Stuff stuff...

Emily and Julie are back in camp! Slept great the night before last so doing the 4 hour drive to Keekorok and back was not too bad. Though I got coated in dust; Emily said I was looking very tan but I’m pretty sure I was just dirty. Funny how distances are out here- a two hour drive seems pretty short to me now. Keekorok is not too far away, about 60km, though I’m sure it’s only 30km as the crow flies. Back in the states any drive over an hour is a trip! It’s always interesting driving around in the middle of the day, the light is so different its like a breath of fresh air to see the Mara like this. There aren’t very many animals out but we did see a few lions on the drive back. The roads are still pretty bad, I can handle pot holes, mud, rocks, dust, dips and ditches, but shoot me now if I have to drive over washboards like that again. They just rattle the car so hard I feel like the car will fall apart, so I end up creeping along in 2^nd gear. Totally awful.

Haven’t seen Saur’s cubs in a while so I think she may have moved them to Sherman’s den. Emily says that Lady (Sherman’s subadult cub) was really badly injured and hanging out around runway den so we’re both really worried now that this dead sub was Lady. If he hadn’t been doing too well it wouldn’t be surprising if some lions got him or he just died from not getting enough food.

Hilarious morning the other day- not only did we see Sherman’s cubs for the first time (she has two!) but we also found some taka taka in the road. This taka taka turned out to be a tray of 12 yogurt cups, of which 10 were good!! So we’ve had yogurt for breakfast in camp for two days now. With three people in camp now the workload has significantly decreased and we spent all day yesterday watching movies, by which I mean Sherlock and Dexter.

I buzzed my head the day we found the yogurt and it feels amazing! I just didn’t have any reasons to not cut it anymore. I can’t really remember why I was growing it out other than just to see how long it would get. French-braiding it was fun for about two weeks before it was too much work. And if I buzz it now it will be short and messy by the time I get back to the US. No regrets! Brushing and detangling and just dealing with so much hair was just getting to be too much work! Not worth it. Buzz feels super cool, temperatures and breezes feel really neat. My hat also sticks to my head like Velcro.

The cultural differences with regards to hair also stand out- when I asked Philimon to borrow their clippers they were like: cool ok. In the US a girl buzzing her head would be a big deal, but here everyone has short hair, including the woman, so it was no big thing to them. A few questions on why I cut it but everyone is just like ok cool. Along with my shuka apparently I’m starting to look much more maasai!

Rain last night and sprinkles this morning so we’ve stayed in, however hippos were really really noisy which ruined what was supposed to be a night sleeping in! The weather has been very random with lots of clouds and random sprinkles these last four days. Makes for some very pretty lighting at times (and cool lightning too!) However this is supposed to be a dry season until the long rains in March so this off and on cloudiness is unusual, but of course welcomed since the short rains were very sparse and the crops always need more rain.

Great luck getting Target trials with Julie which is really exciting. Very fun to be doing grad student experiments again! Got two in happy zebra our very first night out which is just ridiculous because we’ve hardly been seeing anyone in HZ, let alone in good spots for target trials. Did one with NatG a mid-low ranking young male and Eremet, the high ranking young mom I’ve talked about before.

Then the other evening in South we started tracking Taj, a mid-ranking adult female. No sign of her, her beeps were going in and out a lot so we think she may have been deep in a lugga which creates a lot of bounce. We did find her 1 year old son chilling out a few hundred meters from the lugga and did a trial with him! A few minutes later we bumped into an immigrant male named Vail and put out target for him as well. South and HZ are the two territories Julie has the least trials in- so that we got two trials in both of them in Julie’s first few days here is really good.