Out of Africa

Grevy's paper available online

2011-11-02T22:48:00.000-07:00

Just an update that my Grevy's birth paper has been prepublished online. It is available at http://www.springerlink.com/content/3345k58841m87816/, although you must have a subscription (or access to a library/institution with a subscription) to access it. Print version should follow soon.

Welcome to the world

2011-10-14T10:08:00.001-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, I saw my first tommy birth. I feel this was long overdue given how much time I spend in the presence of female tommies during birth peaks. Anyway, it was very exciting.

I spotted the female walking with her tail up, which usually only means she's just pooped or is currently pooping, and sometimes means she's sexually receptive. But this female also had a bubble of amniotic sac protruding from under her tail (the squeamish should just skip the photos):

Bubble

She was very restless, walking around a lot, lying down, getting up again and walking to a new spot. She had some trouble with the territorial male, who took her extended tail as a come-on. Tommy males usually take "being female" as a come-on though, so I'm not even sure why they bother having the tail signal. Eventually she settled on a seemingly random patch of short grass near the edge of a herd of her conspecifics and lay down to labor in earnest. A couple times towards the beginning she tried to stand up as if by walking away she could cancel the whole birth thing. Sorry, mama:

If you look closely, you can see the baby's face. I DO NOT recommend this, and neither does that unfortunate female tommy. We have the same nightmares.

Shortly she accepted her fate and lay on her side, her contractions periodically lifting her legs off the ground:

After a short labor (I have the actual time recorded somewhere), the baby was born! Yay! I was excited, but to the mom it seemed as if the calf was the cereal and the placenta was the prize inside the box. She spent the next few minutes totally ignoring the wriggling new life except to rid it and the ground around it of all traces of blood, membrane, etc:

Nom nom nom

Eating the birth materials is a very adaptive behavior for tommies and other hiders. If you're going to leave your newborn hiding in a bush a half hour after it's born, best not to leave a bloody, smelly appetizer for those predators who would make lunch out of your offspring. A thorough cleaning also helps with bonding by familiarizing mom with baby's scent and stimulating the baby to move for the first time.

Here the mother performs flehmen, a hilarious facial expression made when ungulates and many other animals draw scent stimuli into their vomeronasal organ, which is a sort of "super-smeller" that lets them smell non-volatile chemicals that can't be smelled normally.

Birth materials consumed, mom now seemed to notice her new charge, which had been doing its best to stand, but had only gotten as far as crawling on its front legs and falling on its own face, often aided in this endeavor by mom's insistent grooming:

Oops

The next ten minutes or so was an adorable montage of standing attempts, which were eventually successful:

Standing was followed by the hilarity of the newborn's confusion about where exactly the nipples were located:

But he eventually got that too (albeit not gracefully):

And then, tragedy! Interrupting the adorable Bambi-esque scene of mother-infant bonding came a nefarious interloper:

The warthog hooked the newborn with a tusk and tossed it about ten feet into the air:

At the top of this photo there is a small black dot. This is a part of the calf which has just been tossed up in the air by the warthog.

Brave defense by mom

It then chased mom off, took the now-limp baby in its mouth, shook it violently a few times and then...walked away like it had not done anything strange, as if warthogs are the designated baby-shakers of the savanna and I should not be at all surprised.

But I was surprised. I had never heard of such warthog behavior. Granted, a few time this spring other researchers and I saw warthogs eating carrion and, in one case, harassing a newborn Grant's gazelle and its mother, but it seemed likely that it was just after the placenta. Warthogs are pigs after all and not above scavenging free protein when available. I would in fact have been far less shocked if the warthog actually ate the baby. But it didn't. It just roughed it up and left. Perhaps another short communication paper to come on this. Perhaps I will make my career on one-observation papers. But it was bizarre behavior that I don't really have a good explanation for.

