Notes From Kenya: MSU Hyena Research

Listening for the Quiet of Nature

2012-01-21T05:14:00.000+03:00

People who talk too much make me nervous. I have met that person many times in many different locations throughout my life. Given any topic on which to form an opinion, or merely a willing audience, and the talking starts. I am that guy on more than too many occasions. If someone is listening the convention is to keep talking. Although, I enjoy a good conversation, there is something alluring about a quiet place in nature to escape for a bit. The Mara seems like that sort of place.

When I first arrived, I thought that surely the Mara, isolated and bound from human intrusion by a formidable river, an international boundary, an escarpment, and a vigilant conservancy, would be a quiet retreat. The Mara is seldom quiet. It has inspired me as much as it has challenged me, and I have yet to figure most of it out. But in my time here I have been the audience to an ensemble of noise (and I have probably talked more than necessary as well). Some of what I have heard in the Mara, I will reflect on fondly, and the visual experience is far from complete because there is much to learn from what is heard…the key is to be quiet enough to listen.

The sounds I think I will not miss after leaving the Mara include: the cold crank of tired field vehicle that has no will to start; the whining whur of mosquitoes escorting you from the lab tent to the bathroom and back again during the wet season; the chiming fruit bat ‘alarm clock’ calls of Talek camp that are most loud exactly one hour before you actually need to wake up; a night long serenade of baseline thumping from the Serena hotel staff parties; the broken reception of a internet call or a far too expensive phone call to family or friends at home; the accelerating fan of an inverter signaling the end of your available power supply as the solar system nears over draw; the squabbling of baboons that have just raided your store tent; the midnight crunching of jerry cans (full of water or fuel) suffering loss of structural integrity to the curiosity of wandering hyenas.

On the other hand I think what I will miss the most being away from the Mara are also sounds: the churning stomach acids of a hippo grazing at arms length on the other side of the tent wall at night; the exploratory and experimental attempt of a 4 week old hyena cub whooping when excited by some unknown ecstasy at the den; the whistle of white-faced whistling ducks overhead (probably the longing for the 2011 duck season forever gone); the roar of a nearby (less than 10m) lion that you can feel rattle your diaphragm, the pop of champagne bottles at the end of a incredible balloon flight just before an exquisite breakfast in good company; the thermo-regulating? or competitive signaling? dewlap vibrating from my tent’s resident skink or gecko (not sure which one or why they vibrated the tent tarp); the Tusker inspired stories of grandeur and danger shared by Ian our mechanic; and my favorite sound… the territorial chugging, like sawing wood, of a proud male leopard reminding you whose camp you are visiting, but otherwise whom silently cruises through camp unnoticed with the exception of a brief eye shine if you dare to use the bathroom after dark.

And there are sounds which I have not formed such a strong opinion about, but they do exist and are worth paying attention to: the trumpet of an elephant suggesting that you have encroached too close; the sort of flexing hiss of an annoyed velvet green night adder; the screech of a fleeting plover that explodes in your headlights just barely avoiding being hit on the road, the asynchronous bellow of thousands of wildebeest happy to have crossed the river but fearing the gauntlet of hyenas and lions to come; the giggling, squealing, whooping, and yelling of hyenas sorting feeding rights at a kill.

Of course there are more sounds, but an exhaustive list would be just that…for both audience and myself. Anyway I need to finish packing but I am sure when I next talk of my time in the Mara I will have a lot to say. I wonder if I have been quiet enough to listen and learn anything? Alone in the middle of nowhere, the middle of the Mara, and over all that other noise the one person I could always hear was me. I think I/we talk too much and there is a lot to be heard in the quiet of nature. People who talk too much make me nervous… but thanks for listening.

A tourist's perspective

2011-12-21T13:55:00.000+03:00

I enjoy listening to the guys at camp talk about life and animals. I think there is value in traditional knowledge that stems from experiences and cultures that are tied to nature. As a visitor I have not been here long enough to either believe or disbelieve their wisdom, but I have been writing it down to retell.

The clever ways of animals in the Mara as told by a few Masai...

Jackals follow lions to eat their cubs.

Hyenas put desiccated carcasses in water and return to a rehydrated softened meal.

Baboons chase cheetahs off kills.

Leopards remove the guts of kills in the tree to preserve the meat…eating first some of the intestine, which is hung on a different branch than the rest of the carcass.

Giraffes are polite.

Lions will pounce on a baby elephant while the mother is off feeding, urinate on it and then retreat to sit and wait. When the mother elephant returns it will beat the baby because of an association with the lion smell…then the baby will run and the lions will attempt to kill the baby once away from the mother elephant.

Crocs won’t eat a cheetah that swims across the river.

Nothing eats waterbuck because they have too many tendons and it chokes the predator.

I am not sure how regular any of these scenarios are in the wild. I still have not seen enough of the Mara to contribute much insight. Similarly after the past few months of hyena work I am uncertain if I should believe or disbelieve what I have observed and heard.

For example, ask almost anyone if spotted hyenas are nothing more than scavengers and they will tell you…

A group of 4 lions encircled and chased a herd of zebra back into three crouching waiting lions, which then pounced on and killed two juvenile zebras. After the lions had fed for a few minutes, a rally call of whoops preceded the bristle tail arrival of hyenas. Approximately 30+ hyenas showed up and the lions were forced off one zebra carcass. (Pictures courtesy Noemie Lamon)

Not long after the cheetah disembowled its kill, a hyena (not from one of the clans that we study), catches wind of the dead gazelle. With no more than a half-hearted paw swat of resistance, the cheetah watched is breakfast walk away.

Since I have been in the Mara I have seen two successful hyena kills. I have seen numerous hyenas at kills (responsible killer unknown), and there have been multiple occasions where hyenas have stolen food from some other carnivore. My experience lends to a strong propensity that spotted hyenas are primarily scavengers, but for a less inhibited account of spotted hyena feeding ecology see the combined years of observations detailed in Kruuk 1972 and Holekamp et al 1997 (among others).

In addition to feeding patterns, other aspects of hyena ecology have not forthright unveiled their truth to me. An accurate delineation of a clan social hierarchy is another example of a pattern in nature that is best observed over a significant amount of time; arguably longer than the 9.5 months that I have been in the Mara. Take for example the organization of adult female rank for the Serena North clan … on paper it breaks down as such (highest rank to lowest rank, left to right):

RBC-->ZOEY-->SHRM-->SAU-->ANGI-->DIGS-->PEEP-->ARRO… and near the bottom AWP or some other invariably tattered eared low rank female.

This organization is not so clear in the field…

On August 31^st, 2011, RBC (supposed highest rank) was at a location with a number of her offspring, along with DIGS (supposed 6^th rank) and number of her offspring; all loosely associated around a small piece of food scrap. More importantly, the following transcription excerpts precipitate the fact that both RBC and DIGS were present and able to reinforce any rank discrepancies if they had occurred among their offspring. Furthermore, the rank associations of a youngest offspring outranking older offspring within a mother’s lineage, was upheld at this session; suggesting that these interactions were not altogether an outlier.

1839 MARI app t1 lk (fd) t1 st ov (fd) TYPH, eb oma

MARI t2 lunge (fd) TYPH, eb def parry bo

(In the interaction at 1829, MARI [DIGS cub who was about 1 year old] aggresses on TYPH [RBC’s cub who was also about 1 year old] and TYPH submits.)

1843 DIGS st t1 lk (pesky) t1 pt (pesky) SANA, eb bo

SANA app t1 st ov (fd, scape) brt t2 chase (fd, scape) TYPH, stop fd scrap eb lope bo squeal

(A few minutes later DIGS aggresses on her older offspring SANA, who transfers that aggression to TYPH in a scape-goating reaction…RBC still did not to intervene)

1851 SANA TYPH coal brt t1 st ov (fd) SHRK, eb brt squeal bo

SHRK app t1 st ov/pt (scape) t1 displ (scape) STON, eb bo

SANA t1 lk (fd) SHRK, eb bo w/ fd

(At 1851 SHRK [who is most likely RBC’s offspring, older than TYPH] arrives and is aggressed on by SANA and TYPH…and this causes SHRK to scape goat on the un-involved cub STON [STON’s mother is of low rank].

1859 TYPH app brt t1 st ov (fd) SHRK, eb gig av w/ fd

TYPH brt t2 chase (fd) SHRK, eb av w/ fd

(Finally at 1859 I saw TYPH aggressing on SHRK who responded submissively and this suggested that age related rank of mother’s offspring was being upheld.)

Coming away from the session on August 31, 2011, it would seem that DIGS was of higher rank than RBC.On November 1, 2011 the North clan social structure was further disrupted. During this session SHRM’s lineage was involved in a number of aggressions with other high-ranking females while I was at the communal den. The important individuals to note in the following excerpts are SNIP, who is SHRM’s youngest cub, and HKR, SHRM’s adult female offspring.

0705 HKR groan app t1 st ov (unk) RBC, eb snf

RBC eb grm phallus HKR, groan ll

SNIP app snf RBC, eb sp

SNIP t1 pt (unk) RBC, eb

HKR join in t1 pt (unk) RBC, eb

(Simply put HKR and SNIP aggress on RBC, who submits…that seemed unlikely if RBC was the clan matriarch)

0709 HKR groan app t1 pt (unprov) ZOEY, eb sp

HKR groan snf ZOEY, eb sp bo

HKR SNIP coal brt t1 pt (unprov) ZOEY, eb

(Again if SHRM was the 3^rd highest ranking adult female, it should not be that SHRM’s offspring would be able to aggress on and cause ZOEY to submit, who is ranked number two.)

Highest to lowest rank revised…

…SHRM-->ZOEY/DIGS-->RBC?--> other North clan females in some unknown rank order. That all makes about as much sense as the time I recently saw RBC, in what seemed to be an act of food provisioning to DIGS. At this point in time if any bets are called my money goes to the ‘lions-urinating-on-baby-elephants scenario’ as the most predictable odds.

The more familiar I have become with the North clan, the less I know. Happy Zebra however, after having gone missing for months and losing their matriarch, now seems to be falling effortlessly into a stable social hierarchy.

After previously observing COEL’s displacement from rightful matriarch as KOI’s youngest daughter and heir to dominance, it was still uncertain whether SNAP or PIKE (KOI’s older daughters) would be the newest dominant female in Happy Zebra. On November 30^th PIKE arrived at the communal den and after greeting with an excited SNAP, PIKE proceeded to aggress on SNAP. Not only did SNAP submit to PIKE’s aggression, but SNAP was then aggressed on and bitten by BOOM (PIKE’s oldest female offspring), to which SNAP again responded submissively. In each following interaction, PIKE and BOOM succeeded in dominance over SNAP, who was left to vent her aggression on a few other lower ranking individuals at the den. These first observations of the social reorganization of Happy Zebra are little more than glance at the possible hierarchy delineation. But after a number of observation sessions around the communal den, I would say that I am now sure that PIKE is the dominant hyena in Happy Zebra clan.

I was also sure this would be last picture of BARR taken after KOI (BARR's mom) died.

Siblings COEL and BARR, lying together in July not long after their mother (KOI) was killed.

Coming up on six months since last seen, BARR, was about to be moved into the missing or presumed dead category…

BARR with two of the newest hyena cubs from Happy Zebra clan.

…welcome back BARR

In my last days in the Mara I would do best by remembering that, ‘…studying spotted hyenas requires an open mind and a willingness to recognize that, in the natural world, things are not always what they seem’ (http://scientistatwork.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/21/why-study-hyenas/#more-11367).

I would agree that even with careful observation, what we see and experience in nature is rarely straightforward, and that may be the only validated thing I have yet posted…of that I am sure.

Happy Zebra clan and clues to social organization

2011-11-04T12:58:00.000+03:00

Most of the end of October I was in Nairobi and that was long enough. By the time I returned to the Mara the migration activity had begun to subside and Happy Zebra clan was relocated in my absence. Uncovering the whereabouts of the Happy Zebra communal den seems blog worthy just given the amount of time and effort we have invested in pursuit of these animals. From call play backs, to checking old dens, to driving the most extreme edges of this clan’s suspected territory, and waiting nights after dark trying to pinpoint the location of distant whoops… we tried for the better part of September and October to find Happy Zebra. The unknown with this clan did not however begin when CSBY (the last adult female to occupy Alamo Den) was last seen with her two 4-week old cubs at the previous communal den. As earlier discussed on the blog, the death of KOI by lions removed the highest-ranking individual from the clan. This opened up Happy Zebra to uncertainty (at least for us observing) or possibly opportunity (for other females in the clan) as the social organization was determined to shift.

At the time of KOI’s death, Happy Zebra was composed of 11 adult females, 9 cubs, 6 subadults, and 4 adult males. KOI and her lineage comprised about 33% of the total Happy Zebra clan. All else equal and following the conventional inherited social rank descendent from KOI, COEL (KOI’s youngest female cub) should have been successive dominant female of Happy Zebra clan. However, given that COEL was less than a year old, this cub’s survival, far less its dominance, was not certain. The possible other successors to dominance could in theory have been any female in the clan, though most likely it would be some relation to KOI that arrived at the top. A breakdown of KOI’s lineage and prospective inheritance of dominance in Happy Zebra were organized in a list from a previous post, http://msuhyenas.blogspot.com/2011/07/kois-legacy.html. To discern the newest rank relations we would have to observe and record a series of dyadic interactions and tally aggressions and submissions between individuals in a matrix. The first steps…observe behavioral interactions.

On October 31^st, 2011 I saw Happy Zebra present at their communal den. Most notable in this session was the confirmation of PIKE (one of KOI’s older daughters and a likely candidate for the highest rank individual in Happy Zebra) having two 4 week old cubs. Also of interest were a number of interactions, which occurred between the female members of KOI’s lineage. PIKE’s cubs were confirmed after they were seen nursing from PIKE. Also nearby was BOOM, a previous female offspring to PIKE. Like many female subadults interested in the business of babies, BOOM was being pesky and bothersome to the nursing PIKE. Not very note worthy in and of itself. However, a good context to achieve a brief, instantaneous glance at the social hierarchy is through a cascade of aggressions. For example if a high rank individual aggresses on a mid rank individual, and then the mid-rank individual takes out that aggression on low rank individual, we note the latter aggression as a scape goat context. It could be like, when my girlfriend reprimands me, and in my frustration I vent on my dog (that is assuming my dog doesn’t out rank me…data is still out on that); either way the aggression filters down through the ranks, clearly revealing who is dominant. Anyway my point, was that in being pesky to PIKE, BOOM was aggressed upon. It was also the case that COEL (KOI’s youngest cub and technically rightful heir to dominance) had recently arrived at the den.

COEL cautiously approaching one of PIKE’s newest cubs (the small black one on the right).

The good news is that the ~1 year old orphan persisted through the migration season unaided by her mother. However, after being aggressed on by PIKE, BOOM redirected that aggression to COEL, who submitted and retreated. Shortly after words PIKE and BOOM, in a coalition aggression, again displaced COEL.

PIKE and BOOM in the background before they aggress on and displace COEL, who is already beginning to go ears back (a sign of submission).

Although far from conclusive, at the surface it seems that without the support of her mother to reinforce her social standing, COEL may not befall the highest rank spot in Happy Zebra. Other clues, like COEL arriving and flattening her ears as she approached to greet PIKE and BOOM also suggests her subordination to these two. More evidence is needed, including the observation of interactions between PIKE and some of the other adult females in this clan, but this was a good start to reorganizing the Happy Zebra social hierarchy.

High Season

2011-09-17T22:48:00.000+03:00

At the end of low season the Mara was still a relatively quiet place when I went to bed…and then one morning I wake up and the wildebeest are here… and tourists are here, and the vultures are here, and more crocodiles are here, and all those hyenas I thought may have disappeared are in actuality, still here. And, it all seems to hinge on the fact that…well, the wildebeest are here. People plan and save and finally arrive in the Mara hoping to see a crossing; and I am right there with them as I shuffle camp’s land cruzer among that cross hatched mess of vehicles towards rivers edge. Just a little closer to line up a better view…hopefully the first wildebeest that enters the water is a bit slow or ill or young or old… I didn’t say it aloud, but I am likely not the only one thinking it. And in all the excitement you have to catch yourself as an observer from falling into reflective sentiments like, ‘Wow the circle of life’ as that that Elton John song drowns out a couple thousand bellowing widlebeest.

The migration starts with a crossing…the initialization of the circle of life… or at the very least, increased flight prices to and from the Mara. Jambo high season.

The time surrounding the migration provides an opportunity to see a variety of animal behaviors. Underlying every decision and respective behavior in the animal world (even humans??? no I don’t have the gall to pursue that) there are tradeoffs that ultimately affect an individual’s somatic and reproductive fitness. Disney aside, you eat, are eaten, and/or reproduce. In two words you could argue that the process of living, from to sex, to eating, to death involves combinations of chasing and fleeing.

Sex seems an appropriate starting point.

To set the stage here is my 10-15 second pitch on how this works…I’ll use a pair of lions to illustrate my point.

Simple, right? In the time you read that, it is all over and both lions have once again sacked out. That is likely a hyena camp bias on some level, slighting the complexity and the social interactions involving a lion’s establishment within a pride. Not to mention what it takes to achieve reproductive success as a lion; that will require insight from someone more qualified.

Observing hyenas mating is not overly common, but since the wildebeest arrived I have seen two successful mating attempts and a few less successful pursuits. That being said I am obviously no expert so I’ll first provide a reference for a more technical source (http://scientistatwork.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/how-spotted-hyenas-mate/#more-12195).

The hyena mating events I have observed involve both a lot of chasing and fleeing of variable degrees of intensity. The first part of the chase is a slinky cautious approach by a male, towards a seemingly uninterested female in estrus who walks away (hardly an example of fleeing but it is movement away). As the female’s preoccupation and patience wanes she expresses her annoyance in an aggressive lunge or chase at the hovering male, who (because he is much smaller in stature than the female) flees, loping away to avoid injury. With persistence this exchange of ‘chasing’ and ‘fleeing’ continues and once in a while the result is that the female consents and success (such as that achieved by Trotsky with Sherman).

But success is relative, and as I suggested, all of this somatic and reproductive give-and-take involves the costs along with the benefits. I am not sure of the story behind each scar, but as highest-ranking male in the South territory clan, Dolittle, shows the wear of a life full of costs, from emigration to female courtship; all for ~15 minutes of intromission… maybe that’s worth more than “just” 15 seconds, as with those lions. On the other hand there is more to life than mating.

I tune into the Discovery channel’s Shark Week each year not because it promises to unveil the latest footage of shark courtship. Rather, just as the tourists monitor the riverbanks for a potential crossing or scan the grass for a hidden predator, my intent is witnessing a kill. The energy flux that occurs between trophic levels involving predators and prey epitomizes chasing and fleeing in the wild and it captivates me…us… at least the reviews would suggest. This likely requires little explanation on my part, so I have captioned a series of photographs that demonstrate somatic maintenance among a variety of taxa.

Every chase begins with an approach. This young lion achieved little more than a few uncalculated test chases after a group of impala.

When pursuing prey that will inevitably flee, age is not the single determinant in success. I came across this young leopard suffocating a live and kicking impala that almost certainly weighed more than the leopard.

Even though age does not solely determine when a chase is more successful than the flight, size certainly achieves the endpoint with far less wear and tear. Shortly after the leopard had killed and drug the impala off the road leading into our camp, two lionesses ran out of the grass and darkness. Displaced, the smaller younger leopard was left to watch its catch consumed by the lions as nothing more than a faint pair of eye shines from the periphery of my headlights.

If not just size and age, then numbers also put the odds in favor of both those chasing and those fleeing. Hunting both alone and in groups, hyenas are able to pursue a wide variety of prey. Although I did not see the progression of this kill (and a lone hyena is certainly more than capable of killing a wildebeest) these two adult hyenas and a cub shared the benefit of this wildebeest kill.

This was the fewest and least excited group of hyenas I have yet observed at a feeding session. Usually upon arriving at a fallen carcass, one can rest assured that the chasing and fleeing has yet to really begin until after the prey is immobilized and the hyenas begin to sort the feeding privilege based on social rank.

