Five years ago, if you had asked me how I would spend my eventual destiny in Serengeti, I would not have said“crouching in front of an Acacia tree with my rechargeable 18V Bosch Impact Driver. “But that is what I’m doing.And although in general, I prefer to be tracking and watching any of our 327 lions – especially the roly-poly cubs as they play with their mother’s twitching tail-tuft – lagbolting my steel camera cases to the gnarled Acacia, Commiphora, and sausage trees imparts a degree of satisfaction and accomplishment that watching lions has yet to give me.Here is something tangible.I have just made my 13th camera-trap hyena proof.Take that, you big ugly puppies.
See, I have 200 camera traps across 1,000km2 of our 2,800km2 study area.These are remote, automatic cameras that are triggered by a combination of heat and motion – so they take pictures, night and day, of any animal I could possibly want to study.Elusive leopards, slinky cheetahs, ambling aardvarks, blank-faced tommies, curious baboons…and of course, lions and hyenas.I’m using these cameras to assess how the top carnivores are using their habitat with respect to each other, trying to understand how behavior and environment coincide to drive their patterns of coexistence.Except that from Day 1, hyenas have been relentlessly eating my equipment.I can’t begin to describe the devastation of arriving at a camera site - after having crossed korongos and woven my way through dense whistling-thorn thickets, fighting off the tsetse flies with flailing arms and strings of obscenities – only to discover that the camera is gone.The nylon strap is there, dangling loosely around the tree, and bits of plastic have fallen into the thorn-moat that I hoped would keep curious carnivores at bay.But no camera.Sometimes I find it, chewed like a rawhide bone, 30 meters from the tree.Sometimes I can retrieve the data from them. Other times, like today, the cameras are just gone.6 weeks of data – disappeared.
After losing almost 90 cameras this way, I returned for my second field season armed with, yes, new cameras, but more importantly, heavy-duty steel cases and my new prized power tools.Two hardened-steel lagscrews through the back of the steel case, and the camera is going nowhere.I test one out, just to see – pulling on the camera in all different directions, as a particularly determined hyena might do – but the camera doesn’t budge.Success!I feel like I should blow the smoke from the barrel of my 18V impact driver, like a gunman in the Wild West.It’s been a long, hard road initiating this camera survey, but things are finally looking up….and I can finally sleep at night without worrying about the fate of my cameras like an overanxious parent.
It would not be a trip to TZ without some sort of drama. With 15 minutes before boarding, I was kneeling on my hockey-bruised knees on the cold blue tiles in front of the Delta desk. Around me were scattered camouflage steel cases, calcium supplements, lacy pink underwear.
I had exactly 221 lbs of luggage. Exactly 11 lbs over what I could fit in 3 bags. And even though the Delta rep claimed that Delta would happily of let me go overweight with a nudge and a wink, the rest of the world does not allow bags >70lbs on board. I think she was lying.
The vast majority of these 221 lbs was camera traps – steel and camo, they looked suspicious and malicious, and I painstakingly wrapped them in delicate undergarments and feminine products, hoping that shy Tanzanian customs agents wouldn’t push past the embarrassing intimate items if they did check me on that side…
Of course, all of this painstaking packing was quickly undone. I watched in dismay as TSA dismembered every single artfully packed checked bag. I wonder what went through their mind, these camo colored explosive looking boxes, nestled next to kitten heels and a strapless dress; veterinary darts cuddled up to pink tissue-paper wrapped valentine’s day presents…One of them worked up the nerve to ask me what I was doing. “Studying lions,” I explained, with the briefest of explanations about Lion Project and Serengeti. My plane was boarding and I had yet to make it through security… The TSA agent nodded knowingly…”So you’re a missionary?” I squashed the urge to stare at him like he was a moron. Pissing of security agents is not typically advised.
So I smiled. And eventually the agents packed my bags, rolling their eyes at my incessant cries of “please put the pink fluffy things on top of the cameras!” And by feigning first class tinged with authentic desperation, I was allowed to the front of the security line and made it through in a matter of single-digit minutes. Deep breath. Now I just had to make it to Arusha with all 221lbs of luggage intact…
As I leave Minnesota, winter seems to be already breaking.Amidst the national mid-winter heatwave, mountains of snow are melting, turning the roads into rivers and the hockey rinks back into lakes.For the third time, I am watching cheesy movies across the atlantic, fast forwarding through day and night, racing the sun eastward across the ocean and winning by 30 lengths like Secretariat in the Belmont Stakes.
Except this doesn’t feel spectacular anymore.I am on my way to Tanzania, once again, with 240 lbs of luggage catapulting around the belly of the plane.My back feels thrown and the plane feels cramped, and the woman sitting next to me snorts and sniffles like some Sesame Street character.
