Mid-october back in the Mara...

Super glad to be back in the Mara. Had a crazy day today though- Emily got diagnosed with Malaria. She was feeling off on the day I got back to the mara (5 days ago) with a fever and we both stayed in that evening since I didn’t arrive until after 5 and had a lot of unpacking to do. She slept in the next morning and I went out alone my first morning back- which wasn’t bad since I got to see Biscuit being super adorable and actually coming out of the den. South finally has a cub! Though Bron technically is still under a year old, still in the super fluffy phase. Emily was dosing up with Tylenol which was making her feel well enough to work these past few days but this morning she had a bad head ache and by the afternoon Tylenol AND ibuprofen were not cutting the icky fever feeling. There was only an expired test kit in the lab tent so we ended up going up to the lodge. I actually bought a 12 pack of malarone two weeks ago in Nairobi which is the standard treatment dosage for malaria, (4 pills a day where as when it is used for prophylaxis it is 1x per day). We went up the lodge and visited the clinic and the doctor there gave her a malaria test which came out positive! 

Totally crazy, Dr. Holekamp says she is only the second RA to ever get malaria while on a prophylaxis, the other was a very large guy such that the standard prophylaxis dosage with inadequate. Talking to the doctor was very interesting, he didn’t know the difference between Tylenl and Ibuprofen which was a little disturbing but he seemed to know his shit when it came to Malaria. At first he was a little skeptical since, though Emily has been feeling awful for several days, she is still walking and talking but he admitted that yes, taking mefloquine could be suppressing her symptoms somewhat. After talking to her he said he would give her drugs for the treatment of malaria and said that yes- she does have it, even after talking as if he was skeptical. So we asked for the malaria test even though he said the mefloquine might make it come out negative anyway. 

While we were waiting we talked about hyenas, of course, and how they are great hunters and why we are studying them. He started off with saying that they are awful  animals because they kill goats. Well they also kill cattle too. We told him the project does help pay for the cost of predator proof bomas to those who have lost animals. He still seemed to think they were awful animals anyway haha. We also talked about rabies and he said that hyenas do not get rabies, but then later amended that dogs have rabies and other animals only get rabies if a dog bites them. Well.. kind of. It was very interesting the words he chose to use, lots of: take this and you will feel  better. This will make you better (without explanation of what this was). And very confident, I know malaria very well, I can tell it apart from other illness with the same symptoms. And very importantly he stressed over and over that Emily must take the follow up doses even if she starts to feel better. He also gave her a NSAID  (not ibuprofen)  with the first dosage of malaria treatment. Maybe that is standard so that the ill person will immediately start to feel better and thus trust the medicine? Interesting the way a doctor must act in Kenya with Kenya patients/culture/beliefs. Emily and I had lots of questions about the types of medicine which I don’t think he normally deals with.

He also gave her two little cups of yogurt, telling her that yogurt will get her appetite going and that it goes well with porridge. Which actually makes sense since yogurt is a probiotic. When I got back from obs Emily said she WAS feeling better and that (despite feeling nauseous) the yogurt did get her appetite going again and she had had some oatmeal. She ate a little of dinner too so hopefully this drug will kick it and she’ll be better in two days.

Had relatively quiet obs this evening while driving around. Went to a spot where we’ve been seeing a lot of Bart’s points and though I didn’t find Bart I did find her cub Bron! Apparently this is the meadow where Bron has been living the past week hence the clustering of Bart’s points. I was curious about Bart’s gps points because a natal den will show maybe ten points all in one spot, but what we were seeing with Bart was fifteen points but semi scattered. Makes sense now! Bron is the youngest cub in South (not counting Biscuit) and he would probably still be using a den if there were other cubs around. He was very small and muddy looking and I almost missed him, quite adorable.

I got to the den close to 7 and there were a million hyenas. And by a million I mean 6- at first. Bellagio was there of course, she’s the mother of our new south cub Biscuit (who is a little over 2 months old now and still mostly all black except for his head). All the golden girls were there, the four very old south females that we have never observed to have any cubs, Kneesocks (who has no spots above her legs, fading spots are a sign of age), Brophy (Wes’s girlfriend), Grimace (a hyena whose lip curls up in a spot like a sneer), and Big Bad Wolf (or just BB dubs for short, who is so old with a thick saggy neck and long shaggy fur and essentially no spots at all. They seem to get shaggy when they get really old). 

