot of them busted out laughing.  I made sure to give each a good swat on the head before returning to my work.