at Mpala

So this morning I said goodbye to everyone at Ol Pejeta and drove to Mpala in time for lunch. It was sad to say goodbye, but hopefully I will see most of them again... either next year at Ol Pejeta, or in the states somewhere. Tomorrow morning I will go with 3 Princeton undergrads to Nairobi and be on a plane Wednesday morning.

Here are a few last animal shots. The goat roast the other night was very fun-- it turned into a dance party by the end. I have photos of the goat roast, but don't know if people actually want to see them or not. The goat part is pretty graphic as always, but hey.. that's where meat comes from. So I figure if I am going to eat meat, I should be able to help slaughter it.

 Here is a mother elephant with 2 of her offspring. The older one is in front and the newest baby is behind to the right.

 And then here are those 3 elephants after 6 tourist cars pull up to take pictures of them....

 Another newborn baby zebra-- still wobbly on its feet

 Baby waterbuck!!! I love them- they are like teddy bears

 And the baby white rhino again-- don't worry, he's not dead, just sleeping-- with one leg in the air!

Done with fieldwork

So Thursday was the last day of my project this summer. I officially finished fieldwork yesterday. That means only 4 more days in Kenya now. I am excited to get back home, but the closer it comes I realize I will really miss it here too. It is just so beautiful.

Today I did laundry and we went to town to do some souvenir shopping. Tomorrow we are having one more goat roast before I leave. Se we will go buy another goat and slaughter it ourselves again. Sunday I will pack. Then Monday I drive back to Mpala for the night. Tuesday some of the undergrads and I head to Nairobi for the night. Then our flight is at 9am on Wednesday the 24th. With the time change, I get back to Newark at 11:30 pm that same day. Hopefully I can get through customs in time to catch the last train back to Princeton! Otherwise I will have to bribe someone to come pick me up at like 2am...

I will try to take a few more photos before I leave and post them either in the next few days or after I get back. It feels strange that the summer is almost over. And there will be new grad students at Princeton when I get back! We are not the newbies anymore.

Leopard!!!!

LEOPARD!!!

So today was pretty epic as far as wildlife viewing. It started off with a leopard!!!! Leopards are really rare and very hard to see because they are usually active at night and in bushy areas near water. This one was out at 8 am, about 50 feet in the air in a tree. It was sitting on branches way out on the edge and looked very precarious, but clearly the leopard knew what he was doing. He shifted positions a few times, and Nicole caught this awesome photo of him jumping between branches.

Later that day I also saw a cheetah eating a warthog and then saw a lion. So all 3 big cats in one day.
I also saw "the big 5" all in one day:  lion, leopard, buffalo, rhino, elephant
These are called the big 5 because back in the days of colonial trophy hunting in Africa, these were the hardest to hunt, so they were prized by sport hunters.

In research news, only 3 days left in my project! I finish up on Thursday and then just have to tie up lose ends before driving to Mpala next Monday. Then Tuesday I am headed to Nairobi and on a plane home on Wednesday the 24th!

Busy research center

There are lots of people at the research center right now. The last Earthwatch group left on Monday, but were quickly replaced by Kim's undergrad Sophie, 3 people doing chimp research for 2 weeks, and an undergrad group from George Mason University (8 undergrads, 2 PhD student leaders and 2 drivers). The staff was struggling to find rooms for everyone, but luckily I didn't have to move again.

Then Blair arrived today! Glad to have another friend here. I really wish this week was just me, Kim, Blair, and Nicole, though. I'm honestly tired of having all of these other people around. It is too much constant commotion. They take up all of the common space and are very loud, especially in the morning when we are trying to sleep! It would be nice to have some quiet again...

Oh, and it has started raining again. It rained very hard last night, and the roads were wet this morning. Just as it was drying out toward midday, the thunder started to roll in again. So instead of going back out to the field this afternoon, I am writing this blog post while it is currently raining.

So here are a few photos from the past few days:

 This buffalo did not like me

 Three female lions on Grants Plain. Two of them have radio collars on

 One of them has 3 cubs somewhere, but I still have not seen them :(

And some zebra taking a dip/drink in Ol Pejeta Dam

hyena puppies

Hyena puppies are really cute. There is a den on Oryx plain where the adults come back and all the pups come our every night around 5:30pm. Very cute to watch. I have some really good video of them playing together too.

 These ones are a little older and starting to change to their adult fur.

 But there is also a litter of tiny ones that are still all black. There are at least 4 like this one.

 And I even managed to catch a photo of this one yawning.

I also went on a walk with some of the Earthwatchers to the marsh one day. Here I am with Jim, Paul, Eric and Kim. There are elephant behind us, but I don't know if you can see them in the distance in this small photo.

some more photos

A brand new 8-day old white rhino calf!!! So cute

And a lone lioness on Grants Plain. She must still be somewhat young because you can still see spots on her belly.



working away

Hello everyone,

Sorry for the infrequent posts nowadays. I feel like I haven't had much to post. Just working away. I had a pretty good morning yesterday though.  Despite a mix-up or lack of communication where my guard did not show up on time and I had to go pick him up out of my way, we got done with everything by lunchtime and saw some cool stuff.

The most exciting of which was, I came within 30m of a cheetah on foot! We were walking out into the middle of a plain of fairly tall grass to measure the vegetation. I was already looking down at the ground when a cheetah who had been napping in the grass hopped up. My guard casually goes, "Oh, there is a cheetah sleeping here." For a second I didn't know if we were supposed to carefully back away to the car, but my guard didn't seem worried, so I just carried on measuring grass. The cheetah sat near us for a little but, then eventually walked away. No big threat really. A single cheetah will not take on a human (a lion might though).
We also saw 2 lions which I wasd excited about because I hadn't seen any in a long time and had been searching for days with no luck. I had apparently missed some my mere minutes several days in a row! I also saw 3 black rhino and 3 white rhino. The 2 groups came face to face and greeted each other (with a little apprehension) by touching noses. It is also funny to see rhinos run. Anything that big trying to move fast is a little funny. So that is about it for now.
Tomorrow is August! Which means I only have about 3 weeks left.

