Full camp!

Getting behind on journaling! Evening of my last entry we had Julie and Dave show up with their IRIS students Mora and Emily respectively. Nice to have other people in camp. Also been fun because I’ve been going out with either Julie or Dave so I feel like I’m actually earning my keep here and doing some real RA work without Wes! Julie, Mora, and Emily are all really nice and seem pretty cool so I think it’ll be a good month. 

Next month we will have Julia back with her IRIS student and also Emily, a grad student from U of Penn who is here to get some field experience. She is doing things with dog cognition that seem pretty exciting. Especially since Kay emailed and me and suggested that I focus on cognition which I hadn’t really even considered as an option since that was always Zoe’s thing and prenatal/temperament seemed to fit in with Kay’s lab better. But I’m stoked to be doing similar things to Zoe and with hyenas no less!! So reading up as much as possible on cognition and on the NSF application process, the deadline is in november which is going to come up quick I know. I want to write first drafts by September at least. Zoe is jealous but she is already ahead of me in cognition so even though I am going to be very familiar with my subjects (where as zoe is unfamiliar with bears) I have less practical experience doing cognition research. Also cognition research you get to do a certain amount of operant condition which is essentially training so yay!!! Kay thinks it will be possible to modify a lot of things that they are doing with dog cognition with hyenas. By they I think predominantly Brian O’Hare’s dog cognition lab (which Zoe actually applied to once I think).

Got some pouring rain last night and everyone got soaked running from the cars to the tent. Wes did a drop off with Talek this morning so we have settlers now!! Got in a good game this morning, with six of us we paired up experienced players to inexperienced and Julie and I won. She had played before so maybe we had a bit of an advantage. Julie is doing some neat work using a foam hyena (archery target) named Target of course and measuring the responses of hyenas to him.

Saw four lions yesterday, two of them were relaxing in the morning and when we went back in the evening an adult female had joined them along with another sub. This adult lioness was absolutely beautiful, old and scarred but very regal. There was a big male sub and two smaller subs, one female and one unknown. We had them all to ourselves for at least twenty minutes before they all got up and started play romping. When they crossed the road many other tourist vehicles showed up and we’d gotten our ID shots so we moved on after that.

Dave is trying to dart Sauer in north territory and Marten in south territory. Sauer because we have one more collar for north (and Zoey is likely dead) and Marten because her collar has stopped working. We saw Sauer last night before we saw the lions and this morning Dave, Julie, and Emily found her again and called Mora and I who rushed out of south to north territory only to find that she had disappeared into a lugga with tall grass where Dave was unable to dart. So we sat around for an hour hoping she would move with no luck. Super excited to see a darting so I hope Dave is successful with at least one of the two females while he’s here.