Chimps: Nawapenda

There have been quite a few changes at Ol Pej since I left last year, some at chimps and some at research.  We have a new cook at research, Eric, who makes us some pretty amazing meals.  He really loves through food evidently, and is definitely going to cut into the research-weight-loss-plan that we all tend to get on out here.  There have also been mosquito nets mounted above our beds, which, if you had asked me a year ago, I would have said were completely unnecessary: I wasn’t bitten more than ten times in three months.  This year, however, there seems to be an absolute plague of the biggest mosquitoes I’ve ever seen in my life, I’m constantly smashing them as they rest on the walls in the mornings, and I’m really glad we have nets.  Gorbachev, the blind elephant, is also back to research.  He was relocated last year (I wrote about that here) to a fenced area in the northern part of the conservancy, as he was becoming incredibly destructive around the research center, staff camp, and Ol Pejeta house.  He seems to have broken out once more, despite having his tusks cut down, and is now back to his old habits of wandering around control and visiting us.  I’ve encountered him several times on foot, and after the initial heart-attack of seeing a huge bull elephant and wondering where you’re going to run to if he charges, it’s pretty cool to get to see him so up close and personal as he goes about his daily business.

The research center skulls, an Oryx, Steenbok, and Impala, with Magic Mike, the unicorn beanie baby given to me by Madelynn and Alana (my riding trainer).  Expect to see Magic Mike around, as I plan to take pictures with him all over the place.

At chimps, the new house for the young chimps is completely finished and it is beautiful.  There are twelve spacious rooms for the chimps to sleep in at night, a full bathroom, a clinic, and hopefully sometime in the future: a lab space!  Currently there’s no electricity to the house though, so we can’t move the lab in there just yet, but it will be wonderful when we can.  Also, my old nemesis, the weir! the weir! aka the river crossing, is no longer something I have to face daily.  Since January the river has been much too high for even the experienced-stepping-stone-jumping keepers, and one of the stepping stones got washed away, to boot.  So now there's a gap that's basically unjumpable, and too much water flowing for it to be safe to try to jump or wade across.  This is actually somewhat annoying, because I wanted to get a picture of me conquering the river crossing, and I also now need to drive all the way around to the bridge when I want to get data on the young chimps by the river.  I can't hate that I have no opportunity to crash to my death at the bottom of those rocks any longer though...

My old nemesis, the weir.

Many of the chimps have changed too, especially the young ones.  There’s Angela, of course, who is about twice as big as she was last year, though still quite small.  Ajabu has started walking everywhere on her own, which is a huge change from last year when she would primarily ride on Cheetah, Victoria, or Julia’s backs, and only hitches a ride when she is feeling excessively lazy.  Vicki has also grown quite a bit, and is now almost the same size as Julia, one of her age-mates.  This is only remarkable because Vicki has always been a fairly small chimp – her growth was stunted by the bullets that were lodged in her skull when she was brought to Sweetwaters, and the several operations she had to have to remove them all (poor baby). 

Vicki has gotten quite smart in the last year though.  She has always been a very submissive chimp, willing to give up her food to pretty much anyone.  Even Ajabu can take bananas from her in the night-house and often the guys have to peel bananas for Victoria and stuff them directly into her mouth to make sure she gets her fair share (or keep her separated during feeding time, which is only sometimes feasible as she likes to be with Alley, her foster-mother).  Last year she would often have large portions of her lunch stolen by Oscar, the alpha.  Vicki is so submissive that she wouldn’t even take food if Oscar was looking at her, and if he so much as stepped towards her she would run off screaming.  Just last week though, I saw Oscar do exactly this when Vicki was thrown her bananas at lunch: he stood up and took a swaggering step towards her.  Vicki glanced at him and didn’t move, so Oscar moved towards her a bit more.  She ran off then, but as she was running she pulled one banana off of the bunch of four that she was holding and placed it behind her, right in Oscar’s path.  Oscar was distracted by the banana that Victoria left on the ground, and she managed to keep the rest of her lunch.  I was very proud.

Oscar snuggling with Angela.  The biggest chimp and the smallest!  It's unlikely that Oscar is Angie's dad, since they look nothing alike, but he does love to cuddle her and he's always so gentle.