After three weeks of delays, I’m finally heading…home?I’m dreading – just a bit – the madness that awaits me in Serengeti.A solid three weeks behind, I have 200 traps to place in the next 10 days….which happens to be humanly impossible.
See, my research relies primarily on camera traps – remote, automatic cameras that are triggered by heat and motion, attached to trees so that they take pictures of wildlife night and day.On the street they’re known as “hyena bait.”On my street anyway.
Yeah, that’s right.I’ve discovered that hyenas are like big ugly puppies – the world is their chew toy.However, unlike your neighbor’s cute, squirmy blue heeler, hyenas have no responsible owner to say “No! No demolishing the $200 camera trap!”Last year alone, hyenas ate nearly $10,000 in cameras.I would arrive at my excruciatingly selected camera site to find bits and pieces of plastic, the stray LED, a fragment of circuit board…just no camera.Elephants took down about $5,000 in cameras, but with minimal destruction.They typically ripped the offending trap from the tree and flung it out of site.Those cameras usually worked, with some minor case modifications.But the hyena victims?Beyond repair.
Given the abysmal loss rates from the first year of this ambitious (crazy?) camera trapping study, I am now returning to the Serengeti with replacement cameras and heavy duty steel protective cases…which happen to way about 1.35 tons apiece.That might be an exaggeration, but the point is that they are very, very heavy.And hopefully hyena-proof.
It is dark outside, though the fancy seat-back TV map says we are smack dab over the Atlantic.I feel like my mind should be racing with plans for my research, or meandering down memory lane – but mostly I am thinking about how good the red wine tastes, and how tired my eyes feel.The night outside seems endless, the world feels far away and frozen in time – like Zach used to do on “Saved by the Bell” – and in my alternate reality I slip guiltlessly into mass-market movies, into staring blankly out the window, the wine wrapping its velvet fingers around my fraying neurons.
I have a million things to do by…yesterday, but my brain is tired and does not want to work.I do not want to think about where on earth I put my hard drive, or the fact that I have not yet filed my taxes despite my imminent disappearance into the bush.I want to fade into the bright, apoplectic flashes of the action movie’s runaway trains or the feel-good underdog story of the horse that could.When I get to Serengeti, it will be a flat-out race against the rains.I want to get my cameras set before the rains keep me hamstrung for days at a time.Today is Feb 19; the rains start at the beginning of March.Can it be done?I guess we’ll see when I get there.
I have been convinced of this fact many times during my short stay in the Serengeti.Whether it was upon being startled awake in my tent by the sound of nearby lion roars, or attempting to cross the yawning abyss of the Ngare Nanyuki river in our 1980’s era landrover, my brain fights a turbulent battle against my sympathetic nervous system.Intellectually I know we are not going to die.In the Serengeti at least, lions do not break into tents, even though they are kind of like twinkies, a plastic yellow shell with soft human marshmallow stuffing.And the Ngare Nanyuki, even though I cannot see the ground below me as we drive forward, has been crossed many times before.Norbert laughs at me sometimes, “Ali,” he says, “Do you really think we are going to die?To die is hard work.”
Today though, as I sit frozen, staring at the smooth cement in front of our bathroom door, my brain knows that one wrong move, and someone actually could die.The texts and calls roll in.“GET OUT.Go to Cheetah House if you have to.GET OUT of the house!” Writes Laura.“Close the door with a pole and break the window so it can escape.” Writes Anna.I talk to Megan on the phone.“I don’t want to leave,” I say, “because then I don’t know if it has really left.”She agrees.It is either a Cobra or a Black Mamba, one of the deadliest snakes in the world, and it is hiding in our house.
I liked snakes when I was a kid.I still do, actually.I think I have my mom to thank for my strange affection towards these scaly, slithering creatures.Unlike many moms, she had no fear of them, often rescuing them from the middle of the road where they had ill-advisedly decided to sun.We had a 6-foot long garter snake in our backyard for many years, and tried to catch him and tame him on many occasions.He always broke out of the terrarium and slithered off into the oaks and maples and poison ivy.My only mishap was when a tiny baby green snake bit in the soft tender tissue between my pudgy child fingers.Even the rattlesnakes I’ve almost stepped just curl up into themselves and give a halfhearted warning and watch me leave.Unlike spiders, which give me this involuntary, visceral shudder – what a friend calls the spinal heebie-jeebies – snakes spike my curiosity.Somewhere there is a picture of me, as a toddler, in Bali or some other exotic location, with a 12-foot boa constrictor curling around my mother and me.I like snakes.