Komo, South’s alpha’s daughter, was firmly planted in the den hole the entire session and did not leave once even with Biscuit going in and out. Made me wonder if Biscuit might not be hers but if he was she wasn’t coming out of the den with him which makes me think she has her own cub in there that is still too young to come out, judging by how deeply she was in the den hole. Cruz and Toledo were both hanging out around the periphery all evening, two of South’s immigrant males. Jean-Luc Picard (or just JLP) was hanging out and being a little obnoxious, she is listed as a male in the book, but I’m starting to think this hyena is female. Males treat her like a female and at the den she was groaning constantly, sticking her head into the hole, and aggressively chasing off the immigrant males. Komo finally got fed up with all the groaning (groaning means hey don’t be afraid I’m being friendly I want to see a cub) because it really looked like JLP was just being annoying walking around back and forth and eventually lunged at JLP a few times to get her point across. Star, just over a year, was also chilling out but being non-obtrusive. Two collared females showed up, Java and Marten. Java is the alpha and Marten is the JLP’s mother. She looked like she had big nipples so maybe she has a cub too!! Sadly her sub-cub Korben is missing. Her cubs are all named after space captains if you were wondering. Her collar is no longer working so we are hoping to dart Marten soon and fix it.

The den scene was so active with all these females that I forgot to turn the car back on every ten to fifteen minutes so that the headlamps wouldn’t drain the battery and by 7:30 when I did remember it wouldn’t start. Tried not to freak out and turned everything off and unplugged all the gps, maglight, and telemetry chargers and decided to wait half an hour. We have been having a lot of issues with batteries I this car so I was worried that this was the start of more battery issues but luckily at 8 the car turned back on again no problem. Useful trick I learned from a AAA agent who arrived to start Brighty thirty minutes after I hadn’t been able to start him and turned right on (this was a headlights drain too). 

These problems started in July when the cruiser failed to start one morning after we’d been driving for about ten minutes. Got a jump then kept going and the cruiser died again- this time at a den that took some time to obtain a rescue from. Our mechanic Laragin came and cleaned the batteries and replaced some of the connectors and also recharged the batteries. That fixed it for about a month then it died again, this time on a hill such that Emily and I were able to push it backwards down the hill a bit and get it going again. This time Laragin came and rewired the batteries so that both were going to the alternator rather than having one battery drawing from the other battery. All good for another month or so then it died again in September. Once again we have Laragin come take a look and this time we order new wire and replace some of the wires altogether. 

Cruiser works until its in Talek for a week while RAs are in Nairobi doing errands (including me). Dies after two days in Talek, well there wasn’t any more wiring things to fix so we finally decided to replace the batteries. Laragin kept telling us the batteries were bad, one very bad and one starting to go bad. Both batteries were less than a year old so we wanted to try everything else first. We could buy just one new one to replace the definitely bad one but Laragin advised, and I agreed, that if you replace one battery you should replace both so that a bad battery doesn’t damage a new good battery by being hooked up together. In the end we decided to buy just one new battery and have the cruiser run on one to test and make sure that a brand new battery solved it for good. If this brand new battery dies then we’ll know there is something more to all these electrical problems!!

So now that I had the headlamps off I had to use the maglight to do all obs. Let me tell you, using a maglight, binos, and a DVR can be very difficult when you don’t have three hands. Needless to say I wasn’t able to catch all the behaviors going on. Behind me to the south west there are some very black clouds starting to cover the sky. It is almost a full moon so the nights have been pretty bright and clouds are easily visible in the sky. It looked pretty isolated, just a small shower coming down from one patch but it kept drawing closer and growing in size. Soon lightning was lighting up my surroundings and I was starting to wonder if I shouldn’t just call Laragin to jump the car before this storm hit. 

