Routine and Adventure

A while ago, a balloon pilot friend and I were talking about routine.  We were talking about how most balloon pilots don’t seem big on routine and love adventure.  Then he said that researchers must have a routine, and I replied, “Well, sort of, but it’s never the same.”  How is routine never the same?  I’ve been thinking about that conversation a lot since then.

Everyday, our general schedule is wake up to go out on obs at 5:30, observe the hyenas till about 9am, return to camp and eat breakfast, work and do camp chores during the day, go out for evening obs at 5pm, observe the hyenas again until about 8:30, return to camp and eat dinner, and go to bed.  We do this general thing everyday of the week.  It sounds simple, but it rarely is. 

There are surprises that don’t change the routine much if at all.  For instance, I can be sitting at the same seat every morning for breakfast.  You would think you would see the same view every day, but you don’t.  Sometimes we’ll see an elephant crossing the plain in front of camp, dwarf mongooses working up the courage to try to steal some peanut butter, warthogs walking up to us to snort for our leftover vegetables, zebras grazing by my tent, etc.   The following pictures are all taken from our dining table at Serena.

Some of our warthog breakfast companions

Zebra by my tent

Dwarf mongoose eating a banana

Driving down our driveway after obs, we don’t expect to see much of anything besides antelope, but then there are those days when you have a lion or a rhino in the “front yard.” 

Lion at the bottom of our driveway in Serena

But most of the time, none of these things are there.  There are the extremely rare and amazing surprises, like when you’re driving the same path you take everyday, and all the sudden a leopard appears right outside your window!  Those experiences are so unusual, they just take your breath away.

These events don’t actually alter our routine any, but they definitely make it so much more interesting.  Other occurrences can radically change our schedule though.  Usually it’s cars that make us completely drop everything and deal with them, rather than following our usual schedule. 

There are things that we do frequently enough for the cars that should be simple, but because we’re in Kenya, the chores run on their own time or some strange twist occurs.  For instance, you can go get petrol for the cars and be stopped by tourists to take awkward photos shaking hands.  Or, you can go to pick up car parts from the airstrip one day, but they weren’t put on the plane, the next day the plane forgot to unload them, and finally they get sent to the wrong airstrip, but your great Kenyan friends drive out to get them for you…Even car parts have adventures flying around the Mara.  If you have to go into down after a tire puncture on obs, you may have to explain to everyone why there is a fake hyena in the back of the car before they will fix the puncture.

People exclaiming about us having a fake hyena in the back of the car while changing our tire in Talek town.

Cars are so important to us; they’re necessary for us to go out on obs and follow our plan.  They’re so crucial that one of the rules in the Research Assistant Manual is always drive with the windows down so that you can immediately be aware if something breaks.  When (not if) something breaks, we have to drop everything and get the car fixed.  This leads to us spending whole days with the mechanics and not doing our routine work.  There are the rare, awful for us animal-obsessed researchers, occasions when we can’t go out on obs at all because there is something wrong with all of the cars.  Other times, everything is working until you drive into an unseen mud hole you can’t get out of after all the tour cars that can help pull you out have left the park…then your plans change from going home for dinner and bed to spending the night in the car in the middle of the Mara until a balloon tractor can pull you out in the morning.

Tractor to the rescue! You really can't see what we got stuck in...

To me though, the worst change in the routine happens when you find out a hyena is dead.  Sometimes you find it on obs, sometimes you get a call from someone and get a pit in your stomach because you don’t want to know who was found dead; we get to know all of our hyenas really well.  When there is a dead hyena, we have to drop everything, ID it if it is one from one of our study clans, and then perform a necropsy and collect the skull.  All of this is time consuming to say the least, but it’s also emotionally draining but interesting to see something’s insides.

Basically, there is always something that can pop up in our daily routine that is out of the ordinary.  I find myself frequently saying, “Always an adventure,” when I’m out here.  There is so much that can change or happen at any given time whether it’s a hunt, a rare animal, an engine explosion, an unexpected hole, a surprise storm, a shower gone awry, or any other thing you can (or can’t) imagine.  Everyone who has been out here has their own crazy stories.  We come to expect nothing to go as planned; so maybe that is our routine?  Our “routine” always is an adventure.

Hyenas in a Haystack

By Emily Thorne, IRES 2013

Emily T., Emily B., and Moira with Digs.

I always figured one day I would come face to face with some large and scary carnivore, but had you asked me a few months ago I never would have thought it would be a wild adult female hyena. Moreover, I couldn’t begin to imagine that I would be in the back of a moving Land Cruiser straddling this hyena, keeping her safe as she started to wake up, while trying not to let myself get thrown around with every bump and dip in the road that threatened to send me flying. If you asked me today I would tell you I couldn’t wait to do it again.