Until now.In Tanzania, poisonous snakes are the rule rather than the exception.And the poison here makes rattlers and copperheads look like as mild as a paper cut in comparison.I did not know this until speaking to a friend who had grown up in the bush.Making conversation, I once asked her what animal I should worry about the most, as I go about my days in Serengeti.I expected her to say buffalo or elephants – both of these are ubiquitous, aggressive, and unpredictable.I am more likely to run into a buffalo or elephant than a hippo, which kills more people than any other mammal; and these are more likely to attack in daylight than a lion.But without hesitation, she blurts out “Snakes.Black Mambas.”There is no question in her mind.Walking off paths is dangerous because you cannot see what reptilian bringer of death might be lurking underfoot.Apparently, so is walking around in your house.
The snake in our house is easily 6 feet long, a deep charcoal gray.It is almost certainly a black mamba.I was catching up on updating some lion photos on the computer, singing along to Josh Ritter, with my back to front door.George and Norbert were coming home soon, and leftovers were warming on the stove.The strange swishing noise took some time to sink in.It wasn’t a coming car, and it wasn’t the wind.It wasn’t any part of the normal animal chorus that plays outside our house.Finally, I stand and turn to investigate and catch the thick gray shimmer of a snake undulating across our cold cement floor.There is no visceral shudder that shakes me, just the cold, knife-like stabbing fear.If a black mamba bites you, you will be dead in less than an hour.I am no more than 10 feet away from one of the most dangerous animals that I will ever encounter.I hold my breath and watch it slither into the bathroom, and then I make the calls to those who have been here for many more years than I.I close all the other doors in the house, and then climb up onto the table, off the ground, and watch the smooth, empty cement in front of our bathroom door.I am still waiting.30 minutes.45 minutes.60 minutes.George and Norbert promise they are coming, that they will bring our next-door neighbor JumaPili to help.Yet over an hour later, they still do not show up, do not call.It is one of those many moments that I am more than a little annoyed with the lackadaisicality of Tanzanian culture.30 minutes.45 minutes.60 minutes.It is now 3pm.The malaria retrovirals are making me dizzy and I want to curl up in bed, but I’m not sure where this snake is.Eventually the men show, armed with kerosene and a long pincher-pole.The splash the gas in the hole that runs beneath the bathtub, where the snake is almost certainly curled up.Eventually it will tire of the smell and leave.So they say.
So life goes back to normal, more or less.George starts to wash vegetables in the kitchen, I return to staring at the computer screen.Craig calls to talk about permits.“Oh, the snake,” he says.“It’s probably just a spitting cobra – not that poisonous, really.If you catch it in the face, just wash it out.You’ll go blind for about 12 hours, but nothing permanent.Least of your worries.Now, can you please send the data for…” he goes on to talk about permits and data analysis.I am only half listening, and with the corner of my eyes I am watching the cold, smooth cement outside our bathroom door, smelling the antiseptic aroma of kerosene.
Least of my worries?I can think of a million things that I am less worried about than the spitting cobra hiding beneath our bathtub.But okay, I am not going to die today.Which is good, because I have way too much work to do.
I remember that phrase on constant repeat in my head during my unprepared and ill-advised ascent of the Polish Tatras.I had decided to climb a mountain in late May with little more than a t-shirt and ultralight rain jacket – the kind that costs an arm and a leg because it weighs no more than a paper clip and fits in a tea-cup - a coarse park map and no compass.Just as I was convinced of my imminent demise then, I am now.“Oh God, we are going to die.”I mutter it under my breath to myself as the ancient Landrover steering wheel ricochets between my hands.We are on the long road from Arusha to Serengeti, and I am convinced that at any moment the wind will blow us straight off of the fresh tarmac.Even on the best road in the district, the landy pulls and sways, as though yearning for the ditch along the road, and I constantly remind myself to breathe as I focus hard on staying straight.Daladalas stuffed with passengers pass by effortlessly but I am scared to turn my head lest I lose my tenuous grip on our straight path forward.
It is June 22, 2010.Today I am 27 years old, crossing that bridge from “mid-20’s” to “late-20’s,” and while I joke about how my bones creak and short-term memory is fading, I am still too young to die.Meshack laughs quietly beside me – he is our prized fundi, our expert mechanic, and is making the long trek to Serengeti for no other reason than to make sure that I (and the car) make it there in one piece.“Tuende!” he says, motioning forward.Let’s go.I gulp loudly and clench the wheel tighter.There really is no respite from the terror – on the open tarmac I have to go faster; as we slow for villages there are pedestrians and bicyclists, peddlers and Maasai and livestock that weave alongside the road erratically, and I am convinced that at any moment one of them will meander into the path of my Monster Truck.Winding up the gnarled and pockmarked Crater road are blind turns and oncoming trucks that only further the terror of the already perilous ascent.I am torn between the urgent need to reach the park gates before they close, and my desire to remain alive and in more or less one piece.When we stop at the Crater rim (in part for Patriki to take a picture, in part for me to try and restart my heart), Meshack glances at his watch nervously.Ever so gently, he offers, “Maybe it would be faster if I drive?”