Another big change is Niyonkuru, the alpha of the young chimps group.  Last year, Niyon was a very aggressive and dominant chimp: he would display immediately after coming out of the night house, often throwing rocks, sticks, or dirt around and charging everybody out of his way.  All of the female chimps, and most of the males, would be politely subordinate to him at all times, almost as if to circumvent his unpredictable temper.  This year, Niyon seems to have settled down a bit and is more relaxed over all.  Possibly this is because he is getting older, he is at least 20, and the prime age for chimps is 15-20 or so.  Though they can live much longer, especially in captivity, age is tough on chimps: they can accrue a lot of injuries, especially males who have been in a lot of fights, their teeth start to fall out from the lack of consistent brushing and flossing, and all of the rough-and-tumble play (falls from trees, wrestling, fights with baboons) can really catch up with them.  Additionally, Niyon has started to be challenged by some of the younger males.  Cumbo and William are really becoming fond of the idea that they might not have to be subordinate to him forever, and have been displaying and challenging Niyon more often.  Just a few days ago I heard two chimps screaming off in the bush, and shortly afterwards Niyon and Akela came hustling out of there – not quite running but definitely not walking – screaming, grimacing, and looking behind them.  Following was a very piloerect Cumbo who was swaggering in a half-display and walking them up the fenceline.  Interestingly, Cumbo was also grimacing and screaming/whimpering a bit, which made me think that he wasn’t feeling quite as brave as he was trying to let on.

Chimps have a much harder time controlling their vocalizations than humans do, and many of the vocalizations they make are completely involuntary.  A good example of this are food grunts – chimps seem physically unable to control their appreciation of good food, and will happily grunt and event hoot sometimes when they are eating.  Jane Goodall wrote about this in “In the Shadow of Man,” when one of the younger males at her field site (I think Figan maybe?) would cover his mouth to muffle his excited grunts and hoots when he was given extra bananas after the dominant males left the provisioning area.  The first few times they tried to give him extra, his vocalizations called the dominant males back and his new bananas were swiftly confiscated, but he was unable to completely control his excitement and had to find another way to make himself be quieter, so he physically limited his noise production with his hands.

Unrelated to chimps: Sunrise in the marsh

I am not sure whether Niyon is mellowing out because he is being challenged more often – you would think that an increase in challenges would increase his aggression – or if he is being challenged more because he has mellowed.  Either way, it will make for an interesting five months of data collection if an alpha turnover really is to happen, and I’m excited to watch it.

The lion-tracking that I mentioned last week was pretty fun, if not particularly fruitful.  I followed in Elsa (Kim’s car) with Youngin and one of the current volunteers while Duma took the Oxford students (did I mention that there are four Oxford MBAs here right now doing a project on property size, land use, and productivity right now? They will be here until the end of August, and next week we’re going to the Mara to see the wildebeest migration!) in an Ol Pejeta truck.  We tracked for about two hours, driving all over the East side, before we picked up a signal close to Sweetwaters Tented Camp.  We then moved about fifty meters back into the bush from the road, driving very slowly around all the Euclea and carefully keeping an eye out for suspicious grass (an indication that there might be an aardvark hole there), and finally saw them: a male and a female quietly napping in a small clearing.  They both looked up when we arrived, but neither moved, and the male especially was keen to resume his napping.  Duma suggested that they were probably alone together because the female was fertile and they were “courting.”  The female did move over to the male a few times and nuzzle him, but he wasn’t buying what she was selling, so eventually she just moved off towards the road, probably to start hunting for the evening.  Since I was driving I really didn’t get any good pictures, but I did see six lions a few days later, and got much better pictures then.

A young male lion I found at the quarry

Next up, poop club! I didn’t mention it at all here, but I’ve been collecting fecal samples for my project and that’s been making me keep looong hours.  It’s a whole blog entry of its own though, so get excited!

Wild Kenya

My third-first (the third time I've had a first week) week in Kenya has been pretty wonderful.

The first excellent thing was visiting the chimps. I rolled in on a Saturday morning during visitors hours, because I had errands to run in the morning. (The first few days of my trips to Kenya are inevitably filled with many errands that need my attention NOW, not later, but NOW.)  The chimps were hiding from me, and I was pretty miffed about that, honestly.  I walked back to the old chimp house to see if I could find any other chimps there, and while there were none from the big group, the smaller group of chimps was there.  Romeo recognized me immediately, and started to pant grunt, pat his chest, and play with me.  That removed any ill feelings I might have had immediately: there is no better feeling than knowing some old friends still remember you.  Romeo and I chased one another up and down the fence for a while, and after that I headed back to research to finish up the various protocol, email, credit-card, and requirement loose-ends I had left in the US.