The competition of chasing and fleeing is not merely a phenomenon of mammals in the Mara (as this blog seems to thus far suggest). So, as not to overlook birds and reptiles, I will include a few more photographs that highlight the endpoint of a chase. Both the eagle and the heron out matched their respective reptilian prey in these pictures.

That covers the majority of both sex and death, animal-pursuing-animal interactions I have encountered. Before wrapping this up, I have left out my most personal accounts of chasing and fleeing. Not for a meal or as successfully as birds, and not to achieve any sort of reproductive success (well at least not directly…although I used to think I could embellish a good snake story to my advantage while chatting some uninterested girl in a bar), but either way, I have always enjoyed catching reptiles…

That is all well and good when you know the reptile you are chasing, as with the skink above. It is less good when you hear that there is a big black snake under the guest tent in camp and the camp staff wants to kill it. Not wanting to see this snake meet its end, yet unable to get a controlled grip on the snake’s head through the tent floor, there was little else to do but chase it out from under the tent. Happy to escape my incessant prodding the snake left out from the tent into the bush when we realized there was another large black snake making its way towards the cool recline under the tent floor. This second snake made flight up a nearby tree, before making a second attempt to escape the heat of the day under the tent. Insert here the chasing and fleeing story. Warmed by the afternoon sun, this second black snake was much faster at fleeing than I was at chasing and catching, but we made our way through the forest on edge of camp. In all the excitement, I missed the memo when the snake no longer wanted to play this game. Fleeing stopped, and so halted my pursuit. The snake rose up off the ground, staring at me. Unfortunately I have no picture to demonstrate this; fortunately that spitting cobra had just poor enough aim that if I did have a picture of it, I would still be able to see it sitting here today.

Some pursuits are best slow, casual, and from a distance.

In a few weeks the high season will conclude. There won’t be as many wildebeest, or tourists, or vultures here, but with all that eating and mating I expect the Mara will still host some chasing and fleeing.

Migration!

2011-08-24T23:21:00.002+03:00

The migration finally came (on the 23rd of July) to my side of the Mara, and given how high the Mara River was at the time, there were some pretty dramatic crossings and subsequent die offs. Chris Dutton and Amanda Subalusky who study the river (maraadventure.blogspot.com) said that in the first crossing, they counted over 3,000 carcasses just below the crossing point. As I’m sure you can guess, that made for a pretty stinky river, but for some very happy vultures, crocs, and hyenas!

(Yes, those are all carcasses!)

Dreaming of Hyenas

2011-07-27T18:08:00.000+03:00

When you spend many hours a day watching animals like we do out here, it is not surprising that they begin to enter your dreams. So it was quite natural that I started dreaming of hyenas about a month and a half ago. A common breakfast table conversation in Talek camp is to ask if anyone has had any interesting hyena dreams. And as you might expect, our hyenas have a habit of popping up in many peoples’ dream-worlds in strange ways. In one breakfast table conversation, an unnamed Talek researcher revealed that she had recently given birth to two hyena cubs in her dreams! Kay’s immediate response… “Was it through a phallus?”

A large part of my hyena-watching time out here has been spent learning the distinct spot patterns of different hyenas so that I can recognize each hyena individually. So, many hyena appearances in my dreams have centered around me IDing them. Magenta, one of my favorite hyenas and one of the first I learned to identify, was often present just wandering around in whatever other scene might be playing out in my dream. One night I dreamt I was transcribing, recording the hyenas’ behaviors as we watch them, and I caught a flash of Buenos Aires’ distinctive thigh.

All of this seemed quite ordinary to me. My previous great ape study subjects continue to make guest appearances in my dreams. I’ve dreamt that Ulindi, a bonobo mother handed me her new baby to hold, that one of my favorite gorillas just happened to be peaking through my bedroom window, and that Sandra the chimpanzee sent me an email.

But never would I have predicted that hyenas’ presence in my dreams would actually prove useful in my training as a hyena researcher. A few weeks ago I had my first observation session without a seasoned hyena researcher along with me to confirm that I was properly identifying all the hyenas at the den. The session started out calm—a few cubs here and there. But then things began to get more hectic. The sun set and adults started showing up left and right. I’d ID an individual but then doubt myself and I inevitably felt overwhelmed by all the greetings and aggressions surrounding me.

By the time I left the session, I was confident I had correctly IDed everyone except for a couple of individuals. I was particularly frustrated by my inability to recognize one hyena. When she first arrived at the scene, I identified her as Dionysus. But then I changed my mind…and then changed my mind again thinking maybe it was in fact Dionysus. As you all know from Tracy’s previous post, this individual is the subject of much mystery and suspense at Talek camp. Much to our surprise, we realized Dionysus was actually female, not male, only when we darted her earlier this summer. This put her next in line to become the clan’s matriarch and take over control from her mother who had died earlier this year. However, we hadn’t seen her interact much with the other high-powered Talek ladies so there was still much speculation about her role. This makes it all the more important that when we see Dionysus interacting with other hyenas, we pay close attention in order to discern the changing rank relations of this group.

That evening I couldn’t stop thinking about the identity of this mystery hyena. At dinner, I wouldn’t let my fellow Fisi researchers eat in peace, bugging them with constant questions like, “Who has that big jack-o-lantern-looking smiley face on her side?” Brian’s reply shows the typical problem in trying to ID hyenas from memory with other researchers – everyone sees something different. He answered, “Hmmm I see smiley faces on about 12 of our hyenas.”

So I went to sleep annoyed and wondering who my mystery hyena might be. In my dream that night, I dreamt that an idea suddenly popped into my mind. My dream-self suddenly thought, “Check Yaz!” Yaz is not a hyena that keeps a particularly high-profile and I had only seen her a handful of times. In the dream, I pulled out our ID book filled with hyena photos and turned to Yaz. It was a perfect match.

I woke up that morning not taking the dream too seriously. Wasn’t it just slightly pathetic that I was dreaming about looking up hyena ID photos? When we got in the car, I mentioned to Brian that I had IDed my mystery hyena as Yaz in my dream. I laughed when he told me I should check the book because he had confused Yaz and Dionysus before. A little later, on our way to catching up with the hyenas, he again pressed me to check out Yaz’s photos. So I gave in and opened our book to Yaz. It was a perfect match.

My premonition gets even a little more strange. We pulled up to our first hyena wandering about in the darkness that morning. Brian and I reached for our binoculars and I immediately knew that this was the hyena I had seen the previous night and in my dreams. Brian and I were dumbfounded.

Like most researchers who are trying to unravel the lives of another social animal, I’ve felt a heightening of my hyena-related-senses since being out here. The quality of an interaction might give you a clue as to how two individuals are related, the smell of an area might help you determine if hyenas have been around recently, the energy level of a group of hyenas might help you predict if they are gearing up for a hunt…and apparently, your dreams can provide clues as well.

KOI's Legacy

2011-07-10T11:42:00.004+03:00

Similar to Tracy’s laments of hierarchical difficulties on the East side of the Mara, we’re experiencing some similar challenges over here in the West side operated by The Mara Conservancy. As I’m sure you faithful bloggers out there know, when an alpha female dies, the new highest ranking in the clan should be her youngest (and able) daughter. Although it seems really simple to us onlookers as to who should move to the top, the actual process of this occurring is usually less cut and dry.

Some background before I dive too deep: A little over a month ago, we lost our alpha female in our Happy Zebra clan over here to lions.

Map of Masai Mara Reserve. X is where we found KOI's body.

Even though we’ve only been following clans on this side of the park intensively since 2008, KOI was a tough hyena that we all liked to think ruled with an “iron-paw.” Finding out the new alpha of a clan is always exciting, as this determines a bit of how the clan functions in the future. Because of this, these are always exciting times in the Mara!

KOI on a border patrol with PIKE/SNAP. RIP KOI 2 June 2011.

To understand the top of the hierarchy in her clan, here’s a snippet from the front of our Happy Zebra binder. Each binder has a “Clan List” that displays the linear hierarchy and members of the clan. To keep track of familial relationships, every cub that an individual female produces gets placed at one tab over, and then all of their cubs also get tabbed over as well. Therefore at the time of her death, Koi had 5 surviving cubs that we know of-- Coelecanth, Barracuda, Snapper, Pike, and Sawtooth (types of fish lineage). PIKE, SNAP, and SAW have all survived to reproduction and have produced their own cubs.

KOI - f

COEL (31Aug10) - f

BARR (31Aug10) - m

PIKE (30Oct07) - f

ADL (28Feb11) - ?

BOOM (16Feb10) - f

KATA (16Feb10) - m

SNAP (30Oct07) - f

GLET (13Oct10) - m

SAW - f

SGL (15Nov10) - f

HALA (15Nov10) - m

With Koi out of the picture, the throne should go to COEL. However, because she (and her brother BARR) were only 9 months old at the time of their mom’s death, we all expected they would perish given how dependent cubs at this age are of their mothers (cubs can nurse for up to 18 months!).

That’s why to my surprise, this morning we saw COEL and BARR looking pretty healthy at a topi carcass with both PIKE and SNAP. They’ve now survived over a month following their mom’s death, and seem to be doing just fine. Maybe they’re really good opportunists? Maybe PIKE and SNAP are still unsure of how to treat them and are allowing them to trail along on hunting expeditions and kills? Maybe PIKE and SNAP want more allies to help them in the future and see this as something that will directly benefit them later in life? Whatever the answer is, these two are still around.

PIKE from this morning eating a snack.

Although most of us hyena researchers out here feel that PIKE will most certainly jump over them to take the position of alpha, we are all interested in seeing if COEL and BARR can make it to adulthood. I think if they can make it through this first month and have latched onto their older and wiser sisters, things could be bright for their future.

We’ll keep you posted and check back soon!

The Search for Queen

2011-06-26T08:39:00.022+03:00

Who’s who in Talek West

Let me present Murphy's children, our cast of characters in our search for the new queen. Hyenas have a matriarchal society with youngest ascension, so in theory Murphy’s youngest surviving daughter should take over and become queen.

Hades and Cronus: Murphy’s most recent cubs, born in December 2010. Sadly, they undoubtedly perished shortly after she died since they were still reliant on her milk.

Dionysus: The chubbiest, fluffiest (and most spoiled) cub I have ever seen. As Murphy’s youngest surviving cub (b. Aug 09), Dion is currently the highest ranking hyena in the clan. As a male, however, he is not in the running for queen.

Juno: Our regal teenage mom, Juno (b. Apr 08) is theoretically poised to take over the clan. She has all the makings of a good queen: calm and noble, but not afraid to show her power with some aggressive bite-shaking when food is involved. She has two cubs, Gus Gus (b. Mar 10, now missing) and Mushu (b. Jan 11, currently an extremely healthy, adorable, chubby cub).

Loki: Juno’s subordinate twin sister and the local bully - she arrives at the den at night and proceeds to aggress on all her subordinates just to prove her dominance. In my opinion, this simply shows that she is insecure in her position, but all this testosterone-fueled aggression could ultimately prove an advantage in the battle for queen. Loki also has two cubs, Alderaan and Endor (b. Nov 10), who are currently graduating from the den and making their first tentative steps out into the world.

Helios: A beautiful, brawny baller of a female (b. Feb 06), some of our past fisi campers have their bets placed on her. While she is strong and proud, Juno and Loki are well-established daughters with their own lineages, so I don’t think she’s much of a threat.

Since Murphy’s death, we have been waiting with baited breath to see these hyenas interact, so we can really establish who has taken over. Until recently, luck has not been with us.

Juno is queen…or is she?

On June 10, two months after Murphy’s death, we FINALLY saw Juno, Loki, and Helios interact over food when the Talek West clan was fighting over an impala carcass on the NNH plain.

Helios arrived at the session one minute before Juno did, so one of the first things we saw was Helios open-mouth appeasing (you are better than me, you can totally have the food) to Juno when Juno came to take the carcass for herself. Unsolicited open-mouth appeasing (oma; see photo), when one hyena oma without the other hyena aggressing on her, is one of the interactions we use to establish rank. So, we can conclude that Helios is still lower-ranking than Juno.

Loki arrived at the session at the same time as Juno, but we had to wait 20 minutes for them to interact! Finally, Juno and Loki were both feeding on the carcass, and the following happened:

1806 JUNO t3 bite (food) LOKI

LOKI t1 (scape) DTH

LOKI brt app eb snf ll oma JUNO (grt)

JUNO t3 bsh (food) LOKI, cc

JUNO brt t2 chase (food) LOKI, squeals av w/ scrap

For you non-fisi campers, this means that at 6:06 pm, Juno decides that she wants the carcass all to herself, and so she bites Loki and kicks her off the carcass. Loki takes out her feelings on Death Valley (DTH), who is lower-ranking than Loki and can’t hurt her back. Loki then re-approaches Juno and acts submissive to her, going ears back (eb) and open-mouth appeasing (oma). Juno, who is likely glad Loki is respecting her but still REALLY wants Loki to go away, bite-shakes and then chases Loki, who carpal crawls (cc, a submissive behavior) and runs, managing to keep a small scrap of food for herself but leaving the majority of the carcass to Juno.

As you can tell, Juno is definitely dominant over her twin sister Loki. Juno fed until she was full, at which time she left and Loki took over the carcass. For the next hour, we saw Loki routinely aggressing on Helios and driving her away from the food. During these aggressions, Helios always exhibited submissive behaviors, which means that Helios is subordinate to Loki as well. So far, everything has played out according to our expectations. Until….

The last two standing

We saw Chicopee (one of our immigrant males) paw the ground in front of Dionysus. Pawing the ground is a quintessential mating behavior, so this is a very weird interaction: we think that Dion is a boy, but Chicopee clearly thinks that Dion is sexy. Chicopee could have turned gay, but that’s unlikely. So, the question becomes: is Dion a girl or a boy????

Sexing hyenas is ridiculously difficult. As cubs or sub-adults, the only way to tell is to look at the shape of the erect phallus. If the phallus is pointy, it means boy; if it is flat, it means girl. As you can imagine, it is easy to confuse the two - so easy that camp protocol requires that you sex the hyena three times before it goes into our notes. But even with these precautions, we make mistakes. Therefore, once a hyena is darted, we also check the scrotum/pseudo-scrotum. If the hyena is male, you can feel two discrete testes sliding around within the scrotum, whereas a female’s pseudo-scrotum is simply full of soft tissues.

After nine desperate days of trying to dart Dion, Brian finally shoots him/her and he/she goes down. Brian jumps out of the car to cover his/her eyes and immediately checks the scrotum: boy. Kay does the same and comes to the same conclusion. It is only later, when Kay has a teaching moment for our two undergraduate visitors, that we realize that Dion’s sex is more ambiguous than we had previously thought. Five minutes later, we finally decide that we can’t actually feel testes within her pseudo-scrotum. Dion is a girl!!! She is also (maybe) pregnant.

So now we wait. Just like with Loki and Juno, we need to see Juno and Dion interacting over food in order for us to determine who ultimately is the new queen in Talek West.

Echem…hairball?

2011-06-23T12:15:00.002+03:00

Vomiting. There, I said it. Now lets talk about it hyena style.

For animals that are known for their bone cracking abilities, and can level a carcass to nearly nothing in a matter of minutes, I always think it’s a funny sight to see the things that they can’t digest (usually some shards of bone and hair of their prey).

And although at first vomiting may seem like a normal occurrence for animals that can bite off more than they can chew and eat up to a third of their body weight in a single sitting, when it happens in the field, we record it.

As gross as it may sound, when one of our hyenas vomits, we need to note it because it becomes a new food source. This new food source is something to fight for, snatch up, or even my personal favorite, roll in it. Nothing like adding a little Eau de "Crocuta" to really make you irresistible to the ladies.

New York Times: Scientist at Work

2011-06-21T15:35:00.003+03:00

The first of Kay Holekamp's entries in the New York Times' Scientist at Work series was published on June 20, 2011. Read her story The Land of Dik Diks and Pangolins.

Cracking the hyena code

2011-06-12T12:10:00.001+03:00

Having spent my first month in the Mara, I’ve decided it is time for me to jump into the blogosphere. I just finished my first year as a PhD student in the lab and for my dissertation, I’m hoping to investigate how differences in maternal behavior and physiology that others in our lab have linked to human disturbance are impacting the developmental process of hyena cubs. To do this, I’ll be comparing hyena development in clans exposed to different levels of disturbance, focusing on behavioral, physiological, and cognitive aspects of development.

I am thrilled to be spending this summer getting familiar with the hyenas I have been thinking, reading, talking, and writing about for the past year. Last semester, I spent a great deal of time reading through hyena notes back in Michigan. As we watch the hyenas in field, we record their behaviors into a digital voice recorder. Back at camp, we transcribe these notes into word documents that get sent back to MSU where they can be entered into our database and analyzed. These notes are written in a language all their own. Learning to decipher the rich behavior documented in the strings of acronyms that make up our notes is like learning to crack a code.

Last semester, grad students Sarah Jones, David Green and I trained undergraduate research assistants to “extract” certain behavioral data from this secret language and enter them into our database. This of course required that I learn to crack the code myself.

Both Sarah and David had already been out in the field. As they had already seen hyenas in action and transcribed their every move, it wasn’t so confusing to them to read pages and pages of notes like, “MOS t1 lk (food) MP, eb hb bo. ADON join MOS t3 bsh brt (food) MP, eb cc squeals.” In reading this, Sarah and David could imagine an interaction in which Morpheus (MOS) got annoyed with MoonPie (MP) as they were arguing over some scrap of meat. MoonPie got the message and did a bunch of submissive stuff, pulling her ears back (eb), head-bobbing (hb), and backing off from the situation (bo). But clearly this wasn’t enough because Morpheus then got seriously pissed and bit and shook her (bsh). Adonis (ADON), standing nearby, thought this was a just reprimand…or maybe just wanted to use the opportunity to reassert her own rank… and joined in with Morpheus. This time, MoonPie squealed and crawled submissively on the ground (cc).

Reading our hyena notes before actually seeing a live hyena made for some funny situations. Sarah had to demonstrate a “defensive parry” for me, David had to act like a male hyena anxiously “approach-avoiding” a female he is interesting in, and everyone in the lab had to try out their impression of a hyena whoop for me. Over time, I began to be able to imagine what the hyenas might be acting like as I was reading the notes. Some of the individuals even began to feel familiar. It some sessions, I could feel their personalities jumping off the page as I read the code like a soap opera.

But every once and a while, it would come out that I had a little misunderstanding about one of many components of the hyena code. I have become known in the lab for one of these realizations. One day as I was reading some hyena notes, imagining what the scene must look like, and checking over the work one of our undergraduates had done. I announced to everyone working in the lab, “I love it when everyone oos!” They looked at me a little confused. “Um, what do you mean?” Sarah asked. “You know, it often happens at the end of a session. Everyone oooooos and then the session ends,” I answered. I had been imagining that an “oo” was one of the hyenas’ charismatic vocalizations. It made sense. I often read “everyone oos” and then the researchers left the area. This must be a vocalization the hyenas do when they are about to leave or move on. I was excited to get to Africa and finally hear what one of these “oos” sounds like! Everyone in the lab starting cracking up at me. It turns out “oos” actually stands for “out of sight.” As Dave informed me, “All the observers leave because there are no hyenas around! That’s why the session ends!”

As I predicted, some of the hyena behaviors are just as I was imagining… and some are very different. Although learning the hyena code before ever seeing a hyena is the opposite of what most members of our lab do, it was useful for me to see what the learning process must be like for all the undergraduates who help us extract behavioral data without having the opportunity to see a hyena in the flesh. Needless to say, it is great to be out here seeing what the hyena code actually looks like when acted out live by the cast of characters.

That was my May in the Mara

2011-06-09T14:36:00.000+03:00

I used to have a yellow lab when I was younger. Isaac (my brother) and I had this game we played where we would fish for our dog off the picnic table with a rawhide tied to a broom handle with some twine. To call this a bit odd seems fair, but I think the concept is accessible…drag the rawhide around and the dog chases it until he catches it, tug of war, and then embellish some heroic tall tale about catching a trophy; it is the kind of tale where the catch gets bigger and better each time the story is retold.