Here is a random picture of an elephant in the marsh the other day to keep this post from being all text

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more babies

I have decided that baby warthog piglets are the cutest thing ever.

Giraffe babies nursing aren't too bad either.

In other news, it is still raining here. 3 of the past 4 days at least. It is supposed to be the dry season...

Just working...

Sorry I haven't posted anything in awhile. Now that I am in the swing of the new plan, I have mostly just been working. Getting data...
Dan came to visit one last time on Tuesday to make sure things are going ok. He left yesterday to fly back to the states. I have now finished the first 2 weeks of the new plan. We have broken it up into 3 2-week blocks, so I am 1/3 of the way done. Only a month left to go!  While this place is beautiful, I am a little anxious to come home. Missing people, my own house, and my cat Magic!

I don't have too many new photos to share. Here are a couple of a black rhino and her little calf.

Moon rising over Mount Kenya

We went for a sundowner with some of the Earthwatch people the other night. The sunset was kind of a let-down.... but it was definitely made up for by the view of the moon rising over Mount Kenya. It had been so hazy here the past few weeks we hadn't seen Mount Kenya at all. Then when it came back, this was a really cool sight.

Tonight is Earthwatch's last night. They leave tomorrow morning after their 2-week stint here. So there is a BBQ tonight to say farewell. I am told there will be cake and possibly even ice cream too!

New Car!

The new car finally arrived! And it is awesome. So quiet, leather seats, pop top (so the people in the back seat can stand up and stick their head out). Josephat drove it up from Nairobi today. He brought it to me at Ol Pejeta and took the red one back to Mpala. Dan also visited today and brought Lena, Bianca, and Amy (from Michigan) so they got to see the new car transfer right before they left.

I call it my "new car", but apparently it is actually pretty old. However, it hasn't been driven in something like 12 years. It was just sitting at a car rental place in Nairobi that Dan works with and he wanted to sell it, so Dan bought it for a good price. I'm excited. I have to get used to it a little bit-- the clutch is a bit more sensitive than the red car. Now I need to name it. Any thoughts? It is kind of mint green, so I don't know if that should be incorporated. There is already a car named Kermit at Mpala, so that is out, btw.

On a more gruesome note-- we found a zebra kill some lions had already eaten at and jackals were on now. Then we found another zebra who had apparently escaped the attack-- but his whole right haunch was ripped off! The skin was just hanging by his tail and you could see all the muscle. He was still alive and walking and eating, but I don't know how that will heal. It might get infected and he will not make it...

Lions and Cheetahs

It's been a pretty good 2 days for big cat sightings...
Yesterday I saw three lionesses lounging under a tree. Then today I first saw a male and female lion together. They were napping... then he tried to hump her a couple times. She seemed to respond by saying, not now, just get off of me. Then later today I went for a drive with Kim and we ran into this really cute cheetah.

Baby animals!

It's that time again-- the annual baby animals edition of the blog!

Cheetah cub with its mom-- this is an older cub, so not quite as cute as a tiny one, but still awfully adorable

The tiniest baby zebra. It must have been born just earlier that day-- you can see the mom still has blood on her back legs



And of course a baby giraffe, because even though they are already larger than a human, they look small next to their moms

In work news: I tested out part of the new plan on Wednesday-- my census method works pretty well just speaking it all into a voice recorder. Then I can put it in a spreadsheet later. Today (Thursday) I went out with a guy and moved all of my cages to the Eastern side and did vegetation measurements at them. My former guard James is busy chaperoning the Earthwatch group, so I had a new guy named Rashid. He does not get a gun, so if anything charges us, we just have to run back to the car.

New Plan!

So Dan visited today and I think we have come up with a totally new plan for my project. The way I was trying to do it was just not working. Trying to have 5 set sites, it was too hard to get enough data on 7 or 8 species from each one. And of course there was the problem with cows being where I thought they weren't supposed to.

So now instead of having set sites, I think I am going to work on the whole Eastern side of the conservancy (but the eastern side only), so I can have collars on all cows on the eastern side. Then it won't matter where they go, as long as I know it from the collars. I will do censuses of where all the animals I can see on the eastern side are every 4 days or so. On the other days I will take behavior measurements on grazing animals of 6 focal species of different body sizes, 3 ruminants and 3 non-ruminants: Grants gazelle, Hartebeest, and Eland... and warthog, zebra, and white rhino.

I am going to test out the census method tomorrow, and then if it seems feasible, I will need to move most of my cages to spread them out across the eastern side to measure vegetation growth.

I feel much better now having a new plan. I sort of felt like I was wasting my time for the last week. Hopefully this works and goes much better. In addition, Dan said he is buying me a car and it could be here as early as next week! Then Blair's car can go back to Mpala until she arrives at the beginning of August to use it. I can't wait to see what it is!!!

Earthwatch

The first Earthwatch group arrived today. We figured out yesterday that there were definitely not enough rooms for everyone, so the staff was kind of scrambling to get things ready today. The CEO even had to get involved. They sent 2 big canvas tents down and put 2 beds in each to make enough room. I thought I was going to have to move into one of those, but apparently some of the Earthwatch people thought they were cool and wanted to stay in them, so I got to keep my room!

And now for some photos:

Mother Southern white rhino and her calf grazing

And napping 

There were 24 elephants on zebra plain last night 

Including 2 males fighting