Luckily the car did start at 8 and the storm wasn’t here yet. It was starting to look big and by the time I pulled away from the den it was starting to sprinkle. During dinner the sky broke open and absolutely downpoured. Not sure how many millimeters we’ve gotten but sounds like its stopped now so maybe I’ll be able to go out! Emily is strictly off obs duty until she feels better. She kept taking Tylenol so that she’d feel well enough to come out which in hindsight was probably not a good thing, especially since Tylenol just covers up the sickness.

Being out alone in the dark in the middle of the mara can be a little creepy. Especially when you’re not sure if your car will start or not I sometimes feel  rather nervous. The hyenas are a comfort though because their behavior, calm and playful doing normal things around the den also makes me feel calm. The hyenas are secure out here so there isn’t anything to worry about. But when I pull away from the den then I’m truly all alone rumbling along rocky dirt roads in this old cruiser (1995). The storm was a bit of an omnious presence to my right as I drove north back towards the lodge. The lodge was very easily visible though, lit up at the top of a hill emitting a soft orange glow. Our camp is just down the road from the lodge and right next to the public campsite so the lodge is a good landmark for getting home!

Did get to see a white-tailed mongoose run across the road- since they are small carnivores we record their location and numbers. We usually only see them at night but their bright white tails make them very easy to identify. While coming up the driveway into camp I saw a giraffe head poking out of the thicket at the edge of the forest that our camp is inside, it proceeded to walk up the driveway and disaper into the woods next to camp. Cool to see a twiga so close but apparently they are the worst animal to have in camp because they walk right through the tent strings and pull everything down.

Suppose I should update everyone about the rest of the Nairobi trip as well! Before Dave left we went and visited Steph, a former RA and hyena lab student who married a tour guide and moved to Kenya and currently lives in Nairobi. Her house has cool hyena artwork all over it, she has a bronze cast of a hyena skull that apparently she got made for free because she provided the skull for the original cast. Super jealous. There was also a huge charcoal hyena drawing which made me itch for big canvases. At the book/art supply store I nearly bought a large 2 x 3 ft.sketch pad and some charcoal but with some self-control put them back. I already have plenty of pencils and paper and paint and I don’t know how I would travel with more art supplies than what I have. I’ve also started shopping for Halloween costume supplies, we’re going to have a Halloween party hopefully so I bought an orange t-shirt and some spray paint so that I can predictably be a tiger.

After Dave left Phoebe and I visited the elephant orphanage. Only about $5 to go visit it from 11 to 12 when they bring out all the baby elephants for their morning bottle feed. First they brought out the three youngest babies, 4 and 5 weeks old. These guys were so tiny only about two feet tall and they walked very carefully and shyly with their foreheads touching the back of their keeper’s knees. They went straight for the sandy spot within the roped off area and awkwardly tried to roll and play in it. Their keepers used a shovel to pour dirt on their heads and between their ears which they seemed to love. Totally adorable and heartbreaking. The head? keeper told the story and name of each elephant. After the little guys left they brought in the older crew all under a year and finally the bigger kids between 2 and 3 years old. Total of 33 orphan elephants. No orphan rhinos,which I was sad to not get to see but happy to hear.

Also got a hip strap added to my backpack by the canvas people who repair our tents. They do a lot of neat canvas work and Dave had them back canvas covers for his field books. We left super early from Nairobi and made it back to Talek by 1, record time! As much as I love staying in Talek and seeing the talek hyenas I was dying to get back to Serena so we put the new battery into KAL (the serena cruiser) which took some fiddling trying to figure out which wires to connect and I made it to Serena around 5pm.

Ironically it’s south now that has the really good den scene. For my entire time here both North and Happy Zebra have had very active den scenes with many animals and cubs but now we don’t know where either of those clans is denning and South is extremely social, last night was the most adult females I’ve seen all together in South. When I first got out here all of North and HZ cubs were of den age but by around June/July they were starting to graduate the den and now both clans have only one cub that is den age. In north this is George and I haven’t seen him since before I went to Nairobi. With only one small cub it seems that LogC has been moving him around a lot, I don’t think the den scene will stay in one spot until there are more cubs born. The same phenomenon is happening in HZ. Only Higgs is of den age and though there are certain areas in HZ where everyone has been hanging out until yesterday it had been forever since we’d seen Higgs.