I almost kissed him.The passenger seat in a Landrover has never felt quite so luxurious – before or since – though I still question my lifespan on a daily basis from the driver seat. For example, George, my coworker on the Lion Project, has been teaching me to drive offroad.“It is just fine,” he assures me as we begin to climb the veritable of dusty soil and clumpy vegetation.Except when it is not fine.As we circle and spin and weave through aardvark hole-ridden hilltops, I can see him clutch the window frame suddenly in panic, his foot involuntarily slamming down where the break pedal should be.The landrover falls into the abyss where ground once was.Ka-thunk.I hold my breath and resist the visceral urge to slam on the accelerator and clear away from the danger as fast as I can.The landy keeps chugging forward, powered by the magic that is low-range.The rear tire plummets to the depths of hell and haltingly crawls back out.We are alive.Barely.George laughs.“Avoid that green grass!” he reminds me.I am lost – it’s all green.“That’s green!” I point, “and that! And that over there!”It is all green and it all looks the same, but George sees some magical difference.I’m told that in time I will see it too.In the meanwhile, however, I maintain my running commentary.“OH dear GOD, we are going to die!...oh, okay, we’re okay.OH GOD that’s a hole! Oh, okay, we are alive.That’s just grass.”Except when it’s not.
The Pink House is the Savannas Forever fortress near Arusha's gated neighborhood. It sees a constant flow of SF employees and affiliates, lion researchers or grad students stopping on their way in or out of Serengeti. It is like a pink stucco fortress next to a village that has burros tied to their bus stop. ( seriously. We think it is a backup plan in case the daladala doesn't come.) After inner-city Arusha excursions and watching world cup soccer eating homemade chips mayai, we head to Serengeti for months of dirt and dust and the most breathtaking wildlife in the world.
Even as I walk, it is a struggle to keep my eyes open. I am going on 40 hours without sleep, the world taking on that hazy, throbbing, sleep-deprived glare, the lights are harsh and do not want to focus. I had such grand plans for my 3.5 hours in Amsterdam, but all I want to do is curl up into a ball and sleep.
As soon as I step into the bathroom, a familiar wave of “underwhelm” floods over me. The stalls are floor-to-ceiling plastic laminate, off-white with speckled blue. The toilets feel plastic and cheap; there are no vertical tanks and the water flows weakly into the bowl upon flushing – seemingly impotent in comparison to our noisy, torrential, tornado-like toilets. There is only a short, narrow mirror offset from the two plain ceramic sinks. Even the shadiest Taco Bells in the US have snazzier toilets than the Amsterdam airport, and I begin to wonder if Americans just love their bathrooms. Our bathrooms have colorful tile and big, well-lit mirrors; shiny metal stalls that create an air of spaciousness with their open tops and bottoms. Did you know that you can buy dual aquarium/toilet-tanks? The CBS featured “Fish’n’Flush” is just one of a whole line of home improvement products that lets you blend your bathroom time with some quality pet-bonding. You can watch little Nemo swim around while you heed nature’s call. The “Fish’n’Flush” page boasts that this is what you need if you are a homeowner that wants to make a statement. On the same page is an ad for helping the world’s poorest of poor. We like our bathrooms, apparently.
Amsterdam is simply not as shiny as I feel it should be. It is like my dingy, graying MacBook – dulled in the splendor of the shiny new metallic models – exuding an aura of aging technology. The strange dissonant drabness lingers as I walk around. I stare in bleary-eyed amusement at a woman in fitted pants and high heels, and a gentleman in a gray blazer – his hair spiked into a faux-hawk, the product crispy and shiny – they walk with authoritative strides, collecting stray trash with their bare hands. I’ve never seen such a well-dressed custodial couple. Everywhere there is cleaning. Motorizing and cleaning. They love their motorized carts here – there are carts of every kind – passenger carts with back-to back benches, driven by well-postured flight attendants in crisp blue skirt-suits with bright white trim - that swerve frenetically around rolling luggage and dawdling travelers. Police on gimmicky segways that whirr weakly through the crowds. There are standing carts and sitting carts; blue carts and green carts; carts with metal boxes on the backs; carts dragging wheelchairs; carts - little orange carts – with brushy floor cleaners that spray and scrub the dull tan-gray tiles. Everywhere there is endless cleaning and motorizing.