Hyena research has its exciting and unbelievable moments, no doubt, but it also requires a lot of time and an incredible amount of patience. Some of the hyenas being studied here in the Mara have been fitted with GPS and VHF collars that provide the researchers with valuable data about where the hyenas are located, allow the hyenas to be tracked using radio telemetry equipment, and even record the temperature. Once the hyenas are wearing their new high-tech accessories they can usually be found much easier and may lead us to a few collarless hyenas they happen to be hanging around with. The difficulty lies in finding the hyena and putting the collar on in the first place.

Since we arrived in Serena, Dave has been on a mission to find and collar one particular hyena in the Serena North clan: Sauer, the lowest ranking of the high ranking females. A female spotted hyena’s rank in the social hierarchy is inherited from her mother. For this project the hierarchy was divided into equal thirds (high, medium, and low) and a few high and low ranking females from three clans were selected to receive a GPS collar. We spent several mornings driving around the entire North territory in search of a needle in a haystack. Sauer’s cubs were no longer den-dependent so she could be anywhere.  One morning we managed to stumble upon her and her two cubs. This seemed promising so we followed her. And followed her. And followed her some more. She seemed quite content to wander around in what seemed like every patch of tall grass in the Mara, almost strategically avoiding any areas that would allow for a safe and easy shot with the dart gun. Finally she settled on a nice cozy spot. Unfortunately for us that spot happened to be in a lugga, which meant tall grass, water, mud and absolutely no chance for us that day. The next time we found her she was on the move again. We followed her for over an hour through excellent areas with short grass and no thickets or luggas but she just wouldn’t stop moving. She wound up leading us back to the den, which happened to be hyena party central that morning. Our luck seemed to be turning around when she wandered away from the den to a patch of short grass and sacked out. Just as we were finally about to get a good shot along comes another female. Apparently Sauer wasn’t in the mood for company because she stood up and started to wander off again. We followed her but she gave us the slip once more. We watched her walk into a rock field, up the side of a hill and out of site into a thicket. Twice we almost had her and twice she managed to get the best of us.

It turns out however, that it was a good thing she did. To our surprise, our plans suddenly changed when we witnessed an interaction between Sauer and another female named Digs. It turned out that Digs, who had been lower ranking than Sauer, had jumped a step up on the social ladder, something that isn’t seen too frequently in a stable hyena hierarchy. She had surpassed Sauer (who was now a middle ranker) and was now the new lowest ranking of the high ranking females. This meant that Sauer was out and Digs was our new target.

Dave, Wes and I had spent several mornings driving around South in search of Marten, another female Dave wanted to put a collar on, when one morning we received a call from Lily, Moira and Julie who were driving around in North. They had spotted Digs so we headed on over.

At first we thought Digs was going to give us the run around like Sauer had. After over an hour of slowly following her around the North territory past luggas and thickets, through tall grass and around lots of puddles she finally made it to the perfect spot. We were driving slowly next to her, as close as possible trying not to spook her. In one fraction of a second she stopped right next to us, turned her head away with her back end in just the right position and Dave took a perfect shot. It only took a few minutes for her to go down and then I got to see a truly wild (but chemically immobilized) hyena up close and personal. My first thought was that she was huge, but at about 50 kilograms she was actually on the small side for a female hyena. Being that close to a wild large carnivore was surreal. Her feet looked like my dog’s feet only twice the size. Her fur was surprisingly coarse to the touch.  Her sharp carnivore teeth and huge jaw muscles left no doubt that she could do a number on a wildebeest or buffalo. We got to work immediately. We collected blood and other bodily substances (we can all now say we have “milked a hyena”, literally) and measured her head, teeth, limbs, and numerous other body parts. We measured her neck and fitted her new collar so that it was loose enough to be comfortable but tight enough that it wouldn’t fall off. After checking to make sure the collar was working properly we weighed her.

Just as we were finishing up she started to come to. Perfect timing. We carried her to the car on a stretcher and Lily, Moira and I climbed in the back with her. Since it was a rather bumpy ride and the immobilization drugs were starting to wear off (and I happened to be sitting closest to her) I made sure she didn’t get tossed around. And let me tell you, riding in the back of the car with one knee in a puddle of hyena drool, the other leg over Digs’ body (which smelled ever so slightly of dead elephant) in order to brace myself and not squish her, while leaning over to keep her eyes covered and head down was probably one of the most bizarre and coolest things I have ever done. We left Digs under some nice trees in a shady thicket, made sure she was nice and cool so she wouldn’t overheat and surrounded her with big branches to keep her safe. When we checked on her later that day she had fully recovered and was already out and about taking care of hyena business.