Anyway, as I waited on the edge of my seat, the mother returned to her abused calf, sniffed it, and walked away without a second glance. Even given that walking away without a second glance is what tommy mothers do, and what I watch them do on a regular basis, I was convinced after a twenty minute wait that this mother had actually abandoned her calf. It made sense: the calf was probably injured, possibly dead, and in that case not worth any further investment. There was also the possibility that the warthog had interrupted before the crucial mother-infant bond was formed and that the mother had failed to switch on her motherly behavior.

As the mother walked further and further away, joined a distant group of females and became behaviorally indistinguishable from them, I decided to investigate. I got out of the car and found the fawn (alive) after a short search. I donned gloves and briefly inspected the fawn, feeling for broken bones and searching for puncture wounds or other obvious problems. Nothing. I returned to my car and called Kim, who happened to be in the area. Kim showed up, repeated my inspection and also found nothing. Then we fantasized for awhile about adopting a baby tommy and having a research center mascot. It would have been amazing. I decided though that the most responsible course of action would be to wait and see if the mother came back. After all, that would give the newborn it's best chance of survival. It was mid-afternoon and if she didn't come back by nightfall, we would talk to the vet to see if there was anything that could be done.

Kim left and three hours passed. I spent most of it trying to pick out the new mother from the rest of the female herd. Usually mothers are noticeable in their behavior (more vigilant) and their appearance (udders). But I could not find a female more vigilant than the others and they were too far away to spot udders. Eventually, though, a small subgroup broke off and came up the hill towards my car and the birth site. The group played it cool, lying down some 150 meters from the car. Finally, a familiar-looking female stood up and cautiously eyed me and the birth site. The give-away was a piece of afterbirth hanging from her, which I guess she passed while away and had not yet consumed:

Ever so slowly and cautiously, she moved towards the birth site, pausing every few steps to survey the surroundings (presumably for warthogs). Finally - finally - she reached the calf. She sniffed it and it popped up and everything was as if nothing had ever interrupted them. Sigh of relief. She accepted it and groomed it, and eventually moved off with it so it could pick a new hiding spot.

Once it settled in, she moved off again and began the cycle of active and hiding periods that I spend every day observing. Happy ending!

Still not giving up on alternative nipple locations, though

Soon to be published!

2011-10-07T00:42:00.000-07:00

My first scholarly publication should appear in the coming months in the Journal of Ethology! It's just a short communication detailing the perinatal behavior of a Grevy's zebra mother and foal. I was lucky enough to observe part of a birth at Mpala two years ago and after a couple rounds of revisions, the manuscript is finally accepted.

Below, a photo of the newborn with mom in the background.

Photos Published

2011-09-07T11:23:00.001-07:00

Just a short update (for those of you not following me on facebook, twitter or googleplus) to say that some of my camera trap photos from last spring were published in UK newspapers today. Some corny captions and a couple inaccuracies, but the photos look good! Links:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/picturesoftheday/8744049/Pictures-of-the-day-6-September-2011.html?image=3

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3797667/Peek-ape-boo.html

http://www.metro.co.uk/news/874665-curious-safari-animals-fascinated-by-camera-traps-set-up-to-study-them

Camera Trap Fun

2011-08-29T11:29:00.001-07:00

On Saturday I picked up my first round of camera trap photos. I haven't gone through them all yet (already behind), but I've already got a few good ones:

Typical curious tommy photo

The first time I've gotten a giraffe face close up. Usually I just get knees.

A successful photobomb by Jennifer

While moving traps around, I disturbed this frog that had made its home in one of the steel casings. Safe place, I guess, until I come and mess it up.

I also caught this hyena taking a photo of himself:

Unfortunately, he is not as good as Jennifer at taking photos of himself, and the camera only caught the very side of him. Still, it was cool to see an animal interacting with the camera first hand.

I'll be posting more photos here of course, but check out this link for more camera trap photos and this link for more regular photos between blog posts.

Movin' on up!