Superb starling

I spent the next few days working on-and-off at chimps figuring out some of the kinks and getting fluent with my data collection system.  Oh yes, my data collection system.  I’m all digital now, did you know?  Thanks to Natalie, my wonderful sister, I’ve got an app hard-coded for two Lenovo tablets that I use to collect data with.  This sure beats the data entry system of last year: paper and pen, then hours on the computer in the evenings.  Considering that I’ll have a couple of hours of lab work to catch up with each night after I start collecting fecal samples, not having to do paper-to-computer data entry is so wonderful.  I still use a voice recorder for times when the action is too quick for me to get it all down in time, or I need to be watching carefully.  This is usually just at chimp meal times, so I only have about 30-40 minutes per day of voice recordings that I need to transcribe. 

Cheetah snuggling with Angie

The chimps are as entertaining as ever, although the young chimps have been proving hard to find lately. They moved to a wonderful, big, and brand new night house recently, and it has really changed their daily schedule.  Last year, they would spend at least four hours a day at their night house lazing around, napping, grooming, and giving me lots of data. Now they will spend some time at the new night house, some at the old night house, and a rather large amount of it… away. In the bush, somewhere, but that’s no good for my project!  They have just moved in though, so hopefully they settle into a new routine quickly and will come back to give me lots of data.

At the old chimp house, Angela, the baby, is as adorable as ever, though she has grown up quite a bit in the last year. She is very popular with the females, but it seems that most of the males are as yet a little reluctant to play with her. Perhaps because she is still quite small (sitting down she is less than a foot tall, and probably only about 18” in total length, and I would guess she only weighs about 15 pounds), and compared to the males’ 120-170 pounds, that’s quite small still.  Mwanzo is letting her adventure around quite a bit though, so Angela gets to roam free. Eva, a 10-ish year old female, is very, very fond of her, and often carries her around. Angela seems to trust Eva quite a bit: one day when they were playing on the shade structure, Angela wanted to climb in a tree that was a bit far away for her to jump to. Eva put one leg on the shad structure and one on the tree, and let Angela use her as a bridge to climb into the tree.  Eva also loves to play aeroplane with Angie, and I got this sweet picture of them together.

On Friday, Blair, Jenny, Youngin (three Princeton students, the first two of which I was with in Kenya last year) and I went to town to get supplies for my lab work and one of Blair’s experiments. There we met up with Eric, one of the cooks from the research center, who is currently on his “off” (short leave from work) and staying with his family. He had previously invited us to his family’s house which we were happy to visit, and found incredibly beautiful.  His family is a very Australian-style house on decently sized property where they keep some chickens, goats, a couple of cows, a sheep, and rabbits, and a small shamba (garden).  The animals graze around the property and across the road they have another property: one where they have a bigger shamba.  They grow lots of maize in the shamba, as well as beans (of all types), oranges, avocados, mangoes, papaya (unfortunately only a male tree lives there right now), kale (sukuma in swahili), and onions, carrots, garlic, beets, and any vegetable they would like. Eric told us that he and his neighbors are happy to share their produce with one another, so if one of them is growing something that the other doesn’t have, they can just forage in the other’s garden.

We also met Eric’s parents, two sisters, and hundred year old grandmother. One. Hundred. Years. 100. I kid you not. That lady had the strongest grip of any woman I’d ever met, and works in her garden daily.  Eric’s mother and sisters served us a delicious lunch of chicken, peas, and mukimo (a Kikuyu dish of potatoes, maize, greens, and sometimes beans and/or peas mashed together), and chapatti. They kept refilling our dishes and cups too, which had all of us groaning with fullness.

After lunch, Eric and his uncle John, as well as his two sister, Esperanza and Kate, and us all went on a walk down to the nearby Nanyuki river.  The river was quite shallow and very beautiful, with vegetation all around it and plenty of rocks for us to jump on and between.  After playing around at the river for a while, we walked over to a quarry and played in the water there too.  On the way we went by a school and a church, and plenty of livestock and cute skinny dogs guarding peoples’ houses. Unfortunately the rain caught us on the way back from the quarry and we got relatively soaked before we took shelter in a tea house.  In the teahouse, Youngin taught me how to play checkers and trounced me thoroughly, twice.  It doesn’t seem like a very riveting game, though.

