Mkona - Hand

I’ve been communing with birds this month.  While driving back to camp late one night a nightjar – bird - plopped down on the hood of the truck and traveled with us for a couple of kilometers.  We were just becoming aware of a storm that had been raging north of us when our road turned into a river.  We could have abandoned the truck and replaced it with an inner tube and a floating cooler of beer if only it had been flowing in the right direction.  The bird joined us just prior to this discovery.  Once we were pretty certain we weren’t going to sink in the river road, we stopped the car and I decided to remove the bird before it slipped under one of the wheels - assuming the minute I opened the door it would fly away.  No – not one to make rash decisions – it allowed me to pick it up before flying away as I repositioned it in my other hand.  How did it know I wasn’t going to eat it?  Bird # 2 shared the toilet with me and seemed to have just watched the movie ‘The Men Who Start At Goats’ as it was trying to fly out the mesh windows – I showed it the light and the door.  Bird #3 flew down from a tree and rested on my shoulder for just a few yards.  I might take up bird whispering or at least add it to my resume.

 More rain – it took us almost the full month of May to get our transects in.  Lions tend to be everywhere when it rains.  One of the local resource assessors told us that his dad warned him about lion activity during the heavy rains following a big drought.  He said that it makes them crazy.  Michael’s sons saw a couple lions on their walk to school one morning and they’ve been showing up to camp on occasion too.  Just as day was breaking and Paul and I were sleeping soundly in our tent, three lions strolled past the staff tents triggering a chase response from the dogs.  Our watchman peeked his head out of his tent to see three lions race past with Bucket and Monster in close pursuit.  At some point during this series of events, the lions realized that they were lions and the dogs realized that they were chasing lions and the chase reversed and Monster tried to jump in the tent with Albert.  We found another group of nine lions down south on a transect.  Out in the open in the terrible heat, huddled under one little tree – it must have been an ambush waiting to happen.  Sure enough when we came back for night transects, they had already killed a grants gazelle.  Not an easy prey for a lion to hunt, so I suspect the animal was caught off guard.  We watched the pile of lions rest and play after their meal – a pile of nine lions.  I took some video.  My understanding of the everyday lives of prey animals has been morphed this month.  Usually we observe a herd of animals and report that a predator is sleeping in a bush, 1, 2, or 3 kilometers away.  Lately we’ve had front row seats on a number of occasions to the direct interactions of the two.  We watched two male grants gazelles stay bedded as one of the female lions walked towards them about 20 yards away.  Anthropomorphizing her, she thought, “don’t mind me, I’m just going to casually walk this way… and then Bam! She jumped at them at which point they then got up and ran away.  Two hours later, this same lion paced another three grants and was pretty much part of the herd, 5 yards away strolling along in the same direction – it was 8:00 in the morning though, maybe somebody called truce.  

Stitches in Kenya:  1500 shillings, Pain Killers & Antibiotics: 100 shillings, hearing the surgeon say, “These government needles are so dull”, as he’s sewing your hand back together:  priceless.  Don’t panic it wasn’t me - so mom and dad you can breathe.  But it was Paul – hopefully the Schuette family has already been prepped with this news.  He was trying to cut an annoying branch protruding into the road when his machete ‘kicked-back’, flipping out of his right hand and landing blade-first in his left. We called Sam who was in Nairobi and she assured us that the hospital an hour down the road was a good one.  And it was, sterile, professional – except for their lunch hour we had to wait, good doctors.  Joel came with us and we were both in the room as Paul got his stitches.  After the above-mentioned comment, the surgeon and nurse were talking in the Swahili that I don’t understand - mainly all of it  - and Joel told us later that they continued their discussion about the needles and said that these needles were meant for rough, farm working hands, not these smooth city ones.  

Kereng'ende

In high school I wrapped my back car door around a tree – I blame a friend taking too long closing his door.  The mechanic went to the junkyard and got me a new door, but it still cost me $400.  A couple of weeks ago we got the truck washed and someone managed to do the very same thing to the passenger door, but replaced the tree with a pole.  Two days later the truck was good as new, better than before actually, and they didn’t need to replace the door, they bent it out perfectly and applied a new coat of paint for about $80.  I would like my $320 back. 

Dinners in the bush have started to come with live entertainment.  Opening with a duet between two lions, the act was followed by the alert calls of baboons and ‘The Grudge’.  Did you ever see that movie?  If you haven’t this will be hard to explain, but I believe the writers poached their ghost sound from the Colobus monkey.  We don’t often see Colobus, let alone hear them, so when I first heard this noise I started looking around for a freaky ghost that is known best for being captured on surveillance cameras at night in eerie buildings.  Closing for the primates, was a fake buffalo calf and fake lion and hyena fight provided by yours truly in another attempt to add lion number 5 to our resume. 

Lion number five - Kereng’ende (Karen-yen-day) ‘dragonfly’ in Swahili.  She’s the largest collared female and she had puncture marks and scratches from another lion on her back.  The good rains have changed things and the predators seem to be fighting over the best places to call home.  We weren’t sure which pride she belonged to at the time, but have since seen her with Esipata.  Twice now we’ve found her in a tree and the second time, one by one four other lions followed her lead.  The fourth lion that inched up the trunk was Esipata.  The fifth lion wasn’t in the mood to snuggle and tried options two and three before settling on a tree’s trunk that was more like an escalator.  The lions awkwardly slumped over the branches and showed mild interest in a herd of passing zebra and wildebeest.  After a few hours, the last lion walked back down her escalator and came within five yards of the truck, sniffing the air and then settled down into the 2-foot tall grasses in front of us – hardly remaining visible.

Adding more drama to the lion soap opera, Mwanzo and Ren were caught breaking pride lines and spending some exclusive time together.  We don’t want to think about it, but this probably means that the cubs we saw her with earlier are no longer, if indeed they were her cubs.  Lions mate about 100 times over the span of 2 or 3 days.  The first day we found them they played hide and seek with each other for the whole 4 hours we were there.  We left them at 8:30 in the morning sitting out in the open with zebra and ostrich and a few grants gazelles grazing about 100 yards away.  Mating time is a free ticket for the ungulates; lions don’t mix the two pleasures.  The second day they barely moved from their napping positions to their mating ones. 

We made a cameo in this soap opera one morning when we ran into a fresh wildebeest carcass.  Pulling up to the scene to check the tracks and investigate, a previously unseen lioness popped up and snarled at us from about 40 yards away.  Paul’s translation, “Hey, I’m not done with that.”