2011-08-23T11:50:00.000-07:00

New room

No more tent! On Monday I moved into a room in the main building. Usually I prefer the rooms in the bandas because of their superior temperature modulation and better internet and phone reception, but I am not in a position to be picky. Also, I have far too much stuff to fit in a small banda room and the large banda rooms (where I have spent most of my time) have to be available for couples. So I actually could have moved into my usual banda, but would probably have had to move out in a couple weeks. Moving took a long time, so I would like to do that as few times as possible. Plus, I found a spot where I get internet reception, so I don't have to go outside to send e-mail or update my blog.

The new management put down comforters on all the beds (except the temporary one in my tent), and while I think there are probably more urgent problems (leaking roofs) that should have been addressed first, I have to admit the comforter is very nice.

Jennifer (a second-year student in my lab who works on cattle-wildlife interactions) and Sophie (an undergraduate volunteering for Kim) left yesterday. We had a goat roast this weekend in their honor. We did everything from start to finish, starting with picking and catching our goat from the herd to picking the meat out of our teeth. It was a nice party, although I did not take the loss of sleeping time well, especially on top of the typically poor nights of sleep I got in the tent. I got out to the field reasonably early on Sunday morning, but faded fast. Apologies to my family for being a near zombie on the phone when you called Sunday night.

Nicole in hot pursuit of dinner

We didn't end up buying this goat, but a nice group shot of Nicole, Sophie, Kim & Jennifer

The student group that was here when I arrived left on Saturday morning, but yesterday an Earthwatch group took their place. This group is more than half Chinese, and apparently there are several extremely prominent (wealthy) members of Chinese society in our midst. The leader is the CEO of the Chinese version of North Face, so he brought full outfits for everyone in Earthwatch, including pants, matching shirts, headlamps, and nice windbreakers. I have noticed he has some extra jackets, so I am hoping to luck into one. My charm: turned on.

The Chinese have some very interesting viewpoints. They are thoroughly impressed that I go to Princeton (the university of Albert Einstein, as they have reminded me multiple times). They were also shocked to hear that I have a boyfriend. Apparently, in China, "Girl PhD, no chance for boyfriend." Apparently men without PhDs do not want PhD girlfriends to show them up. Men that do have PhDs are obviously very smart and important, so they can get any girl they want. So why would they want to have a PhD girlfriend when they could have a pretty girlfriend? My attempts to point out that "pretty" and "PhD" are not mutually exclusive were met with the same sort of response that I would expect if I had said something dubious about giant squid: "Sure, I hear they exist, but have you ever actually seen one?" Ahem! Their charm: not as turned on.

Anyway, research has started in earnest, but things are going a bit slowly due to car trouble, moving rooms, the glutting of the research center with so many people, etc. I think things should level out this week though, and I am looking forward to getting a routine going.

Back in Kenya

2011-08-15T10:44:00.000-07:00

After a long trip by way of Atlanta, Amsterdam, Nairobi and Mpala, I am back at Ol Pejeta. Things are a bit crowded at the research center, so for the time being I am living in a tent set up next to the permanent buildings. It's spacious, which is nice, but it gets pretty chilly at night and is pretty dark even in the middle of the day. Obviously no electricity, so I have been charging my electronics and dozens of camera trap batteries in other researchers' rooms. I will hopefully only be in the tent until Friday when the current student group leaves.

The research center has undergone a facelift under new management. New coat of paint, an expanded kitchen and staff dining room tacked on the end. There is also a new house built by Max Planck for researchers coming to work on the chimps. There have been other changes with the new management, but I won't get into those.

Enough about the research center, on to the animals. The game viewing has been mind-bogglingly good since I got here. In six days, I have had four lion sightings, five cheetah sightings, and a leopard sighting (!!). Other sightings of note include a two-week old white rhino, a newborn baby zebra that could barely walk, and many exciting birds, including my first long-crested eagle.

The leopard sighting was the coolest so far, simply because I never see leopards. The two sightings I've had have both been seconds long, just long enough to register, "Hey, that was a leopard". This one was different: the leopard was camped out in a tree right by the road. The lighting was not so great, so my photos right now look like vaguely leopard-shaped blobs among branches, but rest assured they will be up after some adjustments. I watched the leopard for a long time while he picked the perfect spot in the tree and left once he settled in for a morning nap.