A young elephant on Oryx plain. We found her in a herd of at least 15, with a couple of little babies to boot.

This afternoon I have plenty of grant writing to do and will probably go lion tracking around three.  These loose ends suck to tie up, but it must be done!

Gorbachev, the resident blind elephant, cleverly navigating a steep riverbank.

The adventure begins again

After travelling for about 35 hours, I’m finally back in Kenya.  And the thing the struck me the most when I got here was how normal it immediately felt.  Which is strange, because I spent the last few weeks before leaving for this trip filled with doubt that I wanted to come back.  I grew a lot of roots in the 10 months between when I left Kenya and when I returned, and it was hard to pull those up, even if it is just temporary.

But let’s back up a bit and get to the reason that I’m here.

This July marks the beginning of the collection of the data for my dissertation.  I will spend the next five months watching chimps, collecting their poop, observing the poop closely, and even arranging to have some of it shipped back to California.  It seems like the poop will monopolize my time, but it really won’t: there are just many more small tasks to do with poop.  After I have spent five months in Kenya, I will return to California for a little while and wait for the rainy season to come to a close in Zambia and then head out there – probably in the beginning of March.  I will spend five months in Zambia doing the same thing – watching chimps, playing with poop – and then I’ll twirl my hands a little bit and ta-dah! my dissertation will be ready for publication.

Or something like that.

I left for Kenya on the 4^th of July – not a good date for a girl trying to become an American citizen – and arrived here on the 6^th. After saying goodbye to my parents at the airport, I flew from San Francisco to Heathrow with a set of twins wailing a few rows behind me the entire flight. And I don’t just mean crying, I mean screaming at the top of their lungs. For nine hours.  I am evidently capable of greatness, and slept for a good amount of that time (so it is plausible the twins screamed only for 4 hours).  It seems to me, however, that any child that screams for that long should pass out from exhaustion at some point.  Alas, it was not to be. At Heathrow I endured a 10 hour layover by buying myself a day pass to a lounge where free wifi, food, and beverages were available.  (I would highly recommend this for long layovers. The pass was expensive, but if you have membership to one of the clubs at the airport, such as the Star Alliance or British Airways etc., you get a much cheaper rate. I will do that in the future, I think.)  Then another nine hours from Heathrow to Nairobi, after being delayed on the tarmac for an hour.  Upon arrival in Nairobi I whipped through immigration and then waited ages for my bags to come out before getting through customs equally quickly.

Luckily, I had made contact with another American travelling from Nairobi to Ol Pejeta before I flew out, so was picked up by Brian, a faculty member at an Illinois university, and Taranji, our driver very shortly.  The drive to Ol Pejeta was remarkably eventful, given that I have driven that way four times now with no hitches.

First, we were pulled over by the police in Nairobi because Taranji wasn’t wearing his seat belt.  Tough luck for Taranji, who was given a ticket.  Even tougher luck for Brian and I as we sat for a half hour, a captive audience, in a minivan on the edge of a roundabout in the middle of Nairobi with all of our expensive gear and equipment surrounding us… we quickly locked the doors and closed all the windows.  After the three hour drive to Nanyuki, Brian and I grabbed a quick lunch at Trout Tree Restaurant, where we saw black and white colobus (Colobus guereza) and tree hyraxes (species; most closely related to elephants!).  On our way into Nanyuki proper, Brian and I were once again pulled over by the police – this time for the “unusual” front license plates on Brian’s rental car.  Kenyan cops are experts at spotting anything that might get them a bribe from a mile off – including the crack in the windshield of our car – and since neither of us owned the car or was planning on handing over the cash, we waited for another half hour or so while the rental agency sent someone back to clear up the mess.

Finally, after a few errands in Nanyuki, we made it in to Ol Pejeta, at a not-entirely-our-planned-arrival-time of 4:30.  I said a few hellos to the people around that I knew from last year – Catherine and Anthony, Research Center staff, Nathan, George, Angela, and Kevin in the offices – and then went out to help Jenny exchange her old GPS units for new at the cattle bomas and on to a sundowner with Blair.

Now that I’m here, I do feel very settled already.  I think a big part of that is that I have a task to do every day: watch chimps, play with poo.  Though it may seem menial, it’s something I know how to do, and do pretty well.  So despite being concerned before getting here, I’m pretty excited.  Because tomorrow?  Tomorrow, I get to see the hairy black friends that I’ve missed all year long.