I don’t care what day of
the week it is, I hate that my watch tells me, and I’m going to stop noting it
on these journal entries. I love the feeling of days blurring into one another,
living somewhere where they day of the week is meaningless, almost as
meaningless as the number.
Just spent all morning
editing transcriptions and writing up this morning! Man is Wes anal about tiny
little things like spaces and caps, but understandably and he admits it.
Consistency makes it easy when we combine all the transcriptions into one
massive document, and for those researchers back in the states when the extract
the information.
Finally got to see some
hyenas in South Territory yesterday! We picked up Clovis, the aging queen of
South clan, on the radio and tracked her until we found her sacked out on a
mound, all sleepy and
regal, very close to where we’d been doing so many circles. You can tell this
is an old hyena, she is going gray around the face, but she looked like she had
food in her belly. Wes says she is dying because she has reduced the area she
moves around in to this area of about 300m2. The clan is somewhat in transition
as Clovis has essentially retired her role as dominant female. However, her
daughters are not to inherit the title as Clovis ‘hates’ her daughters, or at least one or two them. Neither
will the second highest ranking female inherit as Clovis hates her too. (Where
Happy Zebra is filled with love, South seems to be filled with a certain amount
of inter-clan disagreements.) Clovis actually killed Slink’s cubs once and fed
them to her own. Java is the third highest female and Clovis has been backing up
Java in aggressions against other females and she seems poised to inherit the
crown. We pick up Java next on the radio and find her some distance away in the
same general area as Clovis also sacked out sleepy. Later on we see a few more hyenas including a subadult female named
Jameson! She and Jack Daniels are the sole survivors of the whiskey lineage and
I think Jameson might have to be a new favorite of mine, she has an Erlenmeyer
flask on her side. Jameson is my absolute favorite whiskey.
Also: very exciting:
adult hyena in camp last night! And not just down near the driveway or in the
woods, this one walked RIGHT PAST THE LAB/DINING TENT where Julia and I were
sitting! Less than 10m away and no car to protect us! Not that the hyenas would
ever hunt humans, but still. Again reminded that this camp is NOT fenced in and
that there is NOTHING separating us from the hippos and leopards and lions and
other animals that are potentially lethal. I say hippos first because I can
hear them EVERY night grunting and groaning and whistling and all the weird
rumbly noises that hippos make. Wes’s first instinct was to chase it away,
which it had already moved off, and then he said that he always immediately
regrets chasing them off because he wishes he could have IDed them. However the
territorial ‘get out of my camp!’ instinct I think is rightfully dominant.
Especially with how desensitized the cubs at north den are right now (we can
bang and shout all we want on the car and it will not stop them from chewing on
it!) when they graduate we might be in trouble. They are used to our voices and
our smell and we are smack dab in the middle of their territory only a five
minute lope from their den.
As we drive back into
North territory we pick up Waffles who is sacked out dozing in the warm morning
sunlight along with her subadult son Torani. Julia does a focal survey (mother/cub pairs
interactions are part of her thesis) on the two of them for a nice peaceful thirty
minutes. Then we disturb the peace and quiet by doing a startle response trial.
Julia mostly does these at the den and observes who startles (when she fires a cap gun), how far, if they
go all the way into the den, and if they do how long until they emerge again.
However she also does them on mother/graduated cub pairs for comparison. Both
hyenas startled however Torani ran off first to be followed by his mother, they
both sacked out in taller grass about 100m away and promptly went back to sleep-
sorry guys!
Later there were two
pairs of male giraffes fighting. What a neat thing to watch. They stand parallel
to each other where the rear ends somewhat pushed against each other and legs
splayed for stability while they take turns whacking each other with the head,
neck, and horns. What power in those necks. They would nearly knock each other
over with those blows.
And sadly, we picked up
Sherman on the radio in the exact same spot that we did two days ago. Not a
good sign. We track it a little better than we did before and narrow her
location down to a small dense cluster of grass in which we cannot see
anything. However that she does not at least lift her head and show us some
ears is a very bad sign. Hyenas may enjoy a certain area and you might pick
them up on the radio in the same area but not the exact same spot like this
unless they have cubs at a natal den. Which Sherman, who has a cub Lady (male)
at the communal den, does not. Additionally, no matter how desensitized they
are to a car, they are usually not completely uncurious about vehicles circling
their resting areas. The grass was very dense, to the extent that if we tried
to narrow it down anymore we could have run her over and not known until we
bumped. Additionally there was a good ditch/culvert bordering the road which
the dense thicket grass was next to. If her GPS points show that she has not
moved from that spot for another few days we will likely have to get out on
foot and look for her body so that we can do an autopsy and collect her skull
for measurements. Which would be really cool but also really really sad
because it means we will probably have to watch Lady starve to death. Lady’s older
sister has cubs, Billy Jean and Smooth Criminal, at the den and hyenas have
been known to adopt and nurse related cubs, but this has never been observed in
North Clan, or any of the clans this side of the Maasai Mara.
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