Fieldwork-wise, things are getting going. I have all my camera traps out now after a few delays. First I had to get the equipment back in working order, which involved filing down the poles and the pole attachments on the camera casings. Then yesterday I had a leopard-related delay and then lost steering on my car. Getting the steering fixed didn't take nearly as long as I feared, but still kept me from putting all the traps out. I finished up today so tomorrow I am ready to start observations.

I am having some technical difficulties with uploading photos to the blog, so please check out some photos here,

So You Think You Can Burd

2011-05-17T12:16:00.000-07:00

First off, apologies for the radio silence. This last month has been very busy, both work-wise and otherwise. For those of you who are not friends with me on Facebook, I have been posting some photos, which you can see here. Now, onto an overdue post:

Growing up I was never much into birds. Mammals were more my thing, being generally furry, soft, and cute instead of feathered and bedecked with pointy talons and beaks. However, in the last few years my interest in birds has been piqued. It started with the monkey bird feeder I hung on the porch of the condo. It took a couple days for the birds to find it, but once a lone chickadee discovered the smorgasbord it was only a matter of time before the porch was filled with birds: a pair of obese mourning doves that liked to sit in the monkey’s pan, sending showers of seeds to the hopping hordes of round dark-eyed juncos. There were chickadees, titmice, cardinals, blue jays and, every once in a while, an opportunistic red-tailed hawk. I grew fond of my birds and the entertainment they provided outside the sliding glass door.

During my last field season, a few bird species caught my eye. I didn’t have a bird book (cardinal sin for a field biologist, probably), so I could only name those few that I already knew or was able to pick up from people passing through the research center. I admired lilac-breasted rollers, grey crowned cranes, saddle-billed storks, Jackson’s and long-tailed widowbirds, and of course the ubiquitous superb starling. I took photos of them when the opportunity arose, but still didn’t give birds much thought.

Early this March, while the Princeton undergrad field course was here and I was just getting rolling on my research, a large tree next to the research center building was fruiting. Vicky - the de facto teaching assistant for the undergrad course - killed time each day by writing down all the bird species she saw, seeing how many she could get in the few days she was at Ol Pej. This appealed to me on many levels. First, birds are animals and I do adore watching animals. Second, I got to make a list of species. I take perhaps a bit more pleasure than is normal in making lists, so this was very appealing. Third, here was a perfect activity to fill in the five minutes between behavioral samples during my observations. Throw in the challenge of photographing birds well enough to identify them and I was more than sold.

Next trip to town I stopped in at the bookstore and bought “Birds of Kenya & Northern Tanzania”, a Helm field guide. This is my first bird book, so I can’t offer much insight into its quality except to say that the pictures are beautiful and between those, the descriptive blurbs and the range maps, I’ve found the book very useful for identification. Immediately after buying the book I began looking up species as I saw them, marking them with highlighter and a note as to the month and location of the sighting. March was quite easy as I occupied myself with noting all the obvious species: common ostrich, kori bustard, pied crow, speckled pigeon, the aforementioned rollers, etc. In April I slowed down a bit as it got harder to find and ID new species. Going into May I had identified 60 species and set a goal to make 100 before leaving Kenya. Today I got my 100^th bird, Rüppel’s long-tailed starling (and then my 101^st and 102^nd as well). I am way more into this whole birding thing than I ever expected to be and have already ordered an Eastern North American bird guide that should be waiting for me when I arrive home on Monday. Let the life-long hobby begin!

Without further ado, here is my list (so far). More photos coming in a few days when I'm back in the land of unlimited internet.