It is almost 11 months to the day that I was here before, lost and scared, an untried mzungu embarking on my first real academic expedition. I am back now, admiring the cheese and chocolate, the well-dressed herds of flight attendants, shopping clerks, and snappy passerby(s?). I am excited and ready for anything, although desperate for orange juice and a nap. I curl up on the sofa near the unending “waterspa” that whirs and buzzes and opens and closes – a massage bed topped with some sort of super snazzy water-massage device that the lonelyattendant runs again and again and again. People walk without pausing, turning their heads as they pass to stare curiously, but they do not stop. So the spa goes on whirring and buzzing and opening and closing, and all around the little motorized carts – blue and green and orange, stand-up or sit-down style – go puttering by. In the gray, muted lights I curl up on top of my luggage, piled beside me on the bench, and close my eyes to this electric lullaby.
To be honest, I don’t actually know what the date is. We are between time: moving forward, skipping beats. Leaping ahead 14 hours when we really should only saunter 6. We are somewhere between today and tomorrow, and I’m not sure I’m ready for it to come.
Almost 11 months to the day, I am once again heading into the future. I remember how new and fresh these moments were 11 months ago. I was an untried mzungu waltzing into the bush, some white chick from the American Dream suburbs, raised on lattes and cul-de-sac kickball, and almost reluctant to admit that I thought I might be able to say something insightful about lion-hyena-leopard interactions. But this time I am confident and cool…I am proud of what I have done so far and excited for what is to come. I have a study design that blends novel concepts with a cutting edge empirical pursuit. I have camped out surrounded by hyenas, I have tracked lions and been charged by elephants. I have my name in Smithsonian. I have more than a snazzy-sounding elevator-clip of my research to back up my plans. And, perhaps most importantly, I have money. Not only did I score a sweet fellowship, but I raised $24,000 in grants for the season - for even in academia, money makes the world go round. For the first time since graduate school began, I feel like I just might be able to pull this thing off.
Chasing day across the Atlantic, I am stunned by how different this flight is from my last. It feels small and cramped, and though the plane sits 8 across, we are all entranced in our own worlds – instead of appearing in the aisles, where we all feel guilty for blatantly ignoring the jaded attendants, the safety talk is given on our personal seatback tv’s, by a redhead with a little button nose and unusually prominent cheekbones. I remember her from my last international flight, with her weird wagging finger when she reminds us severely not to smoke.
My traveling companion has not said a word to me, though he gets “special meals” which means that they come 40 minutes before mine and waft alluringly while I wait, half-hungry and half-asleep, for my box meal and cup of wine. I waver in and out of sleep, still in stunned disbelief that I am really going back.
In just a few days, I will be driving out to the Serengeti, armed with nearly 200 digital camera traps (DIGITAL!!!) and 5 months of bug spray. This time, when people inquire what I am doing for my project, I will tell them rather than ask. I am still studying the mechanisms driving carnivore coexistence, but now I know how I am doing it and what the ultimate picture will be. I am using camera traps to collect empirical data on spatial and temporal patterns of carnivore habitat use with respect to their competitors – and I will assess spatiotemporal partitioning as a mechanism of coexistence. But it doesn’t stop there. There are a million mechanisms postulated for species coexistence, but few, if any, have been tested in systems like mine. So I will test for interference-exploitation trade-offs, I will look for costs incurred by one competitor on another, I will find the R* of a lion…All of this I will do by analyzing images from these cameras for the next 2 years. But right now I will sleep. Tomorrow is coming, but it is not here yet, and I will revel in today while it lasts…even if all it means is my little seatback TV and boxed meal on a plane.
Sitting at the little airport in Arusha, I feel slightly shaky and close to tears. It could be that it’s nearly 2pm and I haven’t eaten anything yet today…but more likely I’m just sad to leave. I hear the whir of propellers and the grumbling of an engine and look up to see the zebra stripes lift off the runway – Felix in his happy little 4-seater Cessna rumbles off and out of sight. With his sly but easy smile, Felix is a dapper pilot. On the flight in (I being the only person in the world who travels from Seronera to Arusha via NAIROBE and KILIMANJARO) he is confident and deft, but not serious. We pull a couple of wicked turns and tilts, and then this charming Swiss pulls out all the stops. Felix drops the plane faster than gravity’s grasp on our bodies and we do a brief few seconds in zero-G. Things go soaring through the cockpit – the ashtray (it’s an old plane) levitates past my head, my luggage relocates from the floor to the back seat, and the dirt flies up and into our hair and onto our laps. Felix looks a bit sheepish – “Guess I should vacuum, eh?” I am giggling like a little girl. We dust off and take stock of the damage and we do it again.
But now, sitting and trembling with my milky cup of tea at the little Coastal Air terminal, I am in vague disbelief that this summer is over. Later today, the exhaustion will set in as I haggle with the taxi from the airport. Sitting in rush hour traffic, a crazy man will try to climb into the cab with me. “Look!” he will say, frantically pointing to his hand, even though there is nothing there. HE will mime handcuffs and mumble, and my driver Jumal will step out and pull him away. I will get to the hostel hungry and weary and I will listen to some disgusting missionary shout over the phone to his brainwashed son, lecturing him about some dumb girl he is dating back home at his private Christian college in bungwater, VA. The man talks loud enough for the whole hostel to hear and prays loudly on his phone for his son to see the light. When I wind up across from this man at dinner, it is a good thing that I do not have the energy to tell him about the taste he leaves in my mouth, because I would not have the energy to stop myself.
