successful day

Today was a pretty good one. I am heading to Ol Pejeta tomorrow, but it turns out the car I am driving is currently missing the back license plate, so I am not allowed to drive it into town until that gets replaced (at least with a fake one). I had some errands I needed to run in town, so I was trying to find a ride with someone else. At first I thought I had a ride, but then heard the car was full, but then managed to work something out and was able to go in with a group of other researchers from Mpala.

We got to town and had a nice lunch at the Boulangerie. Then I went to the hardware store to see if they can weld together frames for 10 grazing exclosure cages. I was worried this might be difficult or take forever, or be really expensive. But it was very easy and fast to explain it to the guy. He says he can hopefully have them ready by Wednesday and they will only be 1/4 of the price I was expecting. So assuming they actually do get built, great success! I need to put these cages out before I can really start my project, so getting them built as soon as possible is excellent. Once they weld the frames, I still have to wire the chicken wire on myself (and probably hire a day worker to help me), so hopefully that goes off well.

I also needed to buy groceries to take to Ol Pejeta with me. We will have a cook to make our meals, but we have to buy all the grocieries. So I got my shopping done too. While we were in town I got a phone call from a number I didn't know, but answered it anyway. It turns out it was one of the Kenyan guys who works at Mpala that was in town and needed a ride back. He had called the office at Mpala and I guess they gave him my number. So we met up with him and drove him back too.

Perhaps the funniest part of the trip was that the whole British army in Kenya appeared to be in town today. We were eating lunch when a group of like 5 British army solders saw us and walked over and asked if they could sit and started talking and talking to us. They said they had been in the bush training for 5 weeks straight and this was the first day they had off. So they all came to town to get drunk. And I think they were so excited to see 3 white girls, they did not want to let us leave to finish our errands. They asked if we wanted to get a drink with them or go to a party tonight, haha. But unfortunately we had to run errands.

That's about it for the day I think. For good measure, here is a cute photo of the dikdiks outside my room this morning

Animal Shots

I went out for a drive with Wilfred this morning (Dan's Kenyan postdoc who also studies grazing issues) so that he could try to teach me to identify grass species. If the seed head part of the plant is still there, I think I can do it-- if not (like if it has already been eaten by a cow or zebra) IDing the plant will be very hard. Yikes.

But on the way we saw a good number of animals so I thought I would post a few pics. That's all anyone cares about anyway, right? Here are a giraffe running and a Grevy's zebra (there is only one in this pic, but we saw a big group of them today).

in Kenya!!!

Hi everyone-- I have arrived safely in Kenya.  We had a tight connection in London. Our flight from Newark landed as they were almost about to close boarding for our connecting flight to Kenya. Plus, Heathrow is laid out in a very strange way. We could see our next gate through a glass wall, but had to walk approximatley 2 miles and go through security again in order to get to it!  But luckily we and all of our luggage made it onto the plane!

We arrived in Nairobi at 8:30 am local time this morning. I slept 3 or 4 hours on the plane, so my body is already on Kenya time. Hopefully no jet lag at all. It took an hour or 2 to get our bags and get everyone organized into our van ride up to Mpala. Then we had a 4+ hour drive from Nairobi up to Mpala, stopping on the way to buy cell phones for people. So we got to Mpala at close to 4pm. 

We saw the usual elephants, giraffes, gazelles, and zebras on the drive into Mpala. For all but me and 1 other girl, this is their first time to Kenya. One girl was so exicted to see the giraffes. No pictures yet, but I will try to post some in the next couple days. I will be at Mpala until Friday when I plan to drive over to Ol Pejeta for the rest of the summer.

Leaving tomorrow

I am leaving tomorrow for Kenya. My flight leaves Newark at 8:00 am, and because it is an international flight, we want to be there to check in by 6:00 am. So the shuttle van that has been arranged to drive some of us to the airport suggested we leave Princeton at 4:00am!!! I think that is a little early, but oh well. Guess I need to get to sleep early tonight.

I will try to update the blog more regularly this year, but we'll see how busy I get. I would love to hear from people over the summer. Feel free to leave comments here or if you want to send a longer message, email me at schieltz@princeton.edu. See you all in August!

Kenya Summer 2011

(Photo: me last summer looking at a pool of hippos)

Hi everyone -- to those that enjoyed my blog last summer and have been asking if I am going to start it up again, Yes.