1. African harrier-hawk

2. African pied wagtail

3. African snipe

4. African spoonbill

5. African white-backed vulture

6. Amur falcon

7. Barn swallow

8. Bataleur

9. Black-headed heron

10. Black-headed oriole

11. Black-lored babbler

12. Black-shouldered kite

13. Black-winged plover

14. Black-winged stilt

15. Blacksmith plover

16. Blue-naped mousebird

17. Bronze sunbird

18. Brown parrot

19. Brown-crowned tchagra

20. Cattle egret

21. Chestnut sparrow

22. Cinnamon-chested bee-eater

23. Collared pratincole

24. Common bulbul

25. Common drongo

26. Common ostrich

27. Crowned plover

28. D’Arnaud’s barbet

29. Egyptian goose

30. Eurasian bee-eater

31. Eurasian hobby

32. Eurasian roller

33. Fischer’s sparrow-lark

34. Grassland pipit

35. Greater blue-eared starling

36. Green-headed sunbird

37. Grey crowned crane

38. Grey heron

39. Grey woodpecker

40. Grey-backed camaroptera

41. Grey-capped social weaver

42. Grey-headed bush-shrike

43. Hadada ibis

44. Hamerkop

45. Helmeted guineafowl

46. Hildebrandt’s starling

47. Isabelline wheatear

48. Jackson’s francolin

49. Kittlitz’s plover

50. Kori bustard

51. Lesser grey shrike

52. Lesser kestrel

53. Lesser striped swallow

54. Lilac-breasted roller

55. Little rock thrush*

56. Long-tailed widowbird

57. Malachite kingfisher

58. Marabou stork

59. Marsh sandpiper

60. Martial eagle

61. Northern anteater chat

62. Pale flycatcher

63. Pied crow

64. Purple grenadier

65. Red-billed oxpecker

66. Red-capped lark

67. Red-cheeked cordon-blue

68. Red-fronted barbet

69. Red-fronted parrot*

70. Red-headed weaver

71. Red-rumped swallow*

72. Red-winged starling

73. Ring-necked dove

74. Rufous sparrow

75. Rufous-naped lark

76. Rüppel’s griffon vulture

77. Rüppel’s long-tailed starling

78. Sacred ibis

79. Secretary bird

80. Scarce swift*

81. Scarlet-tufted malachite sunbird*

82. Shelley’s francolin

83. Silvery-cheeked hornbill+

84. Somali courser

85. Speckled mousebird

86. Speckled pigeon

87. Superb starling

88. Taita fiscal

89. Tawny eagle

90. Three-banded plover

91. Tropical boubou

92. Violet-backed starling

93. Wattled starling

94. White stork

95. White-bellied bustard

96. White-bellied go-away bird

97. White-bellied tit

98. White-browed coucal

99. Yellow-billed duck

100. Yellow-billed oxpecker

101. Yellow-billed stork

102. Yellow-necked spurfowl

*seen in Aberdares National Park

+seen at Trout Tree

Camera trap shenanigans

2011-04-02T05:31:00.000-07:00

While a lot of species seem to be curious about the strange boxes on posts that have appeared on the Ol Pejeta landscape recently, some are more curious than others. This has led to some amusing surprises when I check the traps and go through the photos.

First, a tiny frog has taken up residence in one of the steel camera casings. He seems right at home and not at all bothered when I open the case and remove the camera to check it once a week.

Several times I've returned to check cameras to find the poles less than upright in the ground (yes, even more cock-eyed than they were when I put them in) and loose in their holes. Once this turned out to be due to a cow that apparently grazed straight over the trap, producing this angle:

Another time the trap had caught the attention of one or more young baboons which turned it into a play platform:
Hyenas have been curious about the traps since day one, so I was not surprised to find that a trap I had placed near a den was partially knocked over. More surprising were the toothmarks in the steel casing and brass padlock. Solid metal doesn't seem like a very inviting chew toy.

Once I noticed that an otherwise intact trap was curiously dirty. This was the work of these patas monkeys:

In the last week I have also caught some less meddlesome but very exciting species, including my first lion:
and an aardvark!
Getting an aardvark photo has always been my unofficial motive for camera trapping in the first place (the official motive being my research). They are very nocturnal and spend a lot of their time underground in the holes they dig to search for termites. They are very difficult to see so I was excited when that photo came up on my screen.