But all of this will happen later. For now, I sit in retrospective and brooding silence. I am strangely sad to leave a place that I barely got to know, struck with a bizarre sense of loss to leave a place that I will return to in less than a year. I cannot explain these feelings so I do not try. For now I just sit in retrospective and brooding silence, wishing Serengeti a sad and silent goodbye.
Sitting at the hyena den, waiting for the tourists to leave, Candida is bleeding from the nose.We are in a land where people die from Malaria and sleeping sickness, tuburculosis and AIDS; I am slightly concerned.Candi has been recovering from her bout of malaria with surprising speed, but the blood worries me.She shrugs it off: “It is normal,” she says, “I feel fine.”
The tourists leave a cloud of dust as they follow the road across the dry, short grass clearing.The spectacularly alien Serengeti savanna exudes an aura of prehistory that reminds me vaguely of Yellowstone National Park. I remember the hot, acidic pools of our first National Park’s famous geyser basin.While most of the cookie-cutter tourists never waddled farther than the 300 ft from their car to Old Faithful, just past the famous geyser lay a minefield of colorful hot springs, each lined with rainbow rings of heat-adapted micro-organisms. In the weeks that I spent trying to “find myself” in Yellowstone, I most often lost myself watching the sun rise over the geyser basin.Sitting and watching the steam rise over the pre-dawn frost that sparkled in the low light of the waking sun felt like watching the dawn of time.I can remember thinking that maybe if I sat and watched those pools for a few billion years, I would see fish grow legs and crawl onto land.
The Serengeti too feels like a land before time, with the fat cape buffalo trundling through the tall grass in front of our yard, the elles eating our aloe garden, and the giraffe in their slow-motion methodically chewing through our acacia trees.I half expect sometimes to look up and see a brontosaurus browsing by our vaguely otherworldly creatures.
The Smithsonian reporter that was here asked us what the coolest was thing was that we’d seen in Serengeti.I remember falling silent.In four short weeks, I’ve seen a million breathtaking, heart-stopping events that I might never see again.I’ve seen a solitary female lion kill a Thompson gazelle in the middle of the day.I have spent the night next to 7 lions that draped themselves luxuriously over an elephant carcass while glowing hyena eyes circled impatiently around, sniffing and rejecting our onion skins and carrot shavings while waiting hungrily for the lions to leave.I have held my breath in the heat of a lion-elle standoff, and retreated from the middle of an epic 3 on 1 battle between neighboring male lions.I have helped to collar a female lion, to de-snare a tangled zebra, and to dart a mother elephant.Climbing a kopje one day, I came face to face with two unattended lion cubs.Camping out in the Western Corridor, I was awakened by a hyena sniffing the ground by my head with only the sheer synthetic fabric between us.
But despite all of the excitement that we stumble onto while making our daily rounds, I think my favorite thing of all is to sit on the veranda just before dawn and watch the world wake up.The house faces directly east and the sun always rises red through the haze of grass-fire smoke. From here I can sometimes see pink and purple lizards doing pushups on sunny rocks, showing off for their plain brown females, and knee-high Tommies locking horns and butting heads in a twitchy capoiera display.
The lions have moved back into the area and this morning I can hear them roaring from just past the neighbor’s house.A cautious hyrax approaches the bucket of leftover wash-water to steal a free drink, and plops down, splay-legged on the cold stone porch.One lazy morning, we spent an HOUR watching the elles pick off thorny branches from our toppled fever tree, their trunks snaking through the foliage, slow and methodical, moving it to their mouths.The elles are my favorite, with their thick, drooping skin that looks several sizes too big.The babies are only hip-high, and they wave their ears when they run to catch up to their moms. Some days the baboons move in slow, cacophonous procession around the house.They get into our rubbish pit and open our water tanks and sit and blink their ugly little eyes at me as they crunch on the fallen Acacia seed pods.Today, however, has been quiet, save for the lions sounding off in the gray morning light as Candi and I loaded the car for my last day in the field.
Finally, as the tourists move off, Candi sniffles and shoves the car into gear.We close in for some close-ups of the gnarled hyenas.So far, I have 271 photos from 4 dens, 2 kills, and a million random locations that I am trying to ID using ear notches and spot patterns.I anticipate spending most of my 11-hour layover in Jo-burg scowling at iphoto and grumbling to myself.As September draws near, I try to fend off the overwhelming sense of panic that rides along each day like oxpeckers on a cape buffalo’s back. I will just take it day by day, den by den, and spot by annoying-yet-individually-identifiable spot.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
We camped less than 20 meters from this thing one night. Cooking from the roof of our landy, we watched a dozen pairs of glowing hyena eyes dancing impatiently around this prize that the lions had secured. It was fine until about 3 am, when the wind died and the SMELL grew so strong that we woke up and retreated.