I have booked my plane ticket and am leaving for Kenya in less than a week. I fly Virgin Atlantic from Newark on Sunday, June 5 to London, then on to Nairobi. I will be in Kenya for nearly 3 months this time. My return flight is on August 24th.

I am not travelling alone, but escorting a group of Princeton undergrads who will be spending their summers at Mpala. I will be at Mpala for a few days when we arrive, then I will drive my vehicle over to Ol Pejeta for the rest of the summer.

For those that don't know, last summer I was working on a project on hybrid zebras that my adviser had started, but this summer I will be starting my own dissertation research. Some background: In a lot of places in East Africa today, people are trying to raise cattle while also maintaining healthy populations of wildlife on the same land. The wildlife bring in money from tourists who come to see them, and the cattle provide food for the community and additional income. In regards to conservation, I think this may be the only way to really preserve sufficient populations of many wild species going forward. There are too many people and not enough land to just fence off huge protected areas for wildlife where people are not allowed to use the land for food. If cattle-wildlife coexistence is managed properly, it appears it can work, but the key words here are "properly managed".

Since cows and wildlife seemingly eat the same grass, they may be in competition for food. Therefore, in order to manage land for both, we need to know how cattle and wildlife interact with each other and with the vegetation they are eating. Some of the interactions between cattle and wild grazers have been studied, but there are still missing pieces. I am planning to look at how the intensity of cattle grazing affects the behavioral response of the different wild grazers, and whether the response depends on the animal's body size and digestive strategy (whether it is a hindgut fermenter like a zebra, or a foregut fermenter/ruminator like cows and gazelles).

So the plan is to put these little GPS collars on cows to see where they herds are grazing, and how much. Then I will go to those sites and take detailed vegetation measurements and behavioral data on the wild animals grazing there. I want to see how the cows affect the grass, and then how this change affects the behavior of the wild animal species. I also expect large species to be affected differently than small-bodied species, and hindgut fermenters to react differenty than foregut fermenters because of their different dietary requirements.

This week will be spent packing. I have lots of gear to take over....

Leaving Mpala

This is my last morning at Mpala... I leave in about an hour to head to Nairobi for the night. This trip really has flown by. I can't believe it has been 9 weeks already. Blair was telling me that last year when she came for 2 months it felt like forever, and then this year 3 months really felt like forever. I have not felt that at all. I definitely could have stayed awhile longer. While a project still has to be decided on, I will probably come back for 3 months next summer. And then the year after that, maybe 6 months? Dan mentioned to me the other day that he likes his grad students to stay for 6-9 months at a time (although it seems none of them do currently- the average is 3 months I think).


Yesterday, I went around with some of the local field assistants to a couple of the communities around this area. It was really interesting to see. We went to a Masaai village where everyone still lives as pastoralists. There is no road to their bomas- we were driving through the bush for a little bit. The boma consists of a couple of tiny huts made out of sticks and thatch and a pen for their goats and sheep, all circled by a ring wall of sticks to prevent the lions from getting to their livestock at night. The one family we went to see was a man and his three wives (polygamy is still very common) and something like 9 children. They herd their sheep around during the day to graze and then bring them back into the boma at night- and that is their whole livelihood. There is no toilet of any kind- they just go in the bush. Their house was a good 500 meters from the next boma, so when I say village it is more of just a community where all the members are from the same tribe, but their homes are pretty spread out.




And now for some photos: Two nights ago the elephants were up by the research center again. There was a big group of them and they broke the water pipe again to get at the water. (So we didn't have running water for most of yesterday while the pipe was fixed). One youngish one was not afraid of us at all and came right up to the research center and I got some really good pictures.











(While taking the last photo, the elephant decided I had gotten too close and acted like she was going to charge for a minute... but I ran back up onto the porch and she went back to grazing)

Grazing experiment

So for the past 5 days I have been working with Dan on this grazing experiment. It invloved laying out plots in the grass, having donkeys graze a third of them, having slashers cut a third of them and leaving the other third as controls. Then the next day we brought in cows to graze all of them. (I was excited because I kind of love donkeys). We measured the vegetation before everything, after the donkeys/slashers, and then again after the cows. So I had one full day of donkey wrangling, one full day of cow wrangling, and this morning we finished up the vegetation sampling.

Here are some photos of donkey wrangling, a donkeys and her baby in one of our plots, and my cows in one of the plots.