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.

Zombies are a first world problem

If you’ve spent any significant amount of time with me or, say, happened to take me to see Sean of the Dead, you will know that I am terrified of zombies.  This terror is completely unwarranted, I know, but it has still led me to create numerous escape and refuge plans in case there ever is a zombie invasion in Davis (mostly they involve the primate center).  Since being in Kenya though, the threat of zombies is really diminished, and I have other things to worry about.  Like lions roaring less than a kilometer away from our research center (probably over a kill), or the lion perched on top of the quarry about 500 meters away from the path I use to do my chimp observations.  Kim hasn’t been helping the situation, she’s been jumpy as a newborn lamb at every little noise lately.  Mostly, it’s the water dripping in the shower or the tree brushing the tin roof, but every once in a while there’s the crunch of gravel when a waterbuck walks by, or the weird sound of a zebra getting nervous and alarm barking at, well, anything (I have to remind myself that zebras are like horses, and therefore pretty dumb when it comes to fear), and the other night we heard a zebra galloping down the road that goes to the airstrip.  So walking from my banda to the bathrooms to brush my teeth at night has been an interesting adventure, filled with quick sprints to my door to avoid whatever may be lurking in the dark.

Ultimately, the research center is actually really safe.  We’re one corner of a square that includes the main offices (which are always manned), Ol Pejeta House (a really nice and expensive hotel), and the staff camp, all of which are pretty much always occupied.  Additionally, there’s an electric fence around the entire compound that gets put up at night to prevent the larger of our potential visitors (elephants, rhinos, etc.) from visiting, and Gorbachov the blind elephant has been translocated to a new area.  When it’s swarming with people while Earthwatch is here, and when I will be living in my tent, I will be doubly safe, as most predators have no interest in going near a camp filled with rowdy Americans on vacation.

It’s actually a little hard to remember that I’m in Kenya, doing field work, which I’ve been looking forward to all year.  My life very quickly took on a routine that involves walking, sweating, and writing down things about chimps.  The quiet of the research center, punctuated only by little birds and the generator at Ol Pejeta House, has been a bustle of activity as it is being renovated in an attempt to fix it up before the first Earthwatch group gets here.  The young chimp house is also a bustle of activity, as a new house is being built for them and any future chimps that might arrive at the sanctuary.  Construction in Kenya doesn’t seem to be too much different from construction in the US though: it moves painfully slowly and is never ready when you need it to be.

Last Sunday we had to chance to watch an elephant darting and translocation.  Alli has the best luck ever in Kenya and she’s seen lions five or six times, cheetahs almost the same number of times, as well as a bat eared fox, patas monkeys, and the rest.  I take Sundays off because they are really busy for the chimp caregivers, and I don’t want to ask them to take time out of their day to follow me around, so I get to stick around the research centre and do data entry or go out with Kim hunting for giraffe.  We were just leaving the Kamok petrol station when we saw a plane, a ginormous truck, and a couple of the elephant trackers hanging out with a large elephant on the airstrip.  The KWS vets darted Gorbachov on foot and after running around frenetically for about 15 minutes he just dropped like a stone.  He took about two drunk steps before that happened – his right hind went wide and then came back under him, and then he collapsed on the forehand.

After he was down the KWS vets sawed off his tusks using a chainsaw, then applied a moisturizer-ish thing to prevent them from cracking.  They took some samples, and we got to touch him, but mostly the point of this job was moving him to a new area.  He’s been quite the pest lately, breaking out of his new confines in search of greener pastures, which is why they took his tusks off.  I pulled a tick off his ear which was alarmingly large, and then killed it because it was gross, and blood spattered all over my shoe.  Getting him onto the truck was quite the ordeal, but the KWS vets were surprisingly tender with him, gently laying one of his ears flat under his body so it wouldn’t be folded over under his weight, and carefully strapping him down so he wouldn’t fall off the truck, all while holding open his trunk so he could breathe.  I imagine that is the last we will see of Gorbachov for quite some time, as he’s been moved to a fenced in area far on the edge of the conservancy, for both his safety and that of others.

This week I have also had the great joy of dealing with car issues, when the rental car wouldn’t start one morning.  It turns out the entire battery had to be replaced, which was awesome.  It lost me a day of data collection, but I did get to go out with Kim and Alli later that afternoon and we finally saw LIONS!  They were adorable, two cubs lying with their mother.  The lioness was quite far from them, and apparently has been making them stay away from her lately, but the cubs were all over one another, licking and nuzzling and yawning and all kinds of awesome.  We’ve also seen a ton of giraffe, including a couple licking the ground, although I couldn’t tell you why.  When I encountered these fellows I was driving along a road and they didn’t scatter the way giraffe usually do when someone drives up, so I was about 15 feet from one of them as he stared in my windshield.  Being used to nasty roos, I was quite wary of his potential to destroy the front of my car, but after staring at us a bit he eventually walked off.

Alley pours dirt on Ajabu

My days with the chimps have been awesome.  Data collection is movcing along nicely, and by that I mean that I could plausibly use some of the data I’ve collected in the last week.  It hasn’t taken me long at all to learn to recognize the chimps, most of them are pretty distinctive, and even I’ve been surprised with my progress.  They are so much more playful than their zoo-housed counterparts, probably because they have a few youngsters amongst them (3-, 6-, and 7-year-olds) who are constantly active and playing.  Ajabu, the youngest at 3, is a typical child: whenever her mother and grandmother lie down for a nap you can see her sitting there, bored with them, and wondering who she can pester to play with her.  Everyone loves to play with Ajabu, and she happily roughhouses with even the biggest males.

Victoria is one of the most playful chimps everrrr

In the other group of chimps, Jane has been happily chasing baboons and warthogs around.  In the mornings, the warthogs and baboons come up to the chimps’ breakfast area and start harassing them to share their breakfast.  Most of the chimps move away from the warthogs, but the hogs are quite brave and will walk right up to a chimp to try to sneak food out of their lap.  This has resulted in a few screams and attacks on the warthogs, as simple threats and displays don’t seem to do anything.  The baboons are even bolder, and Jane chased them around for quite a while until they realized that she wasn’t actually going to hit them.  Then they chased her back, and when one of them managed to grab her she screamed so loudly that at least three other chimps left their breakfasts and came to her rescue.  I’ve been told that the chimps really dislike the baboons, and when truly fed up with them two of the high ranking males have thrown baboons into the electric fence.

Today is a Sunday, so I get to go out with Kim again and hopefully get to take advantage of the last of Alli’s good luck.