1) Billy, you got NOTHING on baboon farts. 2) Machetes sound like windchimes as the whistle through the tall grass. 3) Anywhere else in the world, what we call “tall grass” would be called just “grass,” our “medium grass” would be called “short grass,” and our “short grass” would be called “no grass.” 4) Your eyes play tricks on you out here. Is that a rock or a lion? The chimneys of a termite mount or the pricked ears of a crouched hyena? It’s really hard to tell. 5) Lions have REALLY big feet. 6) There is something living in our drop toilet. Perhaps many “somethings.” I learned the other day that these “somethings” include bats, one of which flew UP from the drop while I was responding to nature’s call. 7) Baby hyenas are really cute. The adults, tragically enough, are not.
As we hurtled along the gutted road, we came face to face with a herd of elephants paying their respects to a fallen buffalo.At first, in the murk of night, we thought they huddled around one of their own, and concerned silence fell upon us.Ellies, for as aggressive as they can sometimes be, have earned our admiration and careful respect.They seem to me intelligent and emotional creatures; where they are not persecuted, they tolerate the roar of our passing engine with a casual glance.But they nearsighted to the point of legal blindness – in heavily hunted areas we are sometimes charged by a protective female, but as we hold our breaths and brace for impact, they stop their charge short and listen…but give up and turn away.If we remain downwind in silence we are invisible.
The elephants tonight are agitated as they mill around the buffalo.Philipp tells us that ellies often investigate death in the forests where he’s worked.In an eerie display of some sort of cognizance, they seem to recognize that something is not right and come to look at fallen creatures.When they come across the bones of one of their own, they pick them up and carry them away.It is sad and scary and moving and beyond my comprehension, what must be going on in the heads of these big, gray, lumbering beasts.
The two tour vehicles that are blocking the watering hole eventually pull away, and the ellies step forward to drink.They cluster close, pressing together side by side.Hesitant lions slowly creep back to reclaim their half-eaten kill, and the matriarch whirls around, her ears flaring, watching the lions in a silent stand-off.The air is still.It is thick with tension and heavy with the severity of the moment. One ill-timed thud against the car window or a frightened squeal from any of us, and we would incited a rampage.Silence is imperative and we hold our breaths as the ellies file past within inches of our landrover.We can almost feel their fear and my heart twists as I wonder what it must be like to stumble blindly through a darkened world, sensing death and its bearers all around you lurking in the hazy shadows and around every corner.As they disappear into the acacias, we hear a long, lumpy-sounding elephant fart and giggle nervously.We can breathe again.
We drive closer to the buffalo carcass and watch the lions return.In the faint starlight, we see that an adult female has already resumed her demolition; her whole head disappears inside the opened belly to rip solid tracts of muscle from the ribcage.We fumble for our headlamps and cameras; I look around optimitistically for an onslaught of hyenas.I have yet to see them challenge a lion kill, and begin to question the feasibility of my research plans. The subadult males pad around our car, their massive paws falling silently in the sandy soil.They are full, and are now studying us.Our windows are open, as always, and we glance around with slight unease – where did the two subadult males go?Suddenly we hear a loud chomp from the back of our vehicle.Fearing that they’ve gone of one of our tires, and hardly in any position to fix a flat, we frantically turn the car ignition and pull a few meters forward.In the sideview mirror, we see a lion trot into the darkness with our plastic tire cover dangling from his teeth.Candida’s jaw drops.We are not quite sure what inspired them to steal such an inedible adornment, but it is late and we have company coming that night.So we chalk the loss up to a casualty of the field…and as we drive home along the corrugated dirt road, we remind ourselves that at least we are better off than the buffalo.
I keep flinching and slapping at the invisible bugs that land and leap away so fast I can’t tell sometimes if they are real or merely a figment of my imagination.By the time I slap my arm, they are gone, and all that lingers is that faint distant tickle on my skin.Craig peers up at me over his little wire glasses.We are wading through 25 years of radio-collaring lion data and I am playing the dusty, bugbitten, in-desperate-need-of-beer secretary.He gives me a withering stare as I twitch murderously at the bugs that seem to molest only me.“It’s all in you’re imagination,” he says with a playfully dismissive wave of his hand as he hunches back over the dusty files. Sreeching in indignation, I am finally successful in my arthropod assassination attempts and throw my tiny offender at my academic advisor.“I don’t want your pickings!”he squawks.Merciless, I catch another and drop it in his lap.It quickly disappears into his ridiculous leg hair. Satisfied, I resume recording.