Digs is doing very well with her fancy new collar. We have tracked her around the territory multiple times since then and Dave has been collecting lots of GPS points for her. Her data, along with the other collared hyenas’ data, will enable researchers to answer important research questions that have never been able to be answered on such an interesting and dynamic species as the spotted hyena. I hope I get to lend a hand in more of these incredible experiences during the rest of my stay here the Mara.

Pains, strains and automobiles: Welcome to field research in the Mara.

By Emily Thorne, IRES 2013

If you have ever had to pull to the side of the freeway at night, get down on your hands and knees, jack up your car and change a tire while trying to avoid being obliterated by passing semi-trucks, then you might be able to relate to my first day in the Mara. Only, instead of a freeway picture a dusty dirt road with grass as tall as your shoulders on either side. Instead of a fully functioning jack picture a broken jack and a few boulders. And instead of passing semi-trucks picture packed-to-the-brim tourist vehicles and add a less than happy herd of elephants separated from you by nothing more than a small patch of trees. Furthermore, imagine that this is not your first flat tire of the day. 

It isn’t that I didn’t believe them when they told me we would experience a lot of car troubles here, it’s more that I had no idea how great the definition of “a lot” really was. Properly running vehicles are essential to hyena research as well as life in the Mara. They are our lifelines to the world outside of camp, our only source of transportation to and from the field, and they keep us from getting killed on a daily basis. Without the protection of our vehicles we would be easy targets for lions, hyenas, elephants and various other creatures every time we leave camp. Fieldwork here without a reliable vehicle is impossible. This means our multitude of car troubles is not only inconvenient and frustrating (not to mention expensive) but also detrimental to our work. Since I have been in Kenya our poor cars (and poor crew!) have experienced three flat tires, broken brake lines, a broken brake booster, a cracked gearbox and an engine explosion. I have only been here for ten days.

We have three vehicles here at the Serena camp. It is a good thing we do too since only one or two of them ever seem to be drivable at any given time.  Field work in the Mara is just as demanding on the vehicles as it is on the researchers, or maybe even more so. All the roads are dirt roads and even the best of them require some skill to navigate. Our research requires us to utilize cut tracks through the plains and occasionally venture off-road. The tall grass we drive through provides great cover for animals such as hyenas, gazelles and jackals. Unfortunately, however, it also provides great cover for car-busting rocks, mud holes and termite mounds.

I have also noticed that Mother Nature takes no pity on car problems. A few days ago, just after leaving camp for the Serena South clan, Dave, Wes and I smelled something burning. Then we noticed smoke coming from one of the front wheels of the Land Cruiser. The brake had frozen up on us and we weren’t going anywhere. A storm was rolling in and we were several kilometers from camp. After trying to call the other researchers for help and finding that their cell phones were out of service, we waited for a tour vehicle to drive by. Finally, one found us and Wes hitched a ride back to camp to pick up our third car (which was thankfully working at the time) and a couple of mechanics from the nearby lodge. Dave and I waited with the car for what felt like an eternity. Actually, it was less than an hour, but there isn’t much to do when you are stuck out in the bush.

On the bright side, due to the storm rolling in and a fire burning somewhere to the south in Tanzania, we were able to watch the most incredible sunset I have ever seen. My hopes were high that the weather would hold out until the mechanics arrived and fixed the car, but of course that is not how it would play out.

It was pitch black out by the time Wes and the mechanics found us, and just as they pulled up the storm unleashed its fury. Lightning flashed, giving us momentary glimpses of the grassland around us but not of what dangers could be lurking nearby. Thunder rolled so loud that I could feel it in my chest. Rain poured down as if buckets of water were being thrown on us. Within minutes the road was soaking wet, the culverts on either side starting to flood. The mud was so slippery that the Hi-Lift jack the mechanics were using to lift the car kept sliding, causing it to spin. It all seemed simultaneously frightening and comical. As there was nothing I could do to help I sat in the other car with Wes and watched as Dave and the two mechanics did whatever they could to figure out how to fix the wheel.

The whole thing reminded me of a scene from the movie Jurassic Park. All we needed was for a T-Rex to pop up out of the bushes, although an angry buffalo or elephant would have been equally terrifying.  Eventually, the mechanics determined that the best course of action would be to remove the brakes entirely from that wheel, drive back to camp, and fix it later. I think Dave noticed I was a bit skeptical about the removing-of-the-brakes idea because he told me not to worry, that the car still had three left. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cringe.

It wasn’t until after we made it safely back to camp and I excitedly regaled our adventure to the others who responded with an “oh no, not again” instead of my expected “wow, that’s incredible!” that I realized events like this are all too common here in the Mara. As exciting as this evening was, I am hoping that future car troubles will be kept to a minimum so that my short stay here in Serena will consist of exciting research experiences, incredible animal adventures, and lots of fun stories to tell. Stories that don’t involve flat tires and busted brakes that is.