About 10:00 pm on June 2, 2011, the bait was secure and the line was cast. Following a Land Rover and the dead hyena in tow, 2-6ish hyenas (very much alive ones) revitalized my sense of excitement from my dog fishing days, as I hung on to the spare tire mounted on the back of the Land Rover. Although yellowish-tan, furry and pretty charismatic like my old lab, I hesitated in wanting this evening’s edition of carnivore fishing to end in a catch. Rather I was hoping that once the necropsied remains of the recently found dead Koi (alpha female hyena from the Happy Zebra clan studied by the Serena Hyena Camp within the Mara Conservancy Park) had been drug a safe distance from the camp drive way, I would be able unhook the tow cable from Koi’s body in a timely enough fashion that I would not be mistaken for the bait.

The fact that I am doing well and writing this now a few days later makes it clear that this tale has already lost the element of danger, and bravery, and tragedy that tend to weave a series of events into stories of epic proportion. Maybe a few beers in, sitting around with some friends a few months from now and a more exciting version will manifest, but because I have already unveiled the end of May and the beginning of June, I should fill in the story line up until this point in time.

Right, so Koi was found dead along the High road the evening of June 2^nd by a watering hole we call Egyptian Goose. That same evening Koi was brought back to camp and a handful of people (the water researchers, camp staff, a few visitors etc) all helped or watched the necropsy of Koi in the glow of mag lights and headlights. Koi appeared to have been dead for less than 24 hours. Her cause of death seemed most likely to be lion(s). This was determined by the puncture wounds found around the neck and amongst the writhing mass of ticks, flies, and non-descript ecto-parasites inhabiting Koi’s matted fur. I am not sure how many of Koi’s ecto-parasites decided to switch hosts and join my team that night. Still you are faced with a serious question when deciding whether to leave well enough alone or swat with a hand covered in hyena fluids ripened by the warmth of the Kenyan sun. To be fair not all of the excitement was at the focus of our scalpel blades and sample vials. Cast in the interface of shadow and trailing headlight or mag light beams that were focused away from the necropsy, a number of local North territory hyenas had gathered. I imagine, as much as I could smell Koi, these North hyenas must have been able to smell Koi from some distance. I have no idea what the North hyenas intent or interest was, but they paced and dodged in the artificial light with increasing energy and boldness as the necropsy continued. It was like if you have ever been at a small venue bar to see a show. Before the main act comes out the crowd kind of jostles in this uncoordinated but unified rhythm of impatient discontent directed at that first band; we were the lead singer for that unappreciated opening act the night of Koi’s necropsy. Soon enough though Koi had been preserved forever in the records and data logs, and was hooked in tow by a cable to the Land Rover. Out across the plane we go, with at least 6-12ish hyenas (very much alive and big ones) in pursuit…

Koi was not the only one to suffer lion troubles in May. On a morning earlier in the month, myself and a few other research assistant/grad students were at a den conducting a fairly standard obs session. The morning was nearing the time we might drive around and try to find other hyenas, but before leaving we saw two hyenas loping across the plane. In casual pursuit were three male lions. At first it did not appear as though the lions’ course would bring them much nearer than 100m from us and the den. That was an incorrect presumption. The lead lion quite intentionally shifted attention and gear, and came running at the adult and cub hyenas at the den. I will try not to sensationalize this part. However, a big male lion, when moved by some inspiration to do more than sun bathe and nap, becomes an impressive display of muscle contractions and potential killing force. This fact was also realized by the hyenas, and the adults all scattered while the cubs dove into the nearest den hole they could find, as the lead male lion leapt over a ditch next to the den. The male lion reached into the den with its paw but to no avail before it began urinating on the den. Meanwhile at a den hole about 50m away, one brave cub ventured a look out of the den. The hyena cub caught the lead male lion’s eye, and he again sprang into action running at the den and trying to reach in and grab the cub. Soon the other two adult male lions had arrived at the den. Again there was a series of macho displays in which the lions were urinating and pawing the ground with their rear legs on top of the den. Not long after marking the den, the lions moved on and retired for the day long nap that was sure to follow. We soon left as the morning was waning, as was the potential for a Mara headliner. It is not that we are impatient, but at that point in time it would be like trying to watch and episode of the Bachelor following an episode of Jersey Shore; relatively it had just become too tame.

Don’t get me wrong, it is not that tame is always bad, but I think everyone can better know where they stand day to day when the stakes go up. Take for example two other den sessions in which the only animal participants were hyenas…well at least live ones. Both of these session involved Clovis, the alpha female from our South territory clan. In two different cub provisioning events, Clovis provided her youngest cubs with almost exclusive feeding access on wart hog kills. If lions, as a context, tend to excite hyenas I think it is safe to say that food does as well. The question is then, if you are Clovis, why bring the wart hog remains back to the den and have to stand by vigilant to ensure that no other hyenas steal your cubs’ prize? It seemed most likely to be a lesson. Why bring the food back among all those other hungry hyenas? One reason might be, simply because you can… and that is the glory of being at the top of the social hierarchy. During the excitement of both of these apparent provisioning events, not only did Clovis provide a lesson to her cubs and the rest of the clan in regards to rank, but it also helped me rank my own status thus far in the Mara. Prior to the two wart hog den sessions, I figured myself close to adequate in terms of observing behavioral interactions among a group of hyenas. Well that day, even as a bystander, I was able to reflect and re-evaluate. Thank you Clovis for increasing the session energy and humbling me with nearly 160 tracks on my DVR to the tune of, ‘NOTE: …incomplete CIs.’

Well that was May and it has been fun and challenging and educational, but now it is already June. Just yesterday on the 5^th of June I saw the first of the migration (zebras) crossing the Mara River.

I am sure as the herds increase in number I will get many more opportunities to improve on my kill session data collection. Watching those first couple thousand zebras crossing the river I was struck by one peculiarity. Even after making a frantic effort to swim, run, or stumble past four large and waiting crocodiles, many of the zebras re-traversed the river back towards the bank they had just left behind.

Maybe the grass is always greener, or maybe the adrenaline and sense of accomplishment is addicting? I think if I was I zebra I would at least look for another river to cross or maybe consider the lions still waiting just up the bank. Anyway I’ll save from some tacky analogy (I have likely exhausted those) involving my time in the Kenya, compared to a journey full of river crossings and crocodiles. Suffice it to say I am sure June will have at least one or two blog worthy events, but if not… Did I ever tell you about hyena fishing…

Did Someone Say Provisioning?

2011-05-30T11:34:00.004+03:00

Spotted hyena moms do sometimes bring food back to the den to get their cubs used to eating meat early on in their lives. Considering meat and carcasses will comprise their diets long after they stop nursing, it’s interesting to witness some of their earliest experiences with solid food. Most moms will provision at some point, but when their cubs are at a communal den it is not very advantageous for a lower ranker to even think about bringing food back for her younguns (as the higher ranking individuals around will just steal the bounty for themselves).

The excitement surrounding provisioning events is fun to watch, and here is a clip of one that we saw just the other day. The adult female in this video (Clovis-- our Alpha in this clan) arrived at a scene just before this video was filmed where another clan mate had made a kill. Using her dominant ways, Clovis thought the food also looked good and quickly snatched the warthog carcass from under them. As we were less than 400 meters from the communal den at the time, she thought this might be a good time to give her cubs a snack.

Seconds after bringing the warthog back to the communal den, nearly every cub underground (~16 in total) emerged and tried their best to get a scrap. Unfortunately for them, Clovis has many older subadults still around in the clan who quickly came to mooch off of their mom’s steal, and prevent any others from enjoying even the slightest little bit.

During the entire ordeal, Clovis really tried her best to ensure that only her kin were getting the most from this carcass, but every now and then you’d see a non-related cub sneak in and get a piece. For some of the younger cubs, the act of getting a tiny morsel away from Clovis was almost more exciting than the thought of eating it in the end!

Population explosion?

2011-05-18T10:07:00.002+03:00

The Talek West clan is the largest it has ever been right now, after a winter-long baby boom. We suspect the recent baby boom was fueled by two years of feasting, not only on the usual suite of wild herbivores present in the Mara, but also on cattle that died during the 2008-2009 drought here in Kenya.

The queen is dead.

2011-04-29T08:23:00.007+03:00

On the night of 12 April, 2011, the alpha female of the Talek West clan, Murphy, was killed near the den, along with her constant male escort, Fozzie. Murphy had been alpha female since her mother, Bracket Shoulder, died on May 29, 1999.

At that time, Murphy was 3 years old, and the throne by rights should have passed to her younger sister, Carson; that is, spotted hyenas exhibit a monkey-like pattern of youngest ascendancy, in which the youngest offspring comes to outrank its older sibs when the mother takes its side in disputes with the older offspring. However, Carson was only 14 months old when Murphy died, and she was clearly unable to hold her own against Murphy’s greater size and strength without help from her mom. Murphy has reigned unchallenged since then. But on 12 April 2011, it appears that Murphy and Fozzie were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and they paid a terrible price.

The Talek West hyenas had been denning at what we call the Plantation Den, which is situated along the north side of the Talek River, inside a small fenced tree plantation managed by local Masai. The Masai living closest to the den reported that lions had killed a zebra that night in the riverbed near the den, and the Masai heard lots of hyena vocalizations, suggesting that the lions and hyenas had engaged in a major fight. The fight might have been over the zebra carcass, or the hyenas may simply have been nervous to have so many lions so close to their den. But in any case Murphy and Fozzie were found dead inside the plantation fence the following morning, each having sustained multiple puncture and slash wounds.

Being somewhat jaded after working here for many years, I initially assumed that Murphy and Fozzie might actually have been killed by local Masai; after all, we have lost multiple other Talek hyenas to spearing by local people inside that same plantation fence over the years. However, the day after Murphy and Fozzie died, my research assistant Brian Lunardi sent our askaris to make inquiries of the Masai who lived nearest the plantation, and the askaris came away from those interviews convinced that lions were the true culprits. Furthermore the pattern of wounding on the bodies of the dead hyenas was most consistent with lion-induced mortality. It is certainly easy to imagine how lions might corner hyenas against the fence, and kill them there. As Murphy and Fozzie were inseparable in recent years, it came as no surprise to find their bodies only 30 meters apart from one another.

During the 12 years of her reign as alpha female, Murphy gave birth to many offspring, all named after gods and goddesses. Her sons (Bacchus, Hermes and many others) have all dispersed to neighboring clans. But surviving her in the Talek West clan are her adult daughters Artemis, Adonis, Morpheus, Pan, Helios, Loki and Juno. When she died, Murphy left a 3-month old cub at the den, but that cub has already vanished. One of Murphy’s youngest adult twin daughters, Loki and Juno, should now inherit the throne. As Juno was the dominant cub within that twin litter, we expect she will become the new alpha female, but we have not yet seen the two sisters interact aggressively since Murphy died, so we don’t know yet what will happen. But in any case, we hope the new queen has a long and successful reign as alpha female.

Welcome to the world!

2011-04-26T11:24:00.011+03:00

Tracy and Brian and I were driving home from a foray this morning into the territory of the Mara River clan, when we stumbled upon a female giraffe standing out in the middle of a hug tall-grass plain all by herself. Or so we thought until we noticed a wee head with huge ears poking out of the grass at her feet. This female giraffe had just given birth a couple of minutes earlier; the afterbirth was still emerging, the baby was coated in amniotic fluid, and it couldn't yet stand up. The mother kept scanning the horizon as though on the lookout for potential danger to her newborn. She repeatedly switched between scanning and nudging her infant as though to encourage it to get up. As occurs in many species of mammals, it appeared that this female had given birth at a place and time of day when her baby would face the fewest risks. Although the Mara is teeming with large carnivores that would happily take advantage of a vulnerable infant like this one, none were about on this plain at 9:30 this morning.

We were all thrilled and fascinated to be so privileged as to witness this initial interaction of a newborn giraffe with its world, so we stuck around and watched for awhile. The baby tried several times to stand, but kept tumbling back into the grass at its mother's feet before it finally made it up onto its very wobbly legs. The mother promptly began licking the amniotic fluid off the calf, but that was apparently just too much for it, and the baby tumbled back into the grass again. Finally, the calf made it to its feet again, and this time seemed a bit steadier.

After standing against its mothers' forelegs for a few minutes, the calf began nosing around until, after several minutes, it finally stumbled upon the mothers' teats. It appeared to take several minutes of suckling (quite noisily!) for the mother's milk to start flowing, but when we drove away the calf was happily nursing below it's mother's belly.

31 March 2011...still a bit late

2011-04-24T16:27:00.001+03:00

I am not claiming that I experience an acute sense of awareness either to reality or some state of elevated artistic appreciation at 5:45 in the morning, but let me continue. The past two mornings, though not spectacular to speak of, have stuck in my mind.

March 30^th and we have made it down the High Road and entered Happy Zebra territory. I am driving a small Suski manual transmission vehicle. This vehicle has a short enough wheel base to ensure you spend some quality time up off of your seat as you bounce from one destination to the next. As I drive one hand is dedicated to steering, shifting, and general control of the vehicle. The other hand and about 95% of my conscious attention floats a full open top mug of coffee with a mix of diligence and desperation. The road is slicked with just enough mud that the loose tail end of the Susuki does not allow much opportunity for drinking my coffee. Somewhat predisposed with my commuting frustrations I am abruptly brought out of my sulking condition at the sight of a large yellow mass of fur. Usually if a large yellowish furry mass if forced upon me in a drowsy state it means my dog, Gunnison, has decided I have slept long enough. (Ok this may be a stretch...but remotely similar?)

Yesterday the yellowish fur belonged to a male lion sacked out in the middle of the road. Given little actual choice, but not wishing otherwise, I slowed the vehicle to a stop about 15m from the lion and I think you could say we shared a moment. You know the kind, similar to most of those drowsy encounters we have around coffee pots and in break rooms in offices and on commutes…a few cups down and complete thoughts begin to form and it looks like we’ll at least make it until lunch. Soon the sun broke, my coffee was nearing its end and the lion had stood to leave. As he walked off the road the lion let out bellowing roar (I had no idea you could feel that in your chest when so close by) and I agreed it was time to part…things to do places to be. But as I drove off I was already anticipating the next time we might share a causal drink; I am hoping an evening beer.

Today it is March 31 and I am the passenger instead of the driver. Maybe because I was relieved of the responsibility of driving the car, or maybe with this freedom and two available hands I was able to achieve a more caffeinated state by 6:15am…either way I felt more aware today then yesterday. Cast in the mist evaporating off the river and recently flooded swamp that makes up the lowland part of North territory, I could not see much beyond the hood of our vehicle. This morning what I saw would impress upon me less than what I would smell.

Carried on the droplets of aerosolized water came an unforgettably familiar smell dating to summers of my past. Half a world away I could only imagine John Deere, a milk parlor, Holsteins, and a dairy farm tucked neatly into a valley of the Appalachian Mountains. The catalyst carrying me back to the Reunioun was the smell of bovids; here African Buffalo, and there milk cows but indiscernible to the nose. Though I enjoyed the comfort of these memories, I wonder…starting the day now as late as 5:30am, have I grown soft with some age. If I recall milking is underway by 4am.

I had no intention of continuing on with today’s events but then again I also did not invite the lions to camp this evening. To start evening obs were canceled because of rain. I began to read “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers” by Dr. Robert Sapolsky. The book opens with some generalizations about stress responses and how humans and other animals are well adapted to deal with acute stressors. Sapolsky continues by addressing relationships of the ever more common human (particularly westernized) diseases and stress…the luxury to worry chronically?

This being said, I had begun reading this afternoon/evening as a last resort. Caught up in complications of my dead computer batter, cloud cover (limiting solar power), and the camp confining rain I was left with nothing but time. So I began to worry about emailing edits back to co-authors on a manuscript we are writing, the small but ever growing pile of data transcriptions I wanted to type, and a number of other equally trivial personal business matters I wanted to cross off my list. Not long after reading through Sapolsky’s opening text I was beginning to feel all too familiar with the over activated allostatic compensation which in time would likely be the death of me. But at last relief.

Sometime after 5pm, what started as distant roars was moving increasingly closer to camp. Around this time I saw a group of impala out on the breakfast plain (the grass plain which we view from our lab tent) were becoming noticeably aware. I would soon learn that the worries of these Impala were sufficiently more justified than my own anticipatory anxiety caused by laptop failure.

Seeing the first two lionesses from where I had been reading I moved to the edge of camp for a better view. From my new vantage (between 50-100 yds of where the lions were moving up the hill through the thicket) crouched by a bush I saw another lioness. She also saw me and after making her awareness to my presence known with a stare, she also continued up the hill. A few other lions passed through and occasionally one would roar but otherwise went by making no disturbance. As the roaring faded up over the hill I realized my laptop had lost priority. I think I owe that lioness who took the time to stare at me a ‘thanks’. On the ground removed from the ‘luxury’ of a safari vehicle I had a glimpse of that adaptive stress response Sapolsky described…acute stressor, HPA cascade, allostatic compensation, and realization that oh yeah it is nice to be alive. I am not envious of the impala or zebra etc., but I can appreciate the change in perspective that can only come from encounters with the likes of lions and tigers and bears.

As I said the roaring from x number of lionesses and juvenile lions had trailed off into the night and by around 7:00pm so had my thinking of it. Nearing dinner, Meg the other RA, was making her way down the path to the vehicles. She was on her way to pick up John and Linda (dog trainers working with the Ranger out post starting a program that would use hounds to track poachers in the Mara). Little more than halfway down the path, Meg mentions that I ought to come take a look…

The lions were back, but his time moving silently past the camp shower, the vehicles and a few tents at the east side of camp. Illuminated by head lamps 7 or so pairs of eye shines made their way through our camp and again out of sight.

For dinner we enjoyed a fried feast of somosa and french fries in excess, washed down with warm Tusker (an African lager). John and Linda shared pictures from the day’s poacher camp raid. Poachers (mostly from Tanzania) in pursuit of bush meat use snares and a variety of other tools to catch and kill hippos, zebras, wildebeest and other animals that happen into their traps. Snares are made from steel tire cords (the rubber is burnt off) and the poachers use spears for hippos, as well as bows and arrows (tipped with various toxic plant and cobra venom based concoctions). Once killed bush meat is taken out of sight into a thicket where the poachers camp. The meat is cut off the animal in haste and laid out on leaves to dry before transport…FDA approved fast food.

Well anyway less I further digress. the five poachers apprehended this day were tipped off by a marauding hyena and the careful observations of John and Linda. The hyena must have raided the poacher camp and was seen eating a suspiciously symmetrical, geometric chunk of hippo meat. In short the location of the clepto-hyena lead the rangers to the poacher camp to make the arrest.

Dinner ended and the night was drawing to a close (it was already 8:30-9:00pm). Meg left with our visitors to take them home as I carried the dishes to the kitchen tent. As the car was preparing to leave the driveway, I could not figure out why Moses, Jorgi (camp caretakers) and I were being high beamed in the kitchen tent.

The group of 7-11 lions had silently re-emerged. This time they weaved in and out of the trees and on the paths around the kitchen tent. What struck me was not their numbers or an overt sense of danger or aggression from the lions, but rather their self-invited comfort in our camp. At times only 10m from the tents they readily helped themselves to drinks of water from our buckets and traveled the trails as it though it was the reason why those paths were maintained.

I am no lion expert and have yet only seen a small number of lions. Still compared to the lazy sun bathing kitty cats that have thus been my lion experience, this evenings lions seemed different. This inclination started when I first met the stare of the lioness initially passing by camp earlier that evening. My presumption continued to develop finding some confirmation, or at least exaggeration (product of a naïve mind conditioned by experiences in safe woods full of Bambi and bunnies back in the US) in the activity of the lions last seen around the kitchen tent. Their movements, motivated; their stares, apathetic to our presence; and their proximity, though slightly surreal, undeniable.

Apparently ‘simba’ never comes into tents and knows that people are not food. Still it has been a long time since the buffet of wildebeest last left the Mara. It is not unreasonable to think one might get hungry awaiting the migration’s return.