Sometimes Nature is Cool!

2011-03-18T12:04:00.000-07:00

As an apology for the traumatizingness of the last post, I offer you these highlights from my latest camera trap collection:

Reticulated giraffe

Black rhino

Tommy calf mid-frolic

Sometimes Nature is Gross

2011-03-18T07:14:00.000-07:00

Ah the rains. They have arrived, quelled the dust, and put a little moisture back in the air and a little green back in the landscape. They have also brought lots of mud, which makes driving a (mostly fun) challenge.

Less exciting than the mud are the bugs. I've started to notice more bugs in the dining area and in my banda. I'm sure this trend will continue. What I hope stops immediately and I never have to experience again is the massive insect orgy that occurred in, on and around (but mostly in and on) my car this morning.

The culprits

I braved the mud from last night's rain to get out to Scott's plain for some observations. I made it and parked near a promising group of female tommies. Not minutes after my car had stopped did I start noticing small black insects flying around outside my window. Within minutes of that, hundreds of them had landed on the windows on one side of my car and the hood, windshield and roof. It sounded like it was raining, so many of them were knocking into the car. As soon as they touched down they began a random search until they encountered another insect or clump of insects, at which point they began fornicating furiously.

Get a room!

I had the window on the other side of the vehicle rolled down so that I could watch out of it and use my rangefinder and camera. As the horde of insects accumulated, I decided it would be prudent to seal the car as best I could (which is not very well since there is a two-inch gap between the window and frame in my back windows. Soon they overtook the other side of the car. In the meantime, my tommy moms had begun some interesting behaviors. I couldn't stop observations on account of the bugs, but I also couldn't continue observations with the windows rolled up. So I rolled one down, only far enough to peer out of. That was far enough though, and in no time the party had moved inside and I had horny insects crawling and doing the deed on my equipment, clothing, legs, and hair. I protested ineffectively by flicking as many as I could.

Eventually my tommy moved far enough away that I had to move the car to keep her in sight. Eager for the possibility of escaping the swarm, I started the car and moved several hundred meters. I hoped that if I could escape the cloud, the insects would stop coming in and I would only have to deal with those that were already inside. No such luck. The bugs seemed attracted to the car and the cloud followed. Worse, the movement of the car seemed to excite them, like a vibrating bed in a cheap motel. They began doing it even more enthusiastically, with more buzzing.

Gross.

After about an hour and a half of this, they all began dying, an endeavor that I encouraged with many well-placed stomps of my shoe (for some reason they congregated in the footwell). By lunchtime, all I had to show for the ordeal was a sprinkling of dead bodies spread throughout my car, an incomplete tommy observation (the bugs had distracted me to the point that I lost sight of her in a herd), and a much less charitable attitude towards small winged invertebrates.

Camera Trap Results

2011-03-15T10:20:00.000-07:00

I retrieved the photos from the camera traps after the first three days of trapping, and I have to say the results are encouraging.

First, only one camera of the eight was too crooked to capture what it needed to. It was tilted such that it was aimed too high, which I discovered when I downloaded a lot of photos of animals' backs and this photo:

Very entertaining, but I really need to be able to photograph animals without them having to stand on their tippy toes. I returned to this camera and lowered it, so hopefully that helps.

Second, I got a wide variety of species: 11 in only three days at 8 cameras. I of course got tommies as well as loads of zebra,

impala,
and warthog.
Rarer captures included giraffe,
Grant's gazelles,
and spotted hyenas (which thankfully did not try to snack on the cameras - a concern even despite the steel casing).
I also got one shot each of cheetah,
white-tailed mongoose,
and a super cool striped hyena, which tends to be a very elusive creature.

In addition to all the wild species, I got more than my share of photos of cattle and sheep. Even some curious cattle herders made an appearance:

Despite all the attention, no cameras were knocked over, mauled, stolen, or otherwise tampered with, which is very encouraging. Tomorrow I will put the remaining