I think the bugs are the only thing I dislike more than the baboons that crap on our veranda.The ants recently invaded our drop toilet (the only one in town where you still have to squat, milling about on the concrete slab in typical ant frenzy.African ants seem to be generally unstoppable.They swarm across our kitchen countertop so thick that the white laminate is completely obscured.Yesterday I saw them dragging a dead tsetse fly across our windowsill. They are tiny pinprick ants, so ghostly as they crawl across your skin that you’re never quite sure if you’ve merely imagined them.But we don’t imagine them in our food.They are baked into our bread, spooned into our leftovers, drowned in our drinking water…They even invaded my canister of refrigerated Lindt chocolates.They flail hopelessly in our wash water and get stuck in the little holes of our makeshift shower bucket.I think sometimes they bite - the backs of my legs are covered with little red itchy bumps, and if they aren’t ant bites then they might be tick larvae, which is even more disgusting.
As much as I would prefer not to share my shower with a thousand tiny freeriders, I have this strange love/hate/admiration/disgust relationship with the colonial creatures.Philipp tells me how some ants raise aphid “livestock,” carrying their little aphids around to leaves and then milking them of their leaf-juice.Some ants live in little black balls on one of the countless acacia species and attack hungry ungulates that dare to browse on their branches.One day while scouring game trails for fresh carnivore sign, I discovered a series of 4-inch wide paths that wove between the trees.I turned to the camera trapping guru by my side, the funny German who’s spent the last decade in the remote west-African bush.Ants! Philipp says.Yes, the ants move in such volume that they create barren little tracks through the woodland grass.Sometimes we can see the ant army marching in rigid formation outside the Lion House.They appear out of nowhere against our cinderblock corners and trudge across the dirt.I don’t know where they are going, but they look like they’re on a mission.Perhaps they heard that there was something in the outhouse.
I have been in the Serengeti for precisely one week now, yet I still hardly know where to begin.
The house is nicer than I could possibly have imagined.For starters, it’s a house.All of my previous fieldwork was conducted from the luxury of my Northface Tadpole.Here at the Lion House we have a veranda that looks out at the dense woodlands of Seronera – the city at the heart of the Serengeti.Furnished with wobbly table and cushioned chairs, the veranda is occasionally decorated by an especially adventurous hyrax or an especially annoying baboon.The lions steal the cushions from the Cheetah House next door, but leave ours alone.It might be because (we’re pretty sure) there’s something (that bites) living in our cushions.The house is encircled by half a dozen 3000 liter tanks that catch the rainwater that runs off the roof – even though it’s fairly clean, we boil and filter it before drinking because, as Ingela says, “you never know what poops on the roof!”Well, we know at least it’s hyraxes, possibly a leopard, maybe baboons, and almost certainly bats.So boil we do.In the wet season, the tanks are full enough that water flows to the taps, but right now we go back and forth with buckets.Lots and lots of buckets.
Our electricity shuts off at 10 pm, so I am curled up on the veranda, writing by the light of my kerosene lantern.The bats are echolocating above my head, but I wonder if they have faulty sonar.Every now and then I hear a soft thwack against the wooden beams, and the other day one brushed through my knotty hair.(My hair is like 3 inches long.I haven’t had knotty hair since I was 12 years old and had long hair.This is what the dust of Serengeti plus days ofnot showering does to a person.)Candida, one of the field researchers, pulls down her crunchy laundry by headlamp.I’m not sure why our laundry is crunchy, but I don’t ask.As long as there are no ants in my pants, I’ll be happy.(The ants are a story in and of themselves.)
A buffalo goes crashing awkwardly through the thick grass and shrubs in our front yards.We have a 20 meter radius of mowed grass out front, but the back yard grows tall and dangerous.When braving the nighttime visit to the outhouse I scan for eyeshine at each step forward.The other day Craig came running back inside the house panting.“Don’t worry,” he said, when I nervously peered out to pay my own visit to the loo, “you can outrun him.” I usually take most of what my advisor tells me with no small pinch of salt, and this was no exception – stared down by the African water buffalo, I decided that perhaps nature calling could be allowed to ring for a while.
Fortunately, the veranda seems to create some invisible barrier to the bigger animals with dangerous things like hooves and claws.The buffalo stay in the tall unmowed grass and poop on our path to the outhouse.Occasionally we hear hyenas whooping in the distance, or lions roaring past the house next door, but nobody ever ventures up onto the concrete stoop.So I get to sit here with my half liter of Kilimanjaro beer and stare into the night, immune to the dangers of east African wildlife…well, that is, aside from mosquitos, biting ants, ticks, and tsetses….and the occasional bat that buzzes my head.At least this place is creative.