Serena Camp

2011-04-24T15:53:00.001+03:00

23 March 2011

4:30 in the morning and fast approaching the time we collectively (I mean both myself and the other RA, Meg) gather at the lab tent. This morning’s rain plays the tarp overhead like a snare drum. Maybe the running water and a need to part with a previous day’s worth of chai or, the slight discomfort caused by the humid microclimate that is my tent when it rains; I stepped through the zipper doors to better assess the situation. The problem with the rain is simply its persistence.

I guess I should back up and explain the daily routine for an RA in hyena camp. At large my job is the observation and behavioral data collection of three clans of hyenas. Each of these clans contains 10-20 adult females (the dominant social rank), a similar number of sub-adults, a similar number of adult males (the subordinate social rank), and any number of cubs. Using distinct spot patterns and facial/ear scars all of the 130 plus hyenas must be known as an individual. Because of their crepuscular nature, hyena observations occur seven days a week from first light to mid morning and from late afternoon until dark. In addition to behavioral data we collect “fresh” fecal sample for DNA and hormone analysis, as well as a number of other various data collections aimed to investigate different aspects of hyena condition. Finally while in the field we conduct bi-monthy prey transects to monitor density of various prey (herbivores from antelopes to elephants), and we are constantly keeping a running list of all predator sightings. To date I have seen cheetahs, lions, banded mongoose, bat-eared fox, black backed jackal, and of course spotted hyenas.

During the day back at camp data is transcribed, some basic camp chores are carried out according to schedule, and camp finances are maintained. Serena camp as I inhabit it (in no particular order) looks as follows (see attached photos)

“March 23, 2011 MMW and ZML leave camp at 5:45 am for obs (observations) at Happy Zebra territory.” “Note at 5:50 slight rain begins.” “ 6:06 enter Happy Zebra." "Note: Same minute rain has increased.” “6:20 leave Happy Zebra; tracks to wet to off-road.”

As I have indicated the biggest problem faced to date has to do with restricted road use and high likelihood that any intrepid driving effort would result in our vehicle stuck in mud. It seems best described as a war between rain and sun. In a battle played out on the roads leading to hyena dens, the rain is winning and the roads are left a casualty of the opposing forces. Talk of April’s scheduled rainy season has lost certain appeal.

20 March 2011

2011-04-24T15:48:00.001+03:00

As I may have mentioned it has been raining here quite a bit, which is fairly annoying for two reasons. First it means that my struggling computer battery is most often left wanting in terms of power. When not plugged in the battery dies in a matter of minutes and I am unable to send emails and otherwise stay in contact. This coupled with the fact that we cannot go out to do our daily work do to the likelihood of damaging the roads, has admittedly, lent to some boredom.

For example after a day of reading field protocols and some other various forms of literature, I found myself unable to pull my view from a small toad. At around 8pm, a termite hatch had begun and seemed destine to cause some annoyance during what would soon be our dinner (the other aspect of camp that I currently most look forward too...and even in the face of events just short of apocalyptic this likely won't change; the food is great and I like to eat.)

Anyway, the toad also arriving at the table for dinner, began a tireless effort to eat nearly a dozen or so of the flying termites, which were about 1/15 the size of the toad. In certain order and with some patience this toad collected termites that having about as much grace as a whirly-gig (falling maple tree seeds) inevitably were stuck buzzing and crawling around on the tarp floor. In their struggle to evade the toad I noticed that some termites were shedding their wings. I do not know if this is to facilitate dispersal or mating or some other phenomenon. Either way their success this particular night fell short by the efforts of the toad. Although I can't speak to its comfort, the fattened toad slipped off into the dark, appetite satiated, sometime during which I was lost in my own gorging of a cabbage dish, chipotte, and curry (peppers, onions, tomatoes, garlic, sweet potatoes, and curry sauce).

After dinner, more tired of reading than tired I made my way to my tent where I was lulled to sleep by the sound of lion roars and hyena whoops. Today I awoke to a leopard growling in camp (they make this chugging kind of sawing sound), but there was again no chance of going into the field because of rain. However, provided a brief spell of sunlight I have been able to write about my time the past few days at Serena Camp (located in the Masai Mara).

14 March 2011

2011-04-24T15:43:00.001+03:00

My name is Zach Laubach and through a fortunate sequence of events I have I arrived in Nairobi, Kenya on Saturday the 12^th of March, to work as a Research Assistant studying spotted hyenas. By fortunate I mean for a number of reasons: the applicability of this experience in terms career aspirations (I am interested in the behavioral ecology of large mammalian carnivores), the timing of this opportunity fell neatly into place in both my academic and personal life, and I found my way onto a plane that actually landed in the appropriate destination (though I’d just as soon not hash out these particulars unaided by a cold drink!) Aside from a few airline hassles, the flight went through without hitch and I was picked up by another Research Assistant (RA) working on the Hyena project. Sunday we went around and began an errand list which was completed today. These chores included buying groceries and supplies, acquiring research clearance from Kenya Wildlife Service, and car maintenance.

About the garage where the car got fixed… turns out the owner is a 50 something year old British guy named Ian. This is a guy I like and will enjoy any opportunity to spend time with. The proud owner of three female English Black Labs, Ian is an avid bird hunter, dog trainer, and sit back and drink beer kind of story teller. Apparently there are two hunting seasons for birds in Kenya, spring and fall. Ian has even duck hunted in Africa… though significant bodies of water limit the opportunities, if located these hot spots have tons of ducks and a few often irritated hippos. This came about after I saw some paintings of dogs retrieving ducks in Ian’s house, and I ventured to mention Gun (my Chesapeke Bay Retriever). Needless to say this guy’s stories were tireless, and I think his reluctance to let us go only began to wane after we had set up a tentative time to continue the discussion over beer and photos from First Flight (our duck hunting club back in Michigan).

Hierarchy, interrupted?

2011-02-28T13:06:00.001+03:00

RBC is the current (?) alpha female of North clan. She's a tough girl alright, when she has to be, but her personality leaves much to be desired. I can't tell you how many times I've been at a den, struggled to keep up with all the hustle and bustle that usually accompanies den sessions with lots of cubs, but had this one, oddball hyena sacked out (usually deep in tall grass and covered in mud) that didn't move an inch the entire time. Take a quick look at her ear and, sure enough, it's RBC. She's the hyena that doesn't even put her head up when 5 other females lope away from the den, whooping like crazy. Her cub will be 'wrongfully' aggressed on by other, lower-ranking cubs and she just chills out. For some unknown reason, she just can't be bothered.

DIGS is the current (?) #7 female of North clan. During my short 7-month tenure, she's been somewhat of a transient hyena. We would see her often-ish at the communal den, usually sacked out and nursing her cub (who is now a subadult), SANA. She never seemed to be in the center of activity, but she was never the loner at her own exclusive den, either. It wasn't shocking to see her at the dens with everyone else, but it also wasn't shocking when she would go missing for a week or more.

Both of these ladies made a contribution to the baby boom of late. TYPH (Typhoon, RBC's cub) is almost 4 months old and seems to be doing well. MARI (Mariana, DIGS' cub) is almost 2 months old and also seems to be growing steadily.

Just a couple of weeks ago I witnessed - what I believe to be - a pretty extraordinary event. I showed up at one of the communal dens to find RBC bleeding from fresh puncture wounds on the left side of her belly. She also had a little blood coming out of her mouth. She seemed to be just fine walking around, but I could tell it was uncomfortable for her to sack out.

I was surprised to see her up and moving around, which was when she started doing some weird stuff. After some low-grade aggressions on some lower-ranking hyenas (normal), RBC went bristle-tailed (showing excitement), wandered around, groaned, and pawed the ground. A lot. Ground-pawing is something that is most commonly done by males when courting females. Hyenas also paw the ground after urinating or defecating. There's speculation that it may also play a role in scent marking (this alternative purpose of ground-pawing is something I read in an outdated book on hyenas that suggested there could be interdigital glands that release a substance used for marking. I don't know if there have been recent studies on the phenomenon). Males do it randomly when no females are around, so I'm inclined to believe that there are motivations other than courtship. Before this day, the only other time I had seen a female paw the ground was after urinating or defecating.

Soon after this DIGS arrived at the den. In response to DIGS' presence, RBC immediately giggled and went into a submissive posture (and was still bristle-tailed). Um, WHAT? I had to take a few extra minutes to confirm that I had the IDs correct. Yup, I definitely saw what I saw. Rumor has it that not even Kay has heard an alpha female giggle. Later, it happens again. RBC was bristle-tailed, in submissive posture, and giggling, while DIGS was bristle-tailed, groaning, and sniffing her.

I know what you're thinking. RBC is hurt. RBC wanted to prevent any potential conflicts or confrontations to avoid over-exertion while injured. Definitely, definitely possible, especially because it seemed like her submission wasn't elicited by any aggression on DIGS' part. However, that doesn't explain RBC's voluntary participation in aggressive interactions before and after her giggling bouts with DIGS (which happened with an intensity that seemed uncharacteristic of RBC, but pretty standard for most adult females).

Perhaps RBC and DIGS got caught up in some altercation and DIGS is actually the cause of RBC's puncture wound (I also noticed later in the session that DIGS had a wound on her right cheek, suggesting they were both involved in an antagonistic interaction, perhaps with each other, lions, and/or other hyenas). If DIGS did indeed hurt RBC, intentionally or otherwise, I can understand RBC's immediate submission.

Or, DIGS is working her way up in the world. Just this morning DIGS seemingly had it in for JONI, who currently sits in the #4-5 spot. DIGS' aggressions were clearly not cub-related (maternal interventions, which I alluded to in my previous post, are common and don't necessarily follow the strict hierarchy), and JONI appeased like she was standing at the door to heaven.

To be fair, we don't know as much about the rankings as we'd like to. I'm speaking for Serena camp, now; I suspect that Talek camp - the mzee of fisi camps - has a pretty good idea of who should be submissive to whom in their own clans. But after studying our hyenas for only 3 years, we are still trying to sort out the pecking order these guys have in place for themselves. So, really, a big switcheroo of (what we know to be) the rankings shouldn't be all that surprising to us, given how little we actually know.

Keeping that in mind, it's still fascinating. For the past 7+ months it seemed like our ladies had been behaving consistently with what we thought was their place in the hierarchy. But given that there have been only 2 instances of possible change in one month, it is all the more clear to me why still, after 3 years, we have not yet been able to fine-tune the rankings with the limited data that we do have.

Baby Boom

2011-02-18T14:02:00.001+03:00

We live exciting lives, us hyena researchers. Chasing carnivores across the African savanna, witnessing the couple-second transition of an ungulate full of life to an ungulate as an early-morning snack, and getting regular, nighttime visitors in camp (namely hippos, buffalo, and elephants). However, in my opinion, there are few events more exciting than the first glance of a brand new hyena cub.

It all started at the end of September. We had finally re-discovered the active den sites of all three (Serena) clans, and the hyenas were more social than usual. It was an exciting time, especially for me as a new(ish) RA on the project; I finally felt comfortable with a majority of the spot pattern IDs and the daily behavioral data collection. I was learning behaviors, and the hyenas were giving it to me.

Then we started noticing that certain females were acting unusually protective of their dens, typically never going more than a meter or two away from the hole unless it was to chase away other hyenas. We started seeing low-ranking females act aggressively towards higher-ranking females. Unusual, considering the strictly-followed social hierarchy of spotted hyenas.

Finally, I saw my first little black cub. Only 4 weeks old: about a tenth the size of its mother with pure black, velvety fur, bare, stretchy skin under the arms, a thin, wormy-looking tail, and fearful eyes. Who would have thought that such gnarly, tough creatures could start off looking so cute and fragile? (though I think hyenas of ALL ages are cute)

The next day we discovered that this cub had a twin. We showed up at the den and the new mama was nursing not one, but TWO cubs. By the end of the week we discovered 4 more brand new cubs in this clan (Happy Zebra). By the end of the month our other two clans also decided to hop on the baby bandwagon. 3 cubs in North, 2 cubs in South.

I was excited. I got to name some cubs and come up with lineages for new moms. It was fun to watch the cubs grow up and gain their confidence (for the first couple months most cubs will shy away from a blade of grass that blows in the wind). Slowly the cubs went from being all-black to having a dusting of white fur on their faces and foreheads. Eventually, spots started to develop on their shoulders and forelegs. Almost, just barely, enough to start differentiating between the little black fur balls.

Then came the boom. November and December yielded 22 new black cubs. January, 11. Still exciting, but now stressful. 33 more individuals to name, age, sex, and keep track of at the dens. More often than not we would find a batch of unaccounted-for cubs at a den and not learn who the mothers were until days or weeks later (when we finally saw them nursing). As soon as the cubs got old enough I was scrambling to take photos of their one or two shoulder spots just to try and figure out who everybody was. Without nursing information, or having spots to go by, there was virtually no way to confirm the identities of these young cubs.

So I've been busy. I'm trying my best to manage the influx of new hyenas while still discovering more. Just this month I've seen 5 more new cubs, and I'm waiting on at least one more subadult-now-turned-adult female whom I saw with a torn phallus recently (MSTL, for those of you in the know).

We've even had two litters of triplets, a rarity in the hyena world (and the first, for the Serena side): CLOV, the alpha female in South clan, and SILK, a low-ranking female in Happy Zebra clan. We have already, unfortunately, confirmed the death of one of CLOV's cubs, MAYO. It survived to be about 2.5 months old. I have not seen SILK or her cubs in quite a while, so their fate is unknown as of yet.

Otherwise, cub mortality seems to be low. I am only certain of one other disappearance, but I suspect there are 3 more. With the clans' best interests in mind, I hope these cubs live. We are starting to see some of the subadult males less and less, which means they're probably dispersing. I find it hard to believe that our already-small clans are at carrying capacity, so we could use the boost in numbers. With my own self-interests in mind, I REALLY hope these cubs live. I would (will) be devastated to see some of these cubs go, especially after having watched them grow up as if they're my own. They're already showing unique personalities. And they're just cute. See below.

The female hyena calls the shots

2011-01-23T11:45:00.006+03:00

Check out hyenas from a Kenyan p.o.v. in an article (featuring Kay) in yesterday's Nation!

http://www.nation.co.ke

Tis a dark and stormy night…

2011-01-22T13:18:00.000+03:00

…and we are out on obs. There is lightening on the horizon all around us, but that has been the norm recently, so we don’t pay it too much attention. Around 19:30, we are out with a group of West hyenas test chasing prey. It starts to rain - oh well, we start to head home. We make it through Camel X when it starts to RAIN. Like, pour buckets. Two minutes later and we can’t see beyond our front bumper – the rain is whiteout and horizontal. &*#%. We stop the car, which is literally rocking in the wind, and hope for the best. Meanwhile, lightening is striking all around us, and then it starts to HAIL. Wait, this is AFRICA, it’s not supposed to hail here!! Brian and I are in the car with ex-Fisi-camp-superstar Jaime and her bf Than, and we are all thoroughly convinced that a) we will be struck by lightning and b) we will be sleeping in the car. We fall into stunned silence, and I personally contemplate where the lightening will go when it strikes the antenna and comes into the car via the coaxial cables (yeah, physics!). The storm ends about an hour later, at which point we look out the window to see the car sitting in....a lake. It has rained 56mm (2.2 in), which is just enough to cover all the grass on that plain, and the wind from the storm is rippling the water in an eerily convincing way. We chill out for a while, wait for the water to sink in a bit, and then Brian balls out-of-control to get us home!

Waffles and cubs

2010-12-04T15:17:00.003+03:00

Sorry for the delay everyone, but as promised, here's a quick photo essay on our winner for Hyena Mom of the Year 2010: Waffles! Most of the pictures are admittedly focused on the cubs rather than on Mama Waffs, but hey, can you blame me? Everyone knows hyena cubs are the cutest things in the Mara!

First up, here's Mama Waffs in all her glory. Excuse the deer-in-the-headlights expression, she's not used to being in the spotlight.

It was a big surprise when Waffless became a mom. It was her first litter ever, and we hadn't been seeing her around the den very frequently at all when, POOF! A cub appeared!

Surprise, surprise! A week or so later, we found that not only did Waffs have a cub... she had TWO. Thus was born the "syrup" lineage. Say hello to Log Cabin and Hungry Jack.

We saw them almost daily for 3 months. Here they are getting more adventurous, and starting to get their spots:

Then everyone, including Waffs and the babies, decided to switch dens. We lost them for around 2 or 3 months. I was getting worried that maybe the babies had died, since it was her first litter and cub mortality is higher the first time around. But Mama Waffs didn't disappoint. We eventually found the den, and our little guys had turned into monster balls of fluff! They're huge!

Nice going Mama Waffs. For our last shot, here's Hungry Jack, all grown up and eating a nice rack of ribs! Congratulations Waffles, those are some handsome looking babies you've got there.

Rampage through Serena Camp

2010-10-24T11:23:00.003+03:00

Last night Serena Camp was invaded by a berserk hoard of lions, hyenas and hippos. They charged straight through camp, taking out nearly everything in their path. Casualties of the battle include the kitchen tent, the storage tent, and my (Camille's) tent. Meg and I are stationed at completely opposite ends of camp, so between us we pretty much witnessed the entire disaster: Meg watched the first half through her tent windows, while I got the "full impact" of the end of the fight (haha, I punned... keep reading to the end so you can appreciate it fully).

Meg:

Since I wasn't able to take photos of this memorable event, let me paint a picture for you. I'm lying in bed. The would-be blackness of the night is infiltrated by moonlight shining through the trees, lighting up the ground and creating eerie shadows throughout camp (okay, not that eerie, but I wanted to make it sound better). It's definitely light enough to walk around without a flashlight. Hippo screaming, hyena whooping, nothing out of the ordinary. Then I hear some MAJOR whooping, and the sound of something large running through camp (think of the sound if I galloped around upstairs and you were in the basement). Then I hear scuffling through the trees. Hm, that sounds big. I perk up and watch through my screen window to try and check out the action. It's like watching an action movie, Mara style. From what I could hear, it sounded like a minor fight was going on in the thicket. I see a couple lionesses/juvenile lions run by, so I run to the opposite side of my tent to look through the other window. Some hyenas run by. Cool.

All of a sudden, a HUGE crashing sound comes from the edge of the thicket: I turn around and look through the window opposite me (I'm now standing in the middle of my tent), and a group of at least 4-5 screaming hyenas are running towards my tent, with at least 4 roaring lionesses chasing them. OH CRAP. After I pause and take in the awesomeness of the situation, I duck down to a crouch (which, clearly, is the right thing to do in this situation. HIDE from the carnivores so they don't see you through your tent screen, duh). In the haste of my ducking I accidentally knock over my pee basin (ahem...chamber pot) and spill my own pee on my tent floor. Oh, GREAT. The beasts knocked IN TO my tent, turned the corner, ran in to my tent again, and kept on running.

The sound of lions and hyenas roaring that close to me with the sole protection of a tent screen was beyond incredible...incredibly scary. From what it sounded like, there were at least 10 lions and 10 hyenas overall, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were more. I stayed ducked down with plans to scurry under my bed until they had cleared the area to the other side of camp, but luckily I didn't have to resort to such action. It seemed they had chased the hyenas away, because most of the lions quietly ran back past my tent and in to the thicket from where they came.

OH MY GOD! WHAT JUST HAPPENED? I finally get up and go back in to my bed. Aside from some more hippo screaming, nothing else happened - at least that's what I thought at the time.

Camille:

It was around 11:30 or so when the noises started up. I could hear a mess of whooping, giggling and lions roaring, and it was steadily getting louder. Based on the direction of the sounds I thought that something big was happening in our driveway, but I had no idea at the time that Meg was actually in the middle of the fight. Just from the ruckus, I was pretty sure that there were at least 10 hyenas involved, but other than that I was just listening and trying to guess what might be happening. I wasn't worried, since we usually hear things happening just outside camp and we've never had a problem before.

