Lots of cubs and big 5

Taking the maruti to talek today and then Nairobi tomorrow to pick up the new RA! Slept in this morning since I have been sleeping badly due to pee/hippos/etc. Lots to do to get ready for Nairobi trip, including clean my tent since someone might stay in it while I’m gone.

We saw the entire BIG 5 over the course of 24 hours and three hyena territories which was super exciting! Started with some lions in happy zebra territory the other morning, two big males, one walking, one sleeping about a km apart from each other. We also found HZ’s other den that morning!

More on that after. That evening in south we saw a black rhino which is always a treat! I’m at the point now where I’m starting to wonder- will I see another leopard or rhino before I leave? With most of Feb, March, and April left hopefully I will. South den scene is still booming and a real treat, great visibility, we know all the cubs, considering 6 months ago there wasn’t a den this one is amazing.

The next morning we joke about seeing a leopard since we didn’t get one last night (and thus have big5 in a single day). We see a serval and I decide that we can pretend the serval is a leopard. Spotted cat- all the same thing. Only finding hyenas in group of two and three so didn’t get a target trial in, but still been seeing lots of hyenas so still good obs!! Then as we’re driving along the river road back towards camp I spot a leopard up in a tree! Just the silhouette of a cat-shape and the long graceful tail dropping down. I shouted stop stop! We just got our big 5!! (In 24 hours if not in a single day). Beautiful sighting, my camera was on night settings though so my photos are a little fucked up. It chilled out in the tree for about 5 minutes then climbed down and walked off into the thicket. Leopards are simply magical creatures… blows my mind every time I see them, they take your breath away.

Great news- Emily got into vet school!!! Super super happy for her (and that I’ll have a roomie for next year!). So now we can start looking for apartments in earnest. Julie says most grad students live in an area about ten minutes drive away, but Emily and I think that for at least our first year we want to be within walking distance of campus, so less than two miles. After a year if we want to move closer to the grad student community we can. MSU is so big that it even has a grad student dorm so there will still be other grads around.I received a first year fellowship as well as an early start fellowship so I’ll probably move up sometime in june and possibly take a class during the second summer semester. Super excited to get an early start and do work for Kay with the database.

So we also found HZ’s other den with all our missing hyenas. Windsor has been very lame, just a sacked out hyena and little nursing cubs that you can barely see because of grass. We haven’t been sure if Boom and Arba’s cubs were alive because we hadn’t seen them in so long! However it turns out they just moved their den about 300m further south than their old den, closer to the dip of the valley and a lugga. Unfortunately the grass is out of control there and we need to figure out how to get around a lugga to get a better view of them. 

Named it Tigris Den, after deciding that their old den: Amazon was to be the start of a river themed den area. Anyway- we saw BOOM nursing two cubs which means Rum Gone and Plank are still alive, and we saw Arba nursing which means cute little Tarantula is alive!! We haven’t even aged Tula yet because we got such a brief glimpse of him. So far this theme of Pike’s cubs having cubs when they’re two and all the cubs living is unbroken! Hawk is also there which means she moved Sport and Play to this den from Windsor. We also saw Snapper show up and though we have no idea what snapper’s cub looks like we’re very excited to name it Dawa. Basically this den more than doubles the number of HZ cubs. The cubs at this den were all very big with spots running and play romping and I don’t know a single one of them! Very strange to see cubs with spots and not know who it belongs to. One of them was big and orange and fluffy so I declared it Clay Junior or CJ for short.

Also got my first real slender mongoose sighting. Before this it’s just been glimpses of tail or body that people assured me by process of elimination must be a slender mongoose. This one was running around on the track popping in and out of tall grass so we actually got to see its entire body sniffing around, and it didn’t run away with our presence. It stayed and scampered about for a minute or two before disappearing. Super cool. The tip of their tail has a black tuft of hair like a lion- very distinctive and cute.

And Lady is alive and only slightly gimpy, so now I really have no idea who the dead sub is. However, there are still many subadults we have not yet seen including Koala, Spec, Ana, BilJ, Crim, Spud, Slim, Dalt (though I think it was bigger than slim or dalt), Tero (hopefully not!!!) and Gobe.