Emily told me HZ has been hanging out in the western edge of their territory near a large flat rock called pride rock. The first time we went out we also saw a few of them even further west in a culvert named Rumpy culvert. Hyenas freakin’ love culverts. HZ territory is huge and we’re not sure how huge because none of the animals have collars, but when I first got here I felt like they used an area north of the road and an area between two hills south of the road. Then when they started moving dens in July they moved south and east into an area with tracks that even Wes had never taken. Now they’re hanging out all the way to third watering hole when previously I’d never even gone past 2^nd watering hole- named Egyptian goose watering hole. We’ll see where they move next but for now it seems like Rumpy Culvert has become the den and not just a hang out spot because Ojy and Higs were there too! It seems to me like the entire clan liked that area and finally ojy decided that she would bring higs there too. 

Unfortunately it is a culvert that goes underneath the high road, the busiest piece of road in the entire mara. There are often balloon crews speeding along that road since they don’t have any tourists in their cars and we already have one hyena dead. Malo was a HZ subadult and he’d just transitioned from fluffy sub to bigger small adult looking sub. I’d just taken new ID shots of both his sides two days before he was found dead. Emily was alone in serena camp since I was in Nairobi and had to go and get Malo and do his necropsy. Luckily the water researchers were in camp and their assistant Gammi and they helped with cuttin off the head and getting tissue samples. Broken jaw and a lot of internal bleeding means it was definitely a car. His two younger sisters Ando and Dara are both semi-graduated cubs playing in Rumpy Culvert now. Higgs was looking huge though, he’s lost all his black now and has some really cool spots, Emily was super amazed since she hadn’t seen him since mid-september! It’s a good spot for obs and easy to get to but for once Emily and I are both hoping they’ll move on somewhere else soon!

As for north they’ve been hanging out near the river but that’s the only consistency in their movements, usually I have good instincts about where the den is based on the adult female movements but with George I’m clueless. I haven’ t seen much of LogC which makes me not worry about  him, I’m sure she’s hanging out near the den he’s in. If I was seeing a lot of LogC with no George I’d start to worry about the little guy. It looks like a lot of HZ and North animals are pregnant though and I’ve hardly seen Tinsel at all so I’m sure she’s on a natal den so hopefully by December we’ll have a good communal den scene again in all three territories.

With the intermittent rain we’ve been getting the bugs are back in force now- including mosquitos. When I first got out here in May I was putting on bug spray almost every day but during that dry dusty summer/winter I completely stopped using it. Now I have a bottle sitting in the lab tent for frequent use because the mosquitos are biting hard. Makes me worried about getting malaria too, but Emily could have gotten in while she was in Nairobi. Prophylaxis doesn’t actually kill or prevent the bacteria it just suppresses them such that they don’t cause illness. The only prophylaxis that kills malaria is Malarone which treats it at the source in one of the organs, spleen maybe? Otherwise there’s no way to prevent getting malaria in your bloodstream aside from wearing a shit ton of bug spray. Kind of crazy. That’s why you have to keep taking the drug long after you leave a malarial zone to make sure that you fully rid your body of it from your bloodstream before you stop taking the drug.

Didn’t finish this post last night- its morning now and when I checked the rain guage we got 7.5mm last night which is just barely too much to go out with. Its not that our driveway or the roads will be impassable, I could probably drive to FML den or Rumpy Culvert and see some hyenas. But driving on the tracks when they’re wet can really destroy them, especially the tracks that pass through low areas, gunning through mucky spots in 4 wheel  can dig ruts into a track that will stick around even as they dry, forcing future cars to go around the areas and widen the track. Going off road when its wet almost guarantees destroying the grass and leaving new tracks that will stick around for months. In our work every time we see a hyena we almost always have to go off road to ID them and get location information. This means its usually just not worth it to risk incomplete data and track destruction.

So that’s about in for life in the field! Lots to do and lots to worry about. And now it’s time for me to keep working on my NSF grant! (And keep working on the quarterly note compilation).