Within a few minutes, it sounded like all the animals were moving closer. I could hear them from roughly the area of the kitchen tent, and started to get a small feeling that maybe things weren't going to go so well. Next thing I knew, I heard a stampede of footsteps charging in my direction. There was a loud crash (which I found out in the morning was the storage tent) and I frantically grabbed for both my glasses and a flashlight. I keep my window uncovered, so I had just enough time to shine the light out my window and catch a glimpse of a big gray shape hurtling towards me. Hippo?! CRAP!!! I flung myself off of my bed and rolled underneath it. Then it felt like the world just came crashing down around me.

For just a few seconds I could hear things falling over, the tent ripping, a hippo screaming, hyenas whooping from all around me... it was chaos! I was in pitch black because I had smacked the flashlight getting under the bed and must have whacked something loose. Then all of a sudden the cacophony passed over me and everthing went crashing away through the trees behind my tent.

I stayed frozen for a while, terrified that they might come back and run over me a second time, but eventually groped around for the flashlight and gave it another smack to turn it on. Then I could only stare. My tent was turned upside down! My chest of drawers had been flung into the middle of the tent, my bookshelf was toppled over, the desk was balanced on two legs and was only upright because the tent canvas had fallen down around it and was anchoring it in place! Everything I had on top of the table or on the shelves had been flung clear across the tent from the impact.

At that point I tried to decide whether or not to get out and get help or at least move to another tent (since Andy's was unoccupied), but I could still hear the lions and hyenas snarling at each other just on the outskirts of camp, and since I wasn't hurt I decided to stay where I was. I also had no clue where my phone might be in all the mess. I yanked the mattress to the floor and eventually managed to get a few hours of sleep, though every sound had me bolting awake in case I needed to take cover again.

Piecing together the events the next morning, it looks like after the lions and hyenas left Meg's side of camp last night, the fight swept through the kitchen tent and then off in the direction of the storage tent. Somewhere between the two tents the stampede picked up a hippo, who was probably just peacefully grazing in camp like the hippos do every night. The terrified hippo got swept along in the chase, the lions and hyenas ran directly over the storage tent, and then I looked out the window and managed to spot the hippo on a collision course for my tent. The hippo ricocheted off of one edge of my tent, smashing the metal supports, and then lions and hyenas ran directly through the middle of my tent and the whole thing came down on top of me.

We took pictures of the damage once the sun came up, and I think it was actually more terrifying to see the damage from the outside. From inside the tent, things were happening so fast that there was mostly a feeling of shock rather than fear. Seeing everything in the daylight just makes you realize how close a call it was.

First, a rough map of their path through camp:

The Kitchen Tent:

The Storage Tent:

Close-up of lion prints on the top of the storage tent:

My (Camille's) Tent:

Door to my tent (I had to belly crawl to get out the next morning):

Lion claw marks (sliced straight through the top of my tent):

Inside my tent:

Marks of the fighting on the ground outside Meg's tent:

Broken support poles from my tent:

Despite the damage to the tents, no one in camp was injured and nothing is irreparably broken. We were really lucky. Here's hoping nothing like this happens again!

Wapi fisi?

2010-10-23T15:28:00.001+03:00

[Translation: 'Where's the hyena?']

There are just some days when I really do believe that the hyenas just have it in for us. We recently misplaced one of our clans - Serena North - and went on a few obs sessions either seeing no hyenas or seeing only a couple that were sacked out and clearly had no desire to get up from their R&R to conveniently lead us to their new den.

What made it worse was that we had been hearing REALLY close hyena whooping each night, indisputably belonging to our Northies (our campsite is located right in North clan territory). So, each night and morning we would head out falsely believing that THIS was the time we would find our hyenas again.

The photo below is documentation of how utterly annoying the fisi can be at times. I took this photo on one of those disappointing obs sessions in North where we found a hyena or two but much to our despair, no den. I urge you to find the hyena in the picture, although it shouldn't be too bad considering I fussed with the contrast to make it stand out more (click on it for full size). This photo is also proof of how hyenas seem to defy the laws of physics. The hyena in the photo is Waffles (WAFL); she is an adult female, has 2 young cubs (Hungry Jack and Log Cabin), and is by no means a small hyena. How she managed to lie so flat on the ground behind a couple stalks of grass is beyond me.

With cases like this, it becomes no surprise to me how easily we can lose our hyenas. We could have easily driven past her and not even noticed. And there's hardly even grass on the ground, thanks to the wildebeest. I'm not excited for the time when the wildes are gone and all the grass grows back; I think I'm going to need to develop a hyena-spotting super power!

Hyena mating

2010-10-22T13:07:00.001+03:00

Last month, Camille and I were lucky enough to witness a hyena mating! This is a pretty rare experience as, normally, hyenas will seek out a secluded place and go at it privately. However, as you will see from the photos, in this instance it seems that AO (Agent Orange, female) and EUC (Euclid, male) prefer exhibitionism.

We had set out for a normal morning of obs in Happy Zebra clan, and arrived at the D (fancy abbreviation for 'den') just as the sun was rising. AO's cubs were hanging out, wandering and play romping as usual. Then we see AO; strolling by, ignoring her cubs, and leave walking (lofty science language for 'leaving the session in a walking manner'). EUC was following close behind her, but that's pretty normal for hyena males given their low ranking (males want to get close to females, but are too scared to actually approach, so they end up following them around really pathetically). What we did notice was that she was unusually tolerant of his behavior and close proximity to her. She only aggressed on him once if I remember correctly, but then continued to walk away, not minding that he was following close behind.

Since nothing too exciting was happening at the D, we decided to follow AO and EUC. They continued walking in this manner for about 25 minutes, and we continued following them. The only reason we continued was because EUC briefly mounted AO a couple times, so we were hoping to eventually see the real thing. Then they both decided to poop. 'Cool, more samples!' I think. Camille gets out of the car to find and collect the poop and I keep an eye on the hyenas. After a couple minutes of unsuccessful poop-searching, I see through my binos that EUC has yet again mounted AO, but this time he's STAYING up! "Camille!! We have to go now!" I shout. "Wait, I think I can find it, hold on a sec" she answers. "No, no, you don't understand. They're really doing it! They're mating, forget the poop!" I say. I'm not sure if those were our actual words, but they are true to the effect of our exchange before we raced off in anticipation of some exciting action.

We get there and yippee, they're still in the "thrust" of the action, so to speak. In the style of the true professionals that we are, we positioned ourselves in the best possible angle, took photos, recorded videos (the project requires us to!), and giggled our behinds off. It lasted about 6 minutes. Here are just a few of the hundred photos that we took (click on them to see full-size) --

It's blurry, but EUC following AO as they were leaving the D.

The scene as we arrived. Clearly they weren't concerned about topi or zebra voyeurism.

Had to give you a close-up.

Who says you can't multitask? They're even alert to their surroundings while in the act.

All done. EUC spent some time sniffing in the area he had been standing.

Interestingly enough, afterward, they continued walking in the same direction together. EUC would lope a bit ahead, but then turn around and wait for slow-walking AO to catch up. We followed them doing this for a while but then had to leave to do prey transects. Every once in a while, EUC would chase some zebra or wildebeest but then quickly give up. I like to think that after we left, EUC took down a yummy zebra for AO in thanks for her kindness and willingness to give him the best 6 minutes of his life.

Vote Now: Hyena Mom of the Year

2010-10-06T16:15:00.004+03:00

Here's a poll for the Hyena Mom of the Year. Traditional election rules apply: vote early and vote often.

It's a bird... it's a plane... it's SUPERMOM!

2010-10-06T08:45:00.004+03:00

Sometimes people find it hard to believe that hyenas make good mommies. A few nights ago, though, Meg and I had the privilege of witnessing a showdown that would make a believer out of any skeptic.

We were at the den of our Happy Zebra clan happily watching our hyenas when we noticed a family of elephants browsing about 200 meters away. We at first didn’t pay the elephants any attention but they kept moving closer and closer to the den, at which point I switched to keeping an eye on the elephants while Meg observed the hyenas. The elephants got to within 50 meters of the den when a fight broke out between one of the younger elephant females and the big matriarch with a young calf.

The fight seemed to rile the matriarch up, because once the other female backed down, the matriarch promptly charged at our hyenas, who at that point hd stopped what they were doing and were watching the elephants warily. The visible hyenas scattered in all directions away from the den (and trust me, we scattered with them; there's no way I want to be that close to an angry, trumpeting elephant).

Suddenly, one of our female hyenas, Ojibway, sprang out of the den. She had been completely hidden in the den hole so we hadn't even realized she was there, but Ojibway just happens to have a brand new 6-week old cub inside that den. Ojibway saw the elephants, and instead of running with the others, she planted her feet right by the den and stared the elephants down. There were six elephants total standing less than 10 meters away from her, but she refused to back down. Meg and I were terrified thinking that we were about to watch one of our hyenas get trampled into the ground, but the amazing thing was that the elephants turned away and just left her alone. Way to go Ojibway!

Other nominees for Hyena Mom of the Year are:

Marten!

Marten is a low-to-mid ranking mom in Serena South, currently raising her first ever cub. Marten is such a good mom that, despite her low rank, little Jean-Luc Picard has now caught up in size to the dominant female's cub, who is also about 2 months older!

Left C-Slit!

She just gets to be in the running for being Hagia Sofia's mom, the single most photogenic cub in the history of Fisi Camp.

Pike!

Pike is our teenage momma. We didn't expect her to have cubs for at least another 6-8 months, and lo and behold, she went and had two of them. She surprised us even more when she turned out to be a fantastic mom. Boomerang and Katana are about 7 months old and already two-thirds their mom's size! Pike is also fearless in defense of her kids; she actually once attacked Koi, the top female, when Koi was poking at her cubs.

Sauer!

Sauer is such an overprotective mom that she managed to hide her cubs from us for six or seven months! Then suddenly out she comes with her two huge fluffballs, Optimus Prime and Megatron! Way to be sneaky mama-Sau.

AWP!

Such a patient mom is our AWP. She's happy to just lie there while her little cub Velociraptor uses her for a jungle gym, and gnaws on her ears to boot!

Waffles!

Waffles is second from the bottom in rank in Serena North clan, and a first time mom to boot. Despite that, though, her babies Log Cabin and Hungry Jack always look fat, clean and fluffy. I watched once as several of the higher ranking females banded together to pick on Log Cabin. Good mama Waffles dove underneath the females noses, squealing and giggling up a storm, and shoved Log Cabin out of the way so that he could run for the den! Then, once he'd escaped into the den, Waffles threw her body down on top of the den hole and wouldn't move, despite that fact that the other females were standing over her and beating on her.

So cast your votes hyena-fans! Who should be named Hyena Mom of the Year? You decide!

Greetings!

2010-09-24T13:05:00.002+03:00

Hey all! I am super excited to be one of your windows into the world of the spotted hyena for the next 10 months, but before I do that, I guess I’d better tell you a little about myself.

My name is Tracy Montgomery, and while I hail from the sunny lands of Northern California, I have passed the last four years attending Amherst College in Massachusetts. I graduated in May, and spent my last year there researching the effects of estrogens on male fish reproduction (birth control pills, while a breakthrough for us girls, get into our waterways and have much less exciting effects on fish sperm). At Amherst, I worked at our Museum of Natural History, telling people all the cool things we learn from prehistoric bones and tracks while simultaneously being educated on dinosaur species by 6-year-old boys. I also played ultimate frisbee, learned how to deal with winter and to cross-country ski (skills that will obviously come in handy out here), and explored the stunning beauty of the northeast by foot, bike, and car.

I arrived in Nairobi two months ago on the same flight as the magnificent Meg, and a few days later drove to Talek camp, my home for the next year. And are we spoiled out here - fresh homemade food, a hot shower, and solar electricity are only a few of our camp amenities. I went out on obs that first night, promptly fell in love with the hyenas (and Chicopee, my hyena 'boyfriend'), and have been going back twice a day for obs ever since. There is nothing more amusing than observing a terrified male hyena courting and bowing to a female, and little more awesome (or disgusting) than watching hyenas make a kill. I’ve seen so many amazing things out here in just two months – the said hyena kill, a Masai Ceremony of the Women, and an extremely rare black rhino, just to name a few – that I can’t even imagine what the next 10 months hold in store for me.

Or for you, as I plan to share all these amazing experiences with all of you, starting with my next blog. Tutaonana, later!

Splish splash, I was taking a bath

2010-09-17T14:31:00.007+03:00

The Serena hyenas are usually pretty fascinating, but lately it seems like they're being even more entertaining than usual. This morning was a perfect example. Meg and I had bumped into a few of our North hyenas (almost literally, as it happens, because we initially found them when they ran across the road in the pitch black at 5:50am, right in front of our car) and were following them around hoping for some excitement.

They eventually meandered over to a small watering hole, and suddenly two of our hyenas, Angie and Arrow, dove into the water. It was 6:30am, completely freezing, and apparently they figured this was a perfect time for a swim. Go figure. Anyway, while we didn't quite get the excitement we were looking for, we were still thoroughly amused.

The pictures are a little bit grainy due to the faint light, but here are just a few of the things I've learned hyenas like to do in the water:

Splashing.

Snorkeling.

Err... drowning each other?

The backstroke.

And, my personal favorite, pistols at 10 paces.

Our hyenas frolicked in the water for a good half hour, and it looked like they were enjoying every bit of it. I was actually getting jealous towards the end -- it's been getting ridiculously hot here in the middle of the day and I'd love to go for a swim.

So, Kay, can we talk about installing a pool at Serena? Pretty please?

Jambo from Serena!

2010-09-17T09:59:00.000+03:00

Hello, fellow hyena research blog readers! This feels slightly odd; I've been a reader of this blog for quite some time, but now I get to be on the other side posting my own experiences in fisi camp! My name is Meg and I'm relatively new here - almost 2 months in. I graduated in May from the University of Michigan and now I've crossed over to the dark side working for the Spartans. I know, I know. How could I stoop so low? Don't you worry, my Wolverine comrades - I haven't started wearing those horrendous green and white colors. At least not yet, anyways :)

While I've been reading this blog for almost a year now, the introduction posts haven't stuck out as much as the exciting hyena posts have so I'm not exactly sure how this goes. You probably want to hear cool stuff about hyenas rather than boring stuff about me. Well too bad - this is the one post in which I'm allowed to talk only about myself so I'm going to milk it for all its worth.

I'm sitting here in my tent in Serena camp listening to the North clan hyenas whooping not-so-far in the distance, and it makes me realize how far I've come in the short time I've been here. When I first arrived, I was in complete awe at how tough everyone seemed out here. Nobody seemed to be concerned that elephants were logging the forest 50m from my tent (I, on the other hand, had brainstormed a list of escape routes if the elephant decided that my tent looked like a nice stepping ground) or that crocodiles have been known to frequent the Talek river - which I had been crossing daily to go running on the other side. But now I realize that it only takes a little time to adjust the level of risk I feel comfortable with. As Andy Booms told me in my first few days here, you just have to get used to a new "normal."

Back to the whooping - I still remember how I felt when Kenna pointed out hyena whoops to me on my first night in the Mara. It sounded eerie, like something that belonged in a Halloween haunted house. But after weeks of learning and observing the hyenas, the sound has a completely new meaning to me. My first thought (much to my disgust) is usually "Aww, how cuteeeee!" But once I get over this weird, giggly, maternal feeling, I find myself wondering who it was, and what's going on.

By now I feel fairly well assimilated in to this new type of "normal" that is living in the Mara. Serena camp felt like home within hours of arriving and I am SO glad to be here. I have to thank everyone - Kenna, Steph, Andy B, Camille, Tracy, and all the guys - for making the transition so transparent. I was not too worried about how I would fare out here in the bush, but it feels so much better starting a new chapter of my life with such great and welcoming people.

Now that I've got the boring me stuff out of the way, I can move on to the reason why I'm here - hyenas! I've been very lucky so far - I've seen a hyena kill AND a hyena mating already. It's been amazing to say the least. These events and more will be featured in future posts, but now it's time to sleep before the alarm goes off and it's back to work!

lions & leopards & bandits. Oh my!!

2010-09-15T20:55:00.004+03:00

Submitted by Camille Yabut on 12 September, 2010

Alright, I admit it, I'm not the best at keeping current on these blog things. To make it up to you, I've got 3 entries coming up in quick succession. There's been a lot of craziness going on, so yes, it'll probably take at least that many entries to catch you up.

First things first, I'll tackle all the (relatively) recent camp and Mara excitement in this post. Top of the list? Bandits! About a month and a half ago there was a shooting here in the Mara Triangle. Some bandits attacked one of the tent camps, robbed the tourists, and then shot three of them. Two of the victims had to be airlifted to a hospital in the city, and the last one died too soon for medical attention (someone told me that one was shot in the head, but I don't know if this is true). The bandits ran away on foot, and a huge manhunt was organized to find them. The Conservancy put most of their rangers on it, plus poacher sniffing dogs and the local police!

The tent camp was pretty far away from our camp, and we're located very close to the Conservancy headquarters and ranger barracks, so we felt pretty safe. Unfortunately, one of my hyena clans has a territory that reaches all the way up to that area, so we had to restrict evening obs for a while. We were asked to avoid being out after dark until the shooters were found, for our own safety. The Conservancy also offered to station a ranger at our camp until they caught the shooters, but honestly I feel more antsy when there are strangers in camp, so I declined.

Anyway, at the time we had been having elephants in camp every night what better bodyguards could you have than a herd of elephants? They'd trample anyone who came close AND you can't take them down with a few measly bullets. The downside to this was that we spent several mornings in a row trapped in our tents because the elephants would forget to leave, but all in all it seemed a fair trade.

They eventually caught one of the bad guys, persuaded him to talk, and I think they caught the leader based on the info they got. I find myself speculating as to the methods used to make him talk, but mostly I think, "Good riddance!" One of the victims was a 70-year-old man who was just celebrating his birthday with some friends. Bastards.

Next up, more lions! (And why is it that I have so many stories about lions?! I'm a freaking HYENA researcher. Maybe if I pretend like I'm studying lions, I'll see more hyenas?) Before I came to the Mara, there was apparently lioness who decided to take up residence in the Serena Lodge compound and raise her 2 little cubs there (Serena Lodge is the closest lodge to Hyena Camp, only about 5 minutes away). In the process, she went and got herself completely acclimated to humans -- she's absolutely not intimidated at all.

She disappeared for a little while, only to turn up again last month.... in the middle of Hyena Camp. Oh dear.

I was in Nairobi at the time, so I missed the really exciting bits where she strolled through camp in the middle of the day, but read the post by Andy Booms here to get the full story.

By the time I got back to camp she was still hanging around (one day she decided to take a nap up by the choo/toilet, WTF?! We need that!) but mostly I just bumped into her skulking around the edge of the thicket that our camp is in, whenever we'd leave camp for obs.

She's disappeared again now, but I'll keep you posted on whether she comes back again.

And to close off this post, the last bit of camp fun I'll leave you with is: leopards! It's usually really hard to spot leopards out here. They're ridiculously shy, plus they're nocturnal, so you'll pretty much only see one by sheer luck. We at Fisi Camp don't actually have a problem finding leopards though, and that's because the leopards really prefer finding us. They just have to take a stroll straight through the middle of camp, every night.

They usually start at my end of camp, come up by the lab tent, stroll past the kitchen tent, meander up by the cars, and then end their jaunt by walking past the staff's tents. While on their walks, they like to bat at the edges of our tarps, shred helpless tea towels, and sneak up to tents where people are innocently sleeping and then VOCALIZE REALLY LOUDLY. Ok, to be fair I hadn't actually fallen asleep yet, but I was close! Also the leopard got so close to my tent that I could actually hear his paws as he stepped on the grass and leaves -- and if you know how quiet cats are while walking, then you know how flipping close that had to have been. I'm still a little bit pissed about that whole deal, but then it's hard for me to be charitable when something scares the living daylights out of me.

So, that wraps up the recent in-camp adventures.

Kenya Mpya! Katiba Mpya! (New Kenya! New constitution!)

2010-09-15T20:51:00.000+03:00

Submitted by Steph Dawes on 28 August, 2010

Yesterday was a major day in Kenya! After years of discussion, Kenya has finally not only voted in its new constitution (that was on August 4th, if you remember I said that I was going to post about the referendum… I am not, this is much more interesting. Short story: the referendum passed and Kenya has a new constitution and the entire country is excited to be moving forward! GO KENYA!) but they have started celebrating the change that is coming and implementing the changes…and that was what yesterday was all about- celebrating the new Kenya!

So, yes it was a public holiday.

No, I was not aware during the entire day that I was out vulturing… but, when I got back, Benson and Joseph (our camp staff, amazing men, both of them) made me well aware by informing me and telling me that there were surprises and plans for a celebration later that evening… and well, I am always up for Fisi Camp celebrations!
So, how did we celebrate? Why, how any good group of Kenyans and Americans should celebrate such a momentous occasion- with celebratory home and handmade flag pins, homemade cake and nice dessert-table conversation! Yes, while the girls were out on obs (and I was running and reading in my tent. I am Legend is a GREAT book, btw) Benson and Joseph went way out of their ways to prepare celebrations.

As dinner finished, Steven, Lesingo, Joseph and Benson and us all gathered around the table singing “Kenya Mypa! Katiba Mpya!” (New Kenya, New Constitution!) happily… and we proudly wore the home MADE Kenyan flags and enjoyed two homemade cakes- one with wheat for the wheat eaters and one Steph-safe and gluten free! My cake said “HAPPY NEW KENYA!” painted in Chocolate icing….mmmm all around (and of course, soda for those interested!) As we prepared celebrations, we all sat around the table- the whole crew, Lesingo, Steven, Benson, Joseph, Laura, Tracy and myself. We talked about the new constitution and how Kenya would change from their perspectives… some of the highlights:

1.The new constitution will hold land owners and land holders responsible for their land. What this means is that many government leaders have seized land over the years… and now, they will be held accountable and land will be returned to those who rightfully own it.
2.The youth 9all young people, even young married folk) will be empowered with jobs and opportunity so they can better protect their assets (in Maasai land, that means ways to protect and care for their livestock and families, most often.)
3.The government will be reorganized to enable more representation in parliament. Provinces broken down into counties which will each have a representative that will hold town meetings and report to higher and higher levels of government. Also, the youth and citizenry will be invited into parliament (not sure how the details work there) but the constitution indicates wanting the common man involved in running the country.
4.Free primary education (and secondary) will really become FREE. That means cutting down on corruption and better budgeting of finances to fully supply schools so that everyone has access to good education.

In listening to Joseph and Benson, I garnered the following about the celebrations in Nairobi: Apparently the celebration was held in Nyayo Stadium and there were representatives of 7 different African countries and the UN present. In addition, Kofi Annan was there for the day. There were speeches all day from dawn until dusk! Prime Minister Odinga was not even able to get to his remarks because everyone was so busy celebrating the constitution and his role in it! Everyone who could make it to Nairobi did…and it was a day of happiness, hope and celebration…

It was the same at Fisi Camp in the Mara. Good luck, Kenya!

A day with vultures

2010-09-15T20:49:00.001+03:00

Submitted by Steph Dawes , 27 August 2010

So, I know that I have been trying to get caught up on blog entries, writing of events of the past, but I have decided that for today’s (or… rather, yesterday’s) entry, I am going to actually talk about yesterday because it was pretty different than most days at Fisi Camp… mainly because, instead of being a Mama Fisi, I was a Mama Vulture! Yes, that’s right. Yesterday, I took a day OFF of hyena obs to spend the day driving around with Corrine (PhD student at Princeton), John (Kenyan research assistant), and Richard (Ugandan Researcher here to learn how to trap vultures), searching for carcasses on which vultures were feeding so that we could trap them and hopefully give them backpacks with tracking devices, very similar to the collars we use…

Out goals for the day: To trap and backpack two vultures… in order of preference: 1. Lappet- Faced Vultures (they are HUGE and have red heads, though the redness of their heads seems to depend more on their aggression and excitement levels rather than the amount of time spent in the sun; they also have very strong beaks and tend to be the vultures that tear carcasses open) 2. Adult white- backed vultures and 3. everything else (which we were NOT settling for yesterday.)

We left around 645am, after a drop off at the Talek Gate and started on our way. We drove out of the park and all around searching for carcasses. So, when we came upon a carcass our first step was to census the vultures- what species, what ages, and then… what was the carcass? from there, we could make an educated decision about setting traps… or not. If the answer was yes, we would do a drive by. John would basically position the car so that the birds were on the opposite side from the carcass and then Corrine and Richard would quietly and stealthily get out and set the traps (basically thick fishing wire that the vulture should step into and pull closed when it moves away…like a slip knot.) They tie the traps onto the carcass. GROSS! and then would sneak back into the car…we would drive away and watch for signs of a vulture struggling to fly, and failing. At that point, we would close in and attack!

I think overall we set traps out 7 or 8 times throughout the day, but did not catch a single Lappet! Turns out they are sneaky, suspicious birds who (once the carcass has been messed with) are very hesitant to return. Don’t blame them. What would you do if you were feeding quietly and contentedly (with the occasional squabble over the best tail scrap or anal meat?) and a car drove up for a few minutes and when it left, there were pieces of black plastic everywhere over your lunch? Luckily, the day was saved by us catching one vulture – a Rupell’s vulture. This poor vulture was caught early in the morning…around the neck… which is exactly what we DON’T want to have happen. BUT it did… so when that happened we rushed in. Seriously, throw stealth mode out the window! We were in. Blanket over vulture. One person steadying his body. The other holding his neck (they are really long… so they can poke and prod very lithely… or lethallydepending on how you look at it.) Then Corrine approached and grabbed blood from the leg. It was awesome to watch how quickly and effectively they worked. Then Poof! the bird was free and in the air, never to land near a car ever again.

That was pretty exciting… probably the best part of the day… the rest of the day was, as I explained above…spent driving around and hoping to catch a lappet-faced… almost and missed calls on so many accounts…

My overall impression, after talking to the team and experiencing part of their work, is they are doing GREAT research… imagine what you can do with conservation if you are able to determine vulture territories, land use and feeding habits? They are a vital part of the eco-system as they prevent carcasses from just sitting there and enabling a dangerous spread of disease (among others). However, as interesting as the research is… I could never ever hold a job where I spend all day every day driving around in a car unable to really move around. That was an important lesson for myself. That I need to have time to move around. Should I ever engage in field work again, I imagine it will have to be moving and outdoor oriented! But, I respect and love the vulture project. I can hardly believe that the species I am coming to respect the most in this Mara eco-system, are those most misunderstood and dis-respected in pop culture.

Narok Supply Run 2010 (June 28- 30th, 2010)

2010-09-15T20:47:00.001+03:00

Submitted by Steph Dawes on 18 August, 2010

**Please note: This story is a true story. Nothing has been fabricated and no names were changed. It is real from start to finish and as honest as possible with slight positive twists. Be prepared for this brilliant next installment of "it's just life in the Mara." Please enjoy:**

So, we drive up to Narok (the last main town before the Mara.. its three hours away from camp, just about…pending road quality and car problems along the way) and spend the whole day shopping. “Three hours?” you scoff… “That’s Nothing!” Well, you might have considered it a simple drive, but then you would have needed to know that not only was I driving Marc, Kenna and Siri, but we also had three Kenyans in the bed of the truck: Joseph O, who has been doing small labor for us (used to work for Kay.... he is mentioned in a Primates Memoir as the Kenyan who rolled in white dirt a long while back and sort of went crazy working for white women. Interesting character), going back home in Narok, James ( he worked here until he got fired because he was cheating us in Talek...had a whole scam running...well, he seems to keep coming back to camp- and even asked Kay for a rec letter- which she wrote... but insisted people call her for more details. Yikes. would not come back and stay at a place that didnt want me around.)and Benson, one of our amazing current team members who is getting married next month!, who was going home to visit his family. And the road condition (picture American rocky, dirt road on steroids plus HUGE pot holes that not only you but the entire CAR would fall into and NEVER be seen again. Yeah. No exaggeration there.). Bahhaaaa. Long drive. Dusty. Bumpy. Normal. ::Sigh:: So, we make it to Narok around noon, having dropped James at one of the gates on the way out...and we have some food at the Kenol.

Note on the Kenol: It is a gas station…but behind it is this very secret and beautiful oasis that has pretty decent food. Fisi camp reveres it for its Samosas… but they have basic 9very basic, like mall basic) Chinese food and other snacks which are good to eat… picnic benches, grass, trees, flowers… idyllic hide-away in the midst of the dusty, dirty, trash ridden Narok, that we all have come to love.

So, we then start our epic shopping trip. First to market day to get fresh, cheap fruits and veggies... check... in large large amounts... double check... plus paw-paw…yes, I finally found papaya! Mmmm... check. Then to Naivas (grocery store) for everything else. Check. Then back to the Kenol to pick up samosas cause thats what Kay wants for dinner (30 of them.. .haha…half veg and half meat) check! I am doing that while the crew is getting diesel from a cheaper gas station (up the hill). They pick me up. Marc at the wheel. Clutch starts sticking. He can't easily up or down shift. Pull over to side of road. Steph (that’s me!) gets in driver seat. Drives. Hard to up or down shift-- getting to impossible (starts of easy and just gets worse and worse). Pull over. Kenna tries. Nope. Ok, we've broken down in Narok. Call Kay.

No panic but unhappiness- we need a mechanic and we need a mechanic now. Get back to Kenol and explain prob. Their mechanics get to work. Call Chris and Amanda (water researchers who stay at Serena Camp when in the Mara. Awesome people. Starting grad school at Yale in the fall but totally not the stereotype. Have a house in Narok, where they base) and find out they are just getting back into town and are heading to the Kenol now. (THANKS FOR SAVING US). Kenol mechanics look at car and decide that the gear box oil has been leaking (probably true. There is evidence of that. ) They fill up oil and explain issue. Say "we are sure we fixed the problem. We take great care of our customers." Kenna and Steph test drive car around Kenol. No good.. Can’t shift. KEnol guys make excuse that they would have found the problem if they had more time and try to way over charge us. We refuse and pay them reasonably for their labor. Don’t lie to us. We may be women and American, but we are not stupid!

At this point. Chris and Amanda have brought their mechanic. Kay has also called our NBO mechanic. It is around 6pm. We are able to make it to Chris and Amanda's house where we can safely leave our car for the night as we figure out what to do next. Maina (their mechanic) thinks it has to be a gear box problem and/or clutch or pressure plate issue. So does our NBO mechanic, Ian. Maina gamely agrees to look it over on Tuesday (it was late in the day…sun setting is not a good time to investigate car problems outside…) Chris and Amanda offer us a place to stay for the night... mattresses in their front room. Totally perfect...

We eat dinner at an AMAZING NEW INDIAN RESTAURANT IN NAROK

Side note: It is amazing. The golden spoon. They have a veg kitchen and a non veg kitchen and it was some of the best Indian food in Narok (not saying much, but it was impressive… not the best in Kenya by any means, but it held its own. ) Now, Side note 2: We stopped at the Golden Spoon on our way up to NBO to do the Kay and Pat epic switch, and apparently the non- veg food was less than desirable. New news. Apparently knowing the owner and chef (and him being there) is VERY important (he was there the first night with Chris and Amanda and I think was putting on a bit of a show for us…). I stopped there with Pat on the way down to the Mara and though no longer the best ever… it is still very delicious. If you ever eat there, go veg!

Crash back at Chris and Amanda’s place. Next morning...feel like sh** due to lack of medicine for any of my special conditions and cold. But,optimistic. Not much happens during the morning, but the afternoon was great. ** Maina discovers that the pressure plate was completely cracked and the clutch plate was worn down. We were able to order parts and get them from our connections in NBO, so the car was fixed, test drove, and humming by 5pm. Too late to head back to the Mara, but early enough to feel good and have a fun night in.

**During the day we basically explored Narok and did some shopping basics. It was pretty fun. Taught Marc and Siri how to bargain... had a great show down with a lady making some beautiful Maasai jewelry (It was about time to start looking into Maasai handicrafts, given that I am living in the Mara this year. Perhaps someone will get lucky J ) It was epic : (as is everything, apparently. Best adjective EVER)… Then got back to Chris and Amanda’s and made homemade pizza. We even found Amarenth flour (which is perfect because I am now eating gluten free… and feeling a million times better!).... go pizza and hangout night!

The next morning, anti climatically (thank goodness)...we left and made it back safe and sound to the Mara... to find out that the green cruiser was leaking oil though a tire and the white cruiser's alternator was going. Yikes. Fun car week that week. Seriously. When it rains, it pours out here, or so I am learning. Thursday then, we had the opportunity to take both the HILUX (yes, the same car that we had taken to Narok and had fixed just a day before)...and the green cruiser into our mechanic at Sarova (a nearby lodge. He is our Mara mechanic.) What an insane couple of days!

Luckily now, months later… all of our cars seem to be holding up ::knock on wood::. I am ever thankful for that. Yes, we have plenty of minor set backs, but I am thankful for the opportunity to learn about cars this year, our weekly car checks, our nearby mechanics and everyone else who plays support to our vehicles and project :) And of course, our friends in Narok and around Kenya who consistently come to our rescue. And for adventures with memories to last a life time!

Over and out—

Super MOM!! A mongoose rescue

2010-08-05T19:22:00.006+03:00

Yesterday, I was sitting at the lab tent table, minding my own business, eating lunch. All of a sudden, I saw something streak by a meter away from me. It was obviously our resident slender mongoose but it was carrying a large ball of some sort. I immediately thought she was carrying a baby and got very excited to have her reproducing but, by this time, she was long gone so I went back to eating. Until I began to hear a strange noise, coming from the bushes that the mongoose had run out from. It was a noise I had never heard before, so I went to investigate. Lo and behold! I found this little guy!
He was sitting there calling for his mom incessantly.
I kept an eye on him and sure enough, Mom came dashing to the rescue!
She picked him up,
and whisked him away to safety!

New Neighbors

2010-08-04T08:58:00.005+03:00

There’s often debate among the Fisi Camp researchers as to which camp, Talek or Serena, is best. While I won’t get into the specific pros and cons of each, I do think that a lion family looking to move into camp must reflect the desirability of that particular camp. Such is the case with Serena.

It all started yesterday around noon. I was sitting at our dining table just in front of the lab tent, doing some light reading, when I heard the snorting of impala out on the plain just below camp. No big deal. A few minutes later I saw, out of the corner of my eye, the long, tan legs of an animal strolling into camp about 35m away from me. My first thought was that an impala had wandered into camp, which would make it the first I had ever seen actually IN camp. Taking a closer look, I noticed very large paws and a long, swishing tail. Not an impala, but a full-grown female lion. Not quite the same thing.

She came to a stop about 22m from me and, looking at me the whole time, half sat down in a way not unlike a housecat that’s preparing to spring upon an unsuspecting toy. Perhaps I was this lion’s unsuspecting toy. She continued to stare at me while I sat there wondering what options I had (not many). At the time there was only one other person in camp, Moses, one of our all-purpose staff guys. Luckily, he was sitting down at the kitchen tent, so I called out to him, “Moses? SIMBA.” Yes, just like in “The Lion King”, “simba” really means “lion” in Swahili. Moses, previously unaware of the situation, crouched down and peered around the corner of the kitchen tent and saw the lion. “Ah, she is hunting.” Not shocking, but not the words I hoped to hear from him.

Hearing Moses, the lion turned her gaze from me and looked in his direction. Then back at me. I was just preparing to slowly stand and back into the lab tent when she stood up, turned, and walked out of camp the way she had come. Crisis averted…

Around 5:30pm yesterday I was again doing some light reading at the lab tent while Moses did the same down at the kitchen tent. Needing a break, I stood up and walked to the rocks near the fire pit (just in front of the lab tent also) to have a look out onto the plain. Suddenly, I heard Moses say, “LION, LION” in a loud whisper. I ducked down and looked to see the same female walking past the kitchen tent just 5m from Moses. She walked around the tent, skirted the brush at the edge of camp (just 20m from me), and paused to lie down and stretch at the storage tent before leaving camp through the brush again. Not good to have a lion hanging around/in camp for the day.

After two close encounters I was a little disappointed to have not been able to take any photos. At the same time, I didn’t want to be one of those people you’d read about in the news who watched through the lens as a lion ran up and put the hurt on me. But, as you’ll see, I was able to get a few photos after all (otherwise this would just be a long, boring story for you all).

I reached the safety of my tent trouble-free last night and slept soundly, as usual. I awoke this morning, around 6:45am, to the sound of light footsteps on the leaves near my tent. As a group of dik diks likes to sleep in camp at night, I naturally assumed it was one of them. Since it was close, I decided to sit up and have a good look at it out my window. Again I was fooled. It was not a dik dik, but the same female lion, walking just 5m from my tent. This time she was trailed by two small cubs. The three of them circled my tent, just 2-3m away the whole time, and then started to walk back to the woods at the edge of camp. As they were walking away the female caught the sound of Moses unzipping his tent and she paused, growling. She stared Moses down in obvious maternal defense mode. Like yesterday, Moses crouched down behind the tent. The female and one cub continued walking to the edge of camp, where she again stopped to stare at Moses. At the same time, on the opposite side of the tent, I heard a high-pitched squeak. I went to the window and looked, and there was the second little cub, apparently lost and calling for its mom. After about 10 seconds the cub regained its wits and ran around my tent and off to reunite with its mom. Together again, the three of them walked into the woods and away from the tents.

It’s been 2 hours now without seeing them, but it’s a safe bet that they’re not far. I’ll certainly be taking great care not to get myself between mom and cub as I walk around camp today. It’s funny to think though, as I look out onto the plain, off all the tourists driving endlessly in search of lions (they always want to see lions and cheetahs) when we’re here in camp and the lions come right to us (whether we like it or not).

Sorry for the long-windedness, but I hope the photos make up for it. I apologize for the quality; they were shot through my window screen and I was not about to step out of my tent for a better shot.

Hyena Playtime

2010-08-01T19:01:00.000+03:00

A few weeks ago, just as the migration was starting to show up, the hyenas worked themselves up into a bit of a frenzy for a few days. We had some crazy mornings with 2-3 kills a morning and some massive border patrols. One morning, we were out for our usual morning obs and came across a few hyenas in the morning darkness. We followed them and realized we had our work cut out for us when they joined a group of thirty hyenas. We automatically assumed that they were gearing up for another border patrol. As the sun came up and I mentally prepared myself for a difficult morning of data collection, the hyenas began trailing off in a line in typical border patrol fashion. They crossed the nearby lugga, began social sniffing and pasting all over the place, and then, much to my surprise, crossed the lugga again, went right back to where they had started, and began sacking out. A few hyenas seemed interested in a herd of zebra and some even made a few convincing lunges but, before we knew it, they were all play romping.

Usually play romping is done by cubs at the den so we were pretty surprised to see subadults and adults running around acting like children. The sheer number of hyenas playing was impressive to see. Even our oldest hyena, Navajo, got in on the play time.

Old and New Favorites

2010-07-31T17:52:00.000+03:00

Awhile ago I wrote a blog professing my undying love for the immigrant male Rough and Ready but I never got around to posting photos of his lovely spots. So here he is! my handsome hyena boyfriend! (he's the one on the left)Since it took me so long to get these up here I thought I'd throw in the added bonus of my new favorite cub. He started out with the cub name "Jay" and it has taken us months to see him nurse and finally confirm who is mother is. Now that we know he belongs to Hendrix (shoe lineage) we have dubbed him Puma. He has a lovely little black face, much blacker than all the other cubs, and he has the uncanny ability to sneak scraps away from carcasses.
Even though he is one of the lowest ranking hyenas in the clan, he holds his own and won't let anyone steal those scraps from him. Here he is with tuft of wildebeest beard that he carried around all morning the other day.

Mara Mystery Creature

2010-07-09T11:06:00.003+03:00

Lately we have been hearing reports of a strange mystery creature roaming the plains near Talek camp. A few days ago I saw this creature for myself and could hardly believe my eyes. This morning I saw it for a second time. There is no mistaking it. We have a genuine mystery creature in our midst. I was able to snap a photo of it as proof:

Okay, so maybe it’s not quite so mysterious. It appears to be, at least mostly, a Thompson’s gazelle. However, there is certainly something strange about it. Its body is shaggier than any other I’ve seen so far, and there’s no mistaking that head. This unique Tommy immediately brings to mind hypertrichosis, or “werewolf syndrome”, in humans, but we’d like to hear what other theories are out there that might explain the strange appearance of this poor Tommy.

And The Winner Is... Kate!

2010-07-06T16:46:00.000+03:00

The voting has closed and congratulations to Kate! After more than two years of blog posts, her timeless classic "Animals Have Brains Too (Part II)" dominated the non-scientific poll of hyena blog followers. With a whopping 49% of the votes, she crushed the competition like a hyena with a bone. Thanks to everyone who voted and helped celebrate the two year anniversary of the blog. Also, a huge "thank you" to Professor Kay Holekamp and all the students in her entourage who have helped share these great stories from Africa.

As proud winner of the poll, Kate has won bragging rights along with a hearty congratulations from all. Live it up Kate and feel free to post a lengthy acceptance speech in the comment field below!

Two Years of Great Hyena Blog Stories

2010-06-28T23:35:00.002+03:00

Two years ago, Professor Holekamp launched this blog as a way to share some of the great stories involving MSU students and their hyena research in Kenya. To mark the two year anniversary and highlight some of the interesting stories shared on the blog, we've put together a poll based on audience recommendations of their favorite stories. Cast your vote and we'll reward the winning author with all the glory and bragging rights we see fit: http://twtpoll.com/7hsmqf

In case you are not familiar with all the posts, use the search box or Blog Archive on the lower left to find these gems. Enjoy!

The Adventures of Dolittle - The Saga Continues

2010-06-28T21:45:00.003+03:00

When last we saw our intrepid hyena, Dolittle was stumbling through North territory and, well, he looked like crap. Ripped to shreds, one foot in the grave... you get the picture. I'm sure you've all been waiting with bated breath for the next installment in this epic adventure, so here I am to sate your curiosity.

And so our valiant but tattered hero trudged onward through the lonely wilderness, and made his way to... Happy Zebra?!

For about a month after Dolittle mysteriously turned up in North clan territory, he just vanished completely. The last time anyone had seen him, his head and neck looked like he'd been attacked by a rabid paper shredder, and he'd moved on from thin and was well into gaunt.

Fast forward to the morning of May 5th. I was moseying along through Happy Zebra territory when I suddenly came across a rather scruffy looking hyena sacked out in the middle of the road (for further clarification regarding this phenomenon, please refer to Kenna's treatise on the many forms of "sacking out"). This hyena had amazing ear damage, which I knew didn't match up with any of the HZ gang. Hmm... who could this be?

As the sun started to come up, I noticed that the hair on this hyena's neck was all patchy and the underlying skin was scabby and scarred. Eew. Something must have torn this hyena up but good.

Wait a sec...

No way!

It can't be.

But yes folks, it was. Dolittle, in all his scruffy glory, alive, almost completely healed and looking pretty well-fed to boot!

The Long Road Home

We were all ridiculously excited to see Dolittle again, and we wondered initially if he might try a secondary dispersal into Happy Zebra after his abrupt ejection from South clan. Then several weeks passed without us catching another glimpse of our little refugee, and we started to worry again.

On the morning of May 27th I headed off to the current South clan communal den. Most of the hyenas were easily recognizable, but one lazy lump was curled up in a tall patch of grass near the den and just wouldn't budge for me to get a good look. So I sat, and waited, and sat some more. Finally it decided to stretch its legs, and I nearly spit my tea. Dolittle! Same scruffy neck, same mangled ears, and all safe and sound at home again. He was in good company, too, lounging around with Clovis, the top female, and Spider, one of the higher ranking males.

Epilogue?

Dolittle is most definitely back in South clan (we've been seeing him at almost every den session lately) but it looks like the male ranks in South clan have gone through a little bit of a reorganization. We started off with Dolittle > Spider > Bing > Rooster. After this whole Dolittle saga, Bing has somehow clawed his way to the top and we have Bing > Dolittle > Spider > Rooster. It makes me suspect that Bing might have been to one to thrash Dolittle and send him packing... Sadly we'll never know for sure.

Anyway, the important thing is that Dolittle is alive and well, and back home. I'd call that a happy ending, right?

Eye Issues

2010-06-20T18:41:00.003+03:00

This poor little guy is one of our new den cubs in Talek West. His left eye appears to blind in much the same way that Jin from Fig Tree was blind. We have not seen Jin in months so we assume he has passed on to hyena heaven (yes, of course there is a hyena heaven). He seems to be doing ok at the den so far with one eye but we will have to keep you posted on how he does when he graduates from the den and starts spending time out in the big world. We are all curious to find out who his mom is because her rank may determine whether he survives to adulthood. For now we have dubbed him with the cub name Elk and we have a sneaky suspicion that he is sibling to another unknown cub we have temporarily named Moose.

UPDATE: Elk is in fact Vanity, cub to Argon. Unfortunately Argon is pretty low ranking so Vanity may have to be pretty aggressive and assert all the dominance he has over his sibling Moose (now Avarice) in order to survive.

A Reunion: They're Baaaaaack!

2010-06-20T18:23:00.007+03:00

It is amazing what a heartfelt apology can accomplish in so little time.

We had heard rumors that the migration would be late this year due to all the rain in Tanzania. But, it looks like that didn't keep them from us. The migration is a bit early in fact. I was here in November for the tail end of the migration and I had no idea how little that had prepared me for this. One day we were still laughing at our one wildebeest that looked confused and silly hanging out with all the topi on the Talek Plain and the next we were seeing herds of zebra all over the place and strings of wildebeest running in from the South. I am completely overwhelmed by the sheer number and density of the herds. None of the pictures or personal accounts had prepared me for this. And this is only the beginning!

The Talek West hyenas are getting multiple kills every morning and they've become strikingly more gregarious. The cubs at the den are always playing keep-away with various scraps of wildebeest and everyone is fat and bloody all the time. The wildebeest are headed west as well so it won't be long before we start seeing our Fig Tree and Mara River hyenas again.

LONG LIVE THE MIGRATION!

Snare Blues

2010-06-20T16:39:00.004+03:00

Snares are one of the unfortunate consequences of studying a large carnivore in a park surrounded by a pastoral rural community. Some Masai feel that placing snares around their homes is a good way to protect their families and livelihoods against hyenas and other carnivores. Snares are also utilized by poachers and in some areas you are likely to see them on every animal you come across.

When hyenas find themselves caught in a snare, they are usually able to gnaw the cord holding them down but are unable to remove the loop that has tightened around their neck or leg. Sometimes they die from their injuries or suffocate if they get the snare caught on something later on. Other times, they manage to survive with whatever handicap the snare creates. Kay has told us stories about finding hyena remains with snares embedded in the bones. One of our immigrant males, Oakland, has a scar from a snare that is still in his neck. By the time he was darted the wound had grown over and the snare could not be removed without endangering his life. He seems to be doing just fine with it and has remained an active member of the Talek West Clan. Although, I am not sure if this is due to the snare or not, but Oakland has the strangest-sounding whoop I have ever heard.

When I got here I naively thought that snares were a thing of the past. The Mara Conservancy has been cracking down on poaching in the area and most Masai seem to understand that large carnivores are what bring tourists to the Mara. That fantasy world was destroyed about a week ago when we first saw Gelato, one of our Talek West subadults, with a snare stuck on her neck. At this point it seems very loose but she is unable to get it off. We've seen a few younger cubs and other subadults really attack the snare during play (like in the picture above) and we are getting a little worried that this play might tighten the snare further. For this reason, we have made darting Gelato a top priority so that we can remove the snare. Unfortunately Gelato has been spending all her time with large groups of hyenas and so far, no opportunities to dart her have arisen.

Please think happy thoughts for Gelato and we'll keep you posted on her condition.

A Reconciliation

2010-06-12T11:49:00.001+03:00

Dear Migration,

I know I haven’t tried to contact you since you left in November. I’m sorry, my pride kept me away. You were right to leave me. I was taking you for granted, just like you said. I had no idea how hard life would be without you around. I’m so sorry I pushed you away. The rains came just after you left and the grass grew so tall without you here to mow it down. Half the time we can’t even find the hyenas, and when we can, we can’t ID them because the grass is so tall and thick its impossible to see their spots. Ticks are breeding like crazy and I’ve found six of them on me in the last two days. That never used to happen when you were around. I’m so sorry I took you for granted. I’m so sorry I pushed you away. I’m so sorry I let my pride get the best of me and didn’t contact you until now. I’m nothing without you and I miss you so much. Life in the Mara just doesn’t hold the joy it used to when you were here. Please please please come back home. I’m ready to take the next step and I'll do whatever it takes to show you I'm ready. I love you. Please come back.

Yours always,

Kenna

Kenna dazzles IDing border patrol participants

2010-06-10T09:56:00.006+03:00

OK, you’ve seen from her blog posts that Kenna has a great sense of humor, but let me tell you a little bit about her ability as an observer of hyena behavior out here in the bush. We arrived at the den yesterday morning to find very little going on; no radio signals were coming in from there either, so we drove west from the den until we picked up Pan’s signal. We tracked Pan to a processional of 17 hyenas coming toward the den from the west, apparently the tail end of a border patrol along the territorial boundary separating Talek West and Fig Tree clans. The sight of 17 hyenas coming at you is mighty intimidating, but what’s really scary is trying to identify all these hyenas as they move past you in pretty quick succession. Kenna did that yesterday morning with astounding ease, particularly for someone who has only been here for 7 months! She never hesitated, and recognized each one individually as soon as she got only a few seconds to see it clearly. Most of these 17 hyenas eventually got spooked by some cattle and herdsmen, and vanished into the bushes along Den One Creek at about 7:15am. We then moved on to determine how many cubs Gucci had at her natal den (she has two!), and we discovered incidentally that her teenage daughter, Gelato, has a snare around her neck. We’ll have to try to get that off of her soon. While we were nervously watching Gucci’s newest cubs pull on the end of Gelato’s snare, we heard sounds of excited hyenas coming from further up the creek, and so set out to see what was going on. I thought Kenna’s identification skills had been put to the test earlier that morning, but what we found next made that earlier effort look like a piece of cake. This time the sounds led us to a group of 30 hyenas engaging in yet another border patrol but this time along the southern border of the clan’s territory. Once again, Kenna dazzled the rest of us (a brand new grad student and me) with her ability to identify all these hyenas, even though this time they were moving through tall grass for most of the distance covered. Being able to ID hyenas is not something one can fake, as we could easily check all of Kenna’s suggested hyena IDs against photos in our clan spot pattern albums (which we have in the car with us every day), and she was always correct. Check out these photos andimagine how you’d do trying to ID all these (what seemed like) zillions of hyenas. No small feat! Click on a photo if you want to see it blown up.

When Lions Don't Bore You to Tears

2010-06-06T10:58:00.005+03:00

Most hyena researchers that come out here have a healthy respect for lions but, on average, there is no love lost between Fisi Campers and Mara lions. They steal our hyena's food, kill our hyenas, and for the most part, are just plain boring. Call us biased or elitist if you will, but hyenas are much more beautiful, much more intelligent, better hunters, and much more interesting in their behavior and biology. In my seven months out here, lions have impressed and fascinated me only a handful of times. Most of those times have been during lion/hyena interactions (I'm convinced that it was the hyenas bringing out the best in the lions and that the cool behavior really didn't have anything to do with the lions at all). A few times though, lions have been interesting all on their own. In the spirit of fairness and unbiased scientific discovery, I thought I would share a few of those stories with you.

One of the lions prides that I have warmed up to is a large pride that hangs out in our Fig Tree and Prozac territories. I've managed to find them interesting due to a few unique individuals that they have and a few unique behaviors that I have witnessed. Their subadults actually play instead of just laying around all day! Amazing!

This adult female has obviously earned my respect. All it takes is getting your face gored by a warthog

The other cool thing that this pride has going for it is a propensity for climbing small trees in a "clown-car-ish" fashion. Believe it or not, there are 8 lions in this little tree/bush.

In West Territory, there was this one time when I saw a lion actually stalking something! It failed miserably, but I was proud to see a lion actually trying something other than sleeping.
That same morning, shortly after this failed hunting attempt, two HUGE male lions put forth the effort required to chase these females across the plain and out of their territory.

This last picture may not look like much but it is undeniable proof that lions really do get up from their endless napping and do something now and then. So Kay, you really should listen to Dee and go a little easier on those poor lions.

I am still looking for undeniable proof of their superior intelligence and beauty though. That might take another seven months/years.

Yet Another Andy

2010-06-02T11:14:00.003+03:00

I’d like to take a minute to introduce myself. My name is Andy Booms and, yes, I’m actually the third Andy to post on this blog. I just finished my first year as a Ph.D. student in the lab and I’m out for my first field season. While I’m mainly here to get a feel for the conditions and limitations with regard to conducting research out here and to familiarize myself with the hyenas and basic hyena biology, I’m also hoping to test out some methods for my eventual dissertation work on gene flow among hyena populations throughout Kenya.

I know others have posted before on their initial impressions and experiences, but I can’t help but do the same, especially since Kay’s latest post provided the perfect segue. The drive down from Nairobi was incident-free (thankfully) and full of wildlife. I saw elephants, giraffes, wildebeest, zebras, ostriches, gazelles, and many other species before I even set foot in Talek camp. That night I heard my first real hyena whoop in person. It was so cool to have large carnivores off in the distance that it didn’t seem real. I spent the next few days going on obs and adding to my species list. Everything was better than I had imagined, especially the food (and hyenas too, of course).

Then, just yesterday, I moved to Serena camp to spend some time setting up trail cameras. News of recent activity in Serena had already reached Talek before I left: there was a dead hippo in the woods just outside of camp and it was attracting lions and hyenas each night. When I arrived at Serena I was happy to find that my tent was one of the closest to all of the activity; it was probably less than 100m away from the hippo itself. It certainly smelled like it was that close. We went about our evening obs as usual and returned at night to find hyenas already in camp, some only 30-40m from my tent. Then, during dinner, the lions arrived. We couldn’t see them but we could certainly hear them. The roars were so close and so powerful that I could feel them in my chest. Things seemed a little more real then. After dinner I walked to my tent, constantly scanning with my flashlight, and managed to get there in one piece and settle down for bed. The lions continued to roar, closer still, and hyenas could be heard running through camp throughout the night. They all wanted a shot at an easy meal. At some point elephants wandered by and stumbled upon the lions, and I awoke to a loud, angry trumpeting. I could also hear hippos grunting. At that point I just hoped I wouldn’t be trampled.

Morning came and I was still alive. The lions are reportedly still nearby, resting after a long night of eating, but so far this morning I’ve only seen a jackal moving around camp. Today we’ll go about our normal business and I’m sure when we get back tonight we’ll have an encore of last night. It’s important to point out, though, that the lions, hyenas, elephants, hippos, and everything else are generally unconcerned with us. They have better things to do than lurk around each corner or stalk us as we walk to our tents. We’re just bystanders who happen to have a front row seat for now. And it’s a seat I don’t mind having. It’s just another day in Serena camp, and my fifth day in Africa.

The mongooses return....along with some other unexpected stuff

2010-06-02T07:22:00.005+03:00

We had all told Dee she would be sure to have dwarf mongooses attend breakfast with us every day while she was visiting our camp in the Mara Conservancy. They are usually extremely predictable, and they clearly enjoy ]treats like scrambled eggs and toast just as much as we do. However, the entire time Dee was staying in that camp, the mongooses were apparently off foraging at the other end of their home range, so she never saw them. We all felt terrible about this, but we also all recognize that we simply need to accept whatever Mother Nature hands us out here; although Mother Nature put on a pretty good show for Dee during her Kenya visit, the dwarf mongooses weren’t part of it. Camille, who lives in the Conservancy camp year-round, reports that the mongooses showed up at the breakfast table again the very first morning after Dee & I had to drive away to return to Nairobi for Dee’s homeward bound flight. So here’s a glimpse of what Dee missed mongoose-wise. On the other hand, 3 days after Dee left, a hippo died in the forest 50 meters from camp, and the lions and North hyenas have been warring over the carcass day and night ever since. Not only does this mean it’s very scary living in that camp right now due to the constant presence of so many large carnivores, but this also means the whole camp smells absolutely unbelievably terrible, as the hippo carcass is situated directly up wind of camp. As long-time blog readers will recall, however, spotted hyenas can make a hippo carcass vanish very quickly, so it ought to be completely gone in only a couple more days. Hopefully Camille will post a blog entry soon about adventures associated with the dead hippo in camp.

Shoat disaster relief

2010-06-01T14:31:00.005+03:00

On 3 May, I posted a blog entry describing a nocturnal massacre of sheep & goats (“shoats”) belonging to our askari, Stephen. Now I have to tell you about the amazing and wonderful thing that happened in response to that post. A number of readers of this blog were apparently moved by Stephen’s plight, and wanted to help him recover from this devastating loss. Then these kind people, some individually and some in groups, proceeded to donate funds to permit Stephen to buy shoats to rebuild his decimated flock. On 13 May, an old friend of mine, Dee White (shown at right having lunch in camp last week), arrived for a visit at fisi camp, and she brought with her roughly US $500.00 for Stephen, donated by Dee and several of her friends. We converted the dollars to Kenya shillings shortly after Dee arrived in Nairobi, and when she got to camp, she handed most of this cash directly to Stephen, who was, I believe, as shocked as he was pleased. He had clearly never expected to be able to replace so many of his lost animals. At my suggestion, Dee held back a little bit of the money she and her friends had donated, and we are using those funds to buy some cyclone fencing and other materials necessary to make Stephen’s shoat corral predator-proof so such carnage can’t happen again in future. Stephen can’t read or write to thank you all himself, so I’m doing that for him here. When Dee handed him that money, she showed him photos of all her friends back in the States who had contributed to the “shoat disaster relief fund.” Since then, Stephen has expressed his appreciation several different times in various ways, most immediately by inviting Dee to a goat roast at his manyatta (she gracefully declined), but also later asking me repeatedly to be sure to express his own appreciation for this generous gift, and the appreciation of his wives and children as well. So to Dee, Maggie, Judy, Carol, Mary Lou, Pook, Greg, Anne, and all the rest of you, “Asante sana!” from Stephen.

Alumnus' Research on Sexual Deception in USA Today

2010-05-19T15:34:00.003+03:00

Wiline Pangle is an alumnus of the Holekamp Lab where she received her PhD in 2008. While living in Kenya, she collaborated on a topi sexual deception study published in the July issue of The American Naturalist journal and featured in an article this week in USA Today.

What Are Your Favorite Hyena Blog Stories?

2010-05-12T16:40:00.000+03:00

The Notes From Kenya blog is about to hit several milestones: two years of blogging and 200 posts. This is a perfect time to reflect on the success and gather some feedback (and have a friendly little competition among bloggers past and present).

There have been some remarkable stories shared here and we'd like your input as to which ones indeed are the best. Yes, we can look at the Google Analytics data and see that we've had 44,000 visits from people in 154 countries. That same data shows Kay's Birth Through A Soda Straw post was the most popular. This was followed closely by Kate's Mythbusters and Thrill of the Hunt and then Kay's very first post Lion-Hyena Fight.

Yet, as with many things, the numbers don't always give the entire story. Other media coverage, press releases, search engine optimization and external forces sometimes skew these numbers. For example, Kate's Crazy Things Guys Do For Girls was a big hit on Facebook; Kenna's Necropsies grossed many people out; Andy's Jingle Bells offered a twist on the holiday travel stories; and Leslie's Running in Kenya brought some visitors to the blog who were expecting personal fitness related stories.

So to mark the two year anniversary of the blog, we'd like to determine the "Fan Favorite" hyena blog post. To phrase this another way, we are going to conduct a poll.

This is where we need your help. Nominate your favorite blog post(s) using the comment space below. We'll collect the nominations and do a poll among the most popular stories. What stories are the most memorable? What stories have you enjoyed the most or passed along to friends? The comment thread is open, so please nominate as many as you like. (And yes, we do expect hyena blogging alumni to enlist their family and friends to vote for their own pieces).

