Kay Holekamp, the researcher who runs the Hyena Project, flew out to oversee the project for the summer and make sure things were running smoothly. She is our boss as well as a well-known and respected researcher, so we were all nervous and excited to have her in camp. It’s been really neat to learn from someone who has as much experience as she does.
We’ve been darting more with Kay around to lend her expertise to the process. Here is Dave preparing the drug for the dart.
Benson preparing to dart
Weighing a grass rat as part of a small mammal lecture Kay gave to a group of MSU students
The first night Kay went on obs with us, we sat at the new den for nearly an hour before the cubs came out. While we waited, we noticed that there were bats flying around then den; then, we realized that they were actually flying in and out of the den itself. At first I wondered whether that meant that the hyenas had abandoned the den, but Kay explained that bats will often roost in active hyena dens. Sure enough, after a few minutes, Harpy and Alfredo’s cubs popped out of the den too.
Juno and her cubs at the den
I’ve always found it interesting how many different animals share dens with hyenas. I’d seen for myself that warthogs will at least live in neighboring den holes, and apparently porcupines will share space with hyena cubs too. The bats are especially interesting to me because I would have thought they’d be extremely vulnerable in their roosts. It’s amazing to think about an entire world of interactions going on beneath the surface of the ground. We spend so much time with the hyenas, but even so, there are so many unknowns about their daily life. To me, that just reinforces how important long-term research projects are. Kay has been out here studying hyenas since before I was born, and there are still so many questions to ask. It’s incredibly hard to keep a project like this going for so many years, but I wish it were more of the norm in field science rather than the exception.
Buar playing with her younger sibling (one of Helios’ new cubs) at the den
***
I finally had my first close encounter with a snake here in camp. I was walking to the storage tent to get some supplies, with my mind on whatever it was I needed, when all of a sudden, something moved on the ground in front of me. A snake had been sunning itself on the rocks next to the solar panels, and I had come about a foot away from stepping on it. I only realized it was there as I saw the end of a shiny grey body slither away fast as it could go into the bushes, presumably to save itself from being trodden upon. I was completely surprised, and the encounter immediately got my heart pounding. When I returned to the lab tent, I described what had happened to Dave, and he pulled up a picture on his computer.
“Did it look like this?” he asked.
“Yeah, that’s exactly it! … That’s a black mamba, isn’t it?”
“Yep”
I was certainly more nervous about the encounter after I realized it had been one of the world’s deadliest snakes. While a black mamba bite does not ensure that a person will die, one generally only has thirty minutes to get the antivenom before the chances of survival plummet to essentially zero (there is only one recorded case of a person surviving without antivenom, and even he had intense medical assistance). It is strange to think that therefore in some ways, my life hinged upon the split-second fight-or-flight instinct of another living being. It was another reminder of how many things in life are completely out of our control and how unnerving that realization can be.
***
One night, we went out for obs and found a giant flock of swallows zooming over the plain. We often see large groups of them foraging in the air over the plains or water, but this was on another level. There were hundreds of them in the air, swirling in a mass above and around the car. It had rained a little the previous night so we thought that maybe they were after termites.
***
Wilson had never had a birthday celebration before because he didn’t know exactly when he was born, and there isn’t as much of a tradition of celebrating birthdays with the Maasai here. So we decided to pick a day and throw him a small birthday party after obs.
We were heading back from obs a little early so that we could celebrate together, when we came across a hyena lying down. When we stopped to ID her, she suddenly leapt up and started running, so we followed her. She led us straight into chaos. We were bumping along off road behind the hyena, trying to find her in the dark, when we noticed herder’s flashlights sweeping around. Then we saw a group of hyenas converging on an animal, and realized it was a cow. We drove up and scared the hyenas off of the cow just as the herder came running back, but we could already see two giant gaping wounds in the animal’s side.
I had never seen a Maasai man so distraught. He was crying so hard he could barely breath and he was shaking all over. At first, I thought he was just distraught about the hyenas attacking his cow, but slowly Benson and Wilson translated what had really happened. The hyenas were only the second animals giving the herder trouble that night – a group of elephants with young calves had suddenly materialized out of the bushes a few minutes earlier and started chasing the herders. One of them had gored a cow in front of the herder and then chased him and the other men away. The hyenas then closed in on the wounded cow once the elephants moved back and before the people could chase them away. The herder was so upset because he’d almost been trampled, and because he thought that the elephants had gored more than one cow, so it took him a while to calm down enough for his friends to explain that only one cow was injured. This was all made more serious by the news that just a few days earlier elephants killed a man in the Lloita area not far from Talek.
Elephants can be unpredictable and dangerous. This is one that charged at us from the bushes when we didn’t see it and got too close.
Hadley, Julie, and I waited in the car while the guys sorted out what to do with the cow. She was clearly a goner—her guts were exposed and she already smelled like death—but shock had set in so deeply that she kept standing up and trying to walk back to the herd. It was disturbing to watch the cow walk around with her stomach almost falling out of her side, but it was a mercy that somehow she didn’t seem to be in pain.
Finally, we sorted everything out and headed back to camp. We were worried that given the night’s events we might want to postpone the birthday festivities, but in the end I think it helped us get our minds off of the whole ordeal. Besides, Wilson was ecstatic to have his first-ever birthday party; he kept standing up to make speeches about how happy he was and was still thanking us the next morning.
Koitobos, a Fig Tree cub with a giant wound that we think was probably from a lion
woahsimba 