Then we'll compile the nominations and put a poll up in a couple weeks. The blog post with the most votes will win. The writer of the Fan Favorite post will receive bragging rights and a pat on the back from Kay (unless the post is by Kay in which case she'll need some acknowledgement from the folks at Fisi Camp).

If you need help finding a post, use the search box or keywords listed on the left. There are plenty of great stories from the bloggers, so have at it friends and let us know what you like the best. We'd love to hear from all of our readers, so please post your comments. Thank you!

Hyena Research on Video

2010-05-10T16:03:00.002+03:00

The video team from MSU spent last week with Professor Holekamp and her students in the Mara. They followed the researchers and gathered video for an upcoming television show. Here are some clips from their visit.

The first video covers the Hyena Puzzle Box:

This second video is on darting the hyenas:

We'll keep you posted on when the episode of "MSU Today" will air on the Big Ten Network, WKAR and on the web. For a related story, here is Jim Peck's blog post where he writes about his arrival at Fisi Camp.

Sacking Out: The Strategy

2010-05-09T21:47:00.021+03:00

A recent blog reader asked us what sacking out is. I really should have known to explain this in my blogs because "sacked out" was one of those terms that everyone used when I got here that left me clueless. It took me a few days of really paying attention to know what "sacking out" was referring to.

Sacking out is, most simply, when a hyena is laying down. In our data collection and notes we use this term to describe any hyena that is laying down in a variety of positions.

A sacked out hyena can be either a curse or a blessing. At times, it can be a relief to come upon a sacked out hyena. This is partly because it is easy to record in the notes and partly because it allows you plenty of time to ID the hyena without it wandering into bushes or tall grass or a lugga. Other times, a sacked out hyena is the cause of much frustration and teeth gnashing. Some hyenas love to sack out in a way that gives you no hope of identifying the hyena by spots.

Here are a few hyena sacking out strategies:

The Sack Out

The "Yes I know it looks like I'm enjoying this too much for it to just be nursing" Sack Out

(Mom: Koko, Cub: Sheffield)

The "One paw under, one paw back" Sack Out

The "We LOVE the road!" Sack Out

The "MMMMMMmmmm Aaaaahhhhh Roooooaaaaaad, soooo niiiiiice" Sack Out

The "Yeah, I'm in the road again, whatcha gonna do about it?" Sack Out

The "Good babysitter" Sack Out

The "Not-so-good babysitter" Sack Out

(Mom: Artemis)

The "Hiding in the den hole" Sack Out

(Potter)

The "Just Say 'No!'" Sack Out

(Human: Kenna, Hyena: Obama)

The "Hide in the bushes from the hyena researchers" Sack Out

The "Not quite sure I want a bath right now, Barcelona" Sack Out

The "Sleeping on the job, but it's ok because I'm a new mom" Sack Out

(Mom: Lucky Luciano, Cub: Lavington)

The "Bloody Comfy" Sack Out

(Snaggletooth)

The "Why yes, as a matter of fact I am sacked out in a hole. And yes, I am stuck here" Sack Out

(Rigoletto)

The "Grass pillow" Sack Out

The "What do you mean you can't identify me by my belly shape? What kind of hyena researcher are you?!" Sack Out

The "I am such a good mom, anyone can chew or stand on me, I don't care" Sack Out

(Mom: Potter)

The "I'm too lazy to get up for this greet" Sack Out

The "Hyenas love ditches" Sack Out

The "No really, we LOVE ditches" Sack Out

The "Having three cubs is exhausting" Sack Out

(Atari)

The "I have my eye on you" Sack Out

The "In my next life, I want to be a rock" Sack Out

The "Is the Mara ugly or what?!" Sack Out

Hello from a new hyena blogger

2010-05-06T21:25:00.004+03:00

Hey there hyena-fans! This is Camille Yabut, the current research assistant at Serena Camp in the west side of the Mara. I was told that, before we start our lengthy and hopefully enjoyable relationship, I should start off by introducing myself to all you lovely people. So, here we go, my obligatory intro post, which I'll try to trim down to the basics so that we can get into the stuff that's actually interesting.

I graduated from University of California, Davis in 2007 with a B.S. in Wildlife, Fish and Conservation Biology, emphasis on Wildlife Biology. Much to my dismay, I ended up working at a corporate law firm for the two and a half years following graduation, rather than actually using the degree I'd worked so hard on. Finally (and hopefully before I'd completely sold my soul), last year I decided that I'd had enough and it was time to go back to doing what I loved, so I started looking into a) grad school, or b) a fieldwork job. In the midst of all of this, I got the job posting for the RA position with the MSU Hyena Project through the UCD WFCB alumni listserve. I was so excited to hear about an opportunity like this that I leapt to apply (ok, fine, so I more or less attacked the posting, sunk my teeth in and refused to let go... I occasionally wonder if I got the job just through sheer persistence).

So, lucky for me, Kay decided to give me a chance and here I am. I arrived in Kenya in early February, spent a few days tearing around Nairobi, and then as luck would have it, arrived for the first time in the Mara on my birthday (is that an awesome birthday gift or what?). I've been here for about 3 months now and I'm still loving it just as much as I did when I first got here.

Anyway, I've been lagging a little on the blogging (yeesh, a 3-month backlog of stories to share) but I'll try to actually start getting a post in here and there. Can't let Kenna and Andy have all the fun!

That should cover it, right? I promise the next time you hear from me, hyenas will actually feature. Take care 'til then!

Arachnologist needed!

2010-05-06T14:47:00.005+03:00

I recently returned to the Mara after being back in the states and quickly settled into my new tent. However, in the first couple of days I had to evict some of the small guests that had been calling my tent their home. This one in particular caused me to lose a little sleep. I have a guess at what type of spider this may be, but I welcome the opinion of someone the knows a bit more about spiders.

Shoat disaster

2010-05-03T13:42:00.004+03:00

In our research camp in the eastern Mara we have two night watchmen, or “askaris” in Kiswahili. Their names are Stephen and Lusingo, and they both hail from manyattas across the river from our camp. Last night disaster struck at Stephen’s manyatta, resulting in what can only be described as a catastrophic loss of livestock. Sometime between midnight and 1 am, a leopard climbed over the 8-foot wall of one of the livestock corral’s in Stephen's manyatta, grabbed a goat, and fled back over the wall. (This morning Stephen found the leopard asleep on a high tree-branch beside the river, with Stephen's goat --now dead, of course-- tucked into a fork in the tree.) Perhaps detecting the scent of blood from the leopard attack, a spotted hyena then approached Stephen’s manyatta, and forced its way into the same livestock corral. The terrified sheep and goats (“shoats”) stampeded and burst out of the corral through a weakly closed gate, and dispersed into the night on the open plain, where they were promptly set upon by a large group of hyenas. Stephen, who was at work guarding our camp at the time, received a call on his cell phone at 1 am telling him the hyenas were mowing down his shoats, so he rushed home. None of the hyena researchers in camp were aware then of what had happened, but this morning Stephen found us and led us to his manyatt, where the scene can only be described as carnage: dead and damaged shoats all over the place, and the surviving shoats huddled together, still apparently terrified. Women and men were trying to salvage what meat they could from the carcasses of the dead ones, and cleaning what was left of the skins. Stephen had tallied the losses, which totaled 50 shoats, each valued at roughly 3000 Kenya shillings ($45.00 US). We have no funds for any sort of compensation scheme here, so all we could do today was to buy several kilos of shoat meat at filet mignon prices to help Stephen recoup some of his losses. This is one of those situations where, despite the fact that the killer hyenas were not among the ones we study, nor did we have anything to do with this awful event, the hyena researchers feel absolutely terrible for Stephen and his family, as this represents a huge financial loss. We will now do whatever we can to help them cope with this disaster, including strengthening their corrals to keep out marauding predators in the future.

Fruit bats

2010-05-02T12:04:00.005+03:00

I recently arrived back in Kenya, and after running some inevitable errands in Nairobi, finally made it to the Mara. It is green and beautiful here right now, as we are still in the season known as "the long rains." I have lived in a tent in our bush camp for years on end, and never been bothered by the fruit bats.......until now. Over the years, virtually all my students and guests have complained at breakfast about fruit bat noises, but this has never before been an issue for me. In fact, their complaints have always seemed amusing to me. This year, however, the tables have turned. For some reason, the shrill pinging vocalizations of the epauletted fruit bats we have in camp seem extraordinarily loud to me. As with my students and visitors, these bat calls suddenly sound to me like an alarm clock going off, and they have currently the power to bring me up out of even a deep sleep. Hopefully I'll eventually readjust to these beeps, and be able once again to sleep through them, only tuning in as necessary to the actual alarm clock beside my bed. But thus far I've had to leave my tent twice in the middle of the night to shoo the bats away who were (literally) hanging out over my tent engaged in very loud conversations. The good news is that the many insectivorous bats we also have in camp are undoubtedly making an even greater racket as they chase moths throughout the night, but happily they are all talking on very high-frequency channels I don't pick up at all.

The life story of a hyena

2010-04-15T11:09:00.002+03:00

http://www.slate.com/id/2249557/

This link is to a Slate web article that my boyfriend sent me. Not sure how he found it before any of us.

Mara Mysteries Revealed!!

2010-04-13T22:48:00.005+03:00

I have learned many things during my five months in the Mara: things about hyenas, things about birds (Kasaine is a birding pro), things about Kenyan and Maasai culture, and one very special thing about shoats. Now, you may be wondering "Hey Kenna, what exactly is a shoat?" I wondered the same thing during my first cow count (on the eastern side of the park we frequently see Maasai herders. Twice a month we count the number of domestic animals we encounter in the park). Leslie was calling out numbers left and right, "24 cows, 78 cows, 14 cows" and I was frantically trying to keep up until she said, "38 shoats." I paused for second. Leslie saw my confusion, and quickly explained that we count goats and sheep together because they are often in one herd together and are very difficult to distinguish at a distance. That was all well and good and made perfect sense to me, so we went on our way.

For the next month or two, upon further inspection of the shoat herds, I began to notice a funny contraption on some of the shoats. It looked like an overdone belt of some sort. Every time I saw a shoat with one on, I kind of wondered what it was but didn't think too hard about it. It always seemed to be on a bigger animal so I mistakenly assumed that it had something to do with keeping track of the herd or an older animal.

It wasn't until I passed through a herd of shoats on my way to Nairobi with one of our cooks that I finally asked what these belts were actually for.

Our cook kindly explained in his broken English (while chuckling nervously), that these belts were to keep the herd from multiplying out of control. The belt keeps the boy shoats from having sex with the girl shoats.

I was a little embarrassed, partly because once I knew, it seemed so obvious, and partly because I made our poor cook explain it to me. But now that I know, I just find the things hilarious. It is a chastity belt for boys and probably one of the best methods of birth control in the world.

Department of Missing Persons (crocuta division)

2010-04-12T16:57:00.006+03:00

Hi. Andy Gersick here again. Sorry I have yet to properly introduce myself, and I promise to do so asap. But for now I want to start a little semi-regular feature I've been thinking of called...(drumroll please)..."unID of the Week."

Not sure if it'll actually be weekly, but we can dream. For “unID of the Week” I’ll be posting photos of hyenas we run into who defy our best efforts at identification. I know there’s not a whole lot that most readers can do to figure out who those hyenas are – you all don’t have a stack of dusty ID notebooks to page through like we do. So I don’t plan to take up a ton of blog real estate with “unID of the Week” postings. But I hope it’s at least a little interesting to see one of our ongoing puzzles. And I hope that old hyena-watchers and Talek-side researchers will take a look and let us know if any spots ring a bell.

Here on the Serena side we still see a fair number of hyenas that we don't know. This is partially because we're still learning who's who in our clans. Hyenas live in “fission-fusion” groups, which means that even though clans have a coherent identity, clan members don’t all hang out together and may not even see each other for long stretches of time. Hence fission (splitting) and fusion (coming together). But North clan seems to have more than its share of odd hyenas that show up one day, flash some great spots, and then disappear. I have my own pet theory about why this is: I think that some of our unIDs come from across the river, and go back there before we can get used to them. North-clan Territory borders the Mara River to the East, and we know that hyenas do cross the river sometimes. North clan also lost a whole swathe of high-ranking animals last year. The official line is that the lost hyenas – including Elf, the alpha female, and a number of the highest-ranked animals in North clan – died. But I'm more into JFK/Elvis-type explanations for the missing animals. I think they’re still alive. So if they’re alive, where did they go? Again, my theory is that they crossed the river. Sometime in 2009 the top third of North Clan up and disappears. Meanwhile, unfamiliar animals seem to pop up regularly in North territory. The other North hyenas know these animals, but we don’t. So what if North Clan split up, or just spread out, with most of the group staying here on our side of the river and a significant satellite group making their home base on the other side? That would explain the lost hyenas, the random unIDs… it’s perfect.

SO: unID of the Week. Again, if you’re an old hyena watcher or a Talek-side researcher, watch this space for pictures that might ring a bell. If you’re an at-home reader, I hope this feature will ultimately provide documentation for the unraveling of a mystery in real time. Maybe it’ll turn out that hyenas who make only cameo appearances over here are regulars on the other side of the river. Maybe one day, a Talek-side researcher will see a picture of Elf on the blog and say, “Oh her? I ran into her on the border of Prozac-clan territory yesterday.”

Today, we have “unID with Emma, Krest, Arrow and Golgotha near Mgoro Lugga.” This hyena was wandering around with a bunch of our clan regulars. The spots are distinctive, the other hyenas acted like this was a familiar clan-mate, but we can’t find a match in any of our ID books.

DO YOU KNOW THIS HYENA?

The Fall of Dolittle

2010-04-09T11:43:00.004+03:00

This is Andy Gersick. I’m here to study vocal communication and I’m planning a post on that topic soon – hopefully with good clips of hyena calls for readers to click on – but for now I want to talk about some ongoing intrigue in the South clan.

The hyena you’re looking at – the one who looks like his head was run over by a lawnmower – is Dolittle. He’s our ranking male in South clan and normally he is as cocky and content as a male hyena can be (which is to say he’s skittish and timid around females but demands respect from the other males). We were frankly stunned when we saw him the other day in North-clan territory with wounds all over his head and neck. We never expect to see members of one clan deep in another’s territory unless they’re immigrant males trying to disperse. As a top male in South, Dolittle shouldn’t have been planning a move. Hanging out in alien-clan territory is a good way to get yourself attacked, so our first thought was that Dolittle must have somehow wandered into North and gotten a beating for it. Now we’re not so sure.

Just a couple of weeks earlier we had watched Dolittle behaving like an alpha male in his prime. He was at Orchid Den with Grimace – an unlucky female who’s often in heat but hasn’t managed to produce a viable litter (as far as we know). Apparently Grimace is smelling sexy again, because Dolittle was circling around her with the intense-but-worried interest that typifies a courting male – he would hover as close as possible whenever she sacked out and would follow her in nervous spirals whenever she’d wander, backing off timidly if she looked the least bit annoyed. Every once in awhile, when Dolittle’s spirals took him too far away, Grimace would stop and look over her shoulder at him, almost encouraging him to stop sniveling and catch up. Females aren’t usually inclined to tolerate a male’s presence, much less push him to get closer, so Grimace’s come-hither looks were our best clue that she might be interested in mating. At any rate, Grimace eventually seemed to give up on her anxious suitor and lay down by the den for a real snooze, with Dolittle standing twitchily nearby. At that point, we spotted three other clan males approaching in the tall grass just beyond the den clearing. Dolittle saw them too, and his posture changed completely. He stood up straight and stared intently in their direction, pawing the ground and seeming to send a clear message: Back off. The other changed course to avoid the den and slunk past without even shooting a glance at Grimace. Dolittle was flexing his alpha-male muscles.

The animal who showed up in North Territory a few days later was a shadow of that Dolittle. We found him lying in the middle of the road, wounded, exhausted and thin. We decided to hang out and see what would happen to him – half out of scientific interest, half out of worry that the first North animal that saw him would finish him off. But over the next two hours a procession of North-clan hyenas wandered past Dolittle during their morning perambulations, and none of them seemed terribly concerned with the invader. High-ranked Joni gave him an idle sniff – he answered with an intensely submissive posture and she went on her way, trailing young Hooker who barely looked at Dolittle. Later a mixed-sex group of young adults – Leprechaun (m), Arrow (f) and Peepers (f) – thought he was interesting enough to check out from a distance of about 30 meters. Dolittle heaved himself up from his convalescent nap and trotted another 20 meters away, and the three North-ers headed casually in the opposite direction.

So now we have a mystery: who or what attacked Dolittle, how did he end up so far from home, and why don’t any of the North animals seem to care?

Our best guess at the moment is that North is actually Dolittle’s natal clan, and that whatever happened to get him those injuries sent him back to his childhood home to recover. When young males mature sexually and disperse, their first try is often a failure; when they get tired of being abused in their adoptive clans they often come back home to resume their birth-ranks, get a break from being picked on, and fatten up before making the next attempt. Dolittle is too old to fit this model exactly, and his dispersal to South has been a success up to now, but if he was born in North it may still feel like the safest place to get over a serious trauma. If Dolittle is a North animal, that would explain the tolerant treatment he seems to be receiving from other North-ers.

Even if we’re right about that part of it, we still don’t know who gave Dolittle such a thrashing. One possibility is that there has been a mutiny among the South males. If they rose up to depose him, they may have driven him out of South entirely. Audrey DeRose-Wilson recalls a similar event with Rogue, a former number-one male in the Prozac clan. Rogue’s tenure ended suddenly when something triggered an uprising by the other clan males. They turned on him as a group, viciously attacked him and left him severely injured. He loitered around the outskirts of Prozac territory for a few days, then disappeared. He was never seen again.

But Dolittle’s injuries may have nothing to do with hyenas – other lab members have speculated that he might have taken a drink at the wrong time and barely escaped from a croc (his wounds don’t look consistent with a lion attack), or even gotten some kind of chemical burn.

Two days ago I saw Dolittle a second time, still in North Territory (pictures below). His wounds are healing but he is gaunt and limping badly.

The fact that he continues hanging around in North makes me feel more convinced that whatever happened to him happened in South territory. But for now there’s not much we can do to clarify the story. We can only wait to see if Dolittle turns up back in South to resume his reign, or disappears like Rogue.

If you’ve got a theory about what might have happened to Dolittle, post a comment.

Injuries and Survival

2010-04-07T23:02:00.006+03:00

Hyenas are tough, way tough. We’ve all heard stories about such and such hyena that recovered from such and such terrible injury, but I had never seen it before until Moon Pie.

Moon Pie has always been a pretty solitary hyena. She’s relatively low ranking and most times we track her she is sacked out. She also manages to look more like a rock than any other hyena I’ve met yet. We have been tracking her and driven up to rocks that we think are her and passed by her thinking she’s a rock. Multiple times. It’s quite embarrassing.

One day, we tracked Moon Pie and found her sacked out, as usual. We didn’t drive too close due to her being sacked out in a swampy area. When she lifted up her head I started laughing immediately. It looked as if she was making some sort of silly face and I couldn’t imagine why she was doing that. But, at the time we didn’t think too much off it. We really did think that she was just kind of sticking her tongue out at us.

A few days later we tracked her again. This time we got a little closer and were surprised to see that she was still making that same silly face. But it wasn’t a face that she was making. It was just her face. It looked like someone had punched her with a concrete block. The left side of her face was completely swollen, her jaw was out of alignment and a few of her teeth appeared to have been broken or had fallen out.

We were pretty sure that she was not going to make it. We tracked her whenever we could for a week or two and any time we saw her she was sacked out and not really moving but, she always seemed alert. And then the swelling started to go down. And then we saw her moving around. And then we saw her chewing a bit. She still doesn’t look great by any standards. Her jaw is still out of alignment, her cheek looks painful, she has lost quite a few teeth, and those she hasn’t are perpendicular to the direction they should be pointing. But, she’s up and about, feeding, and pooping so it looks like she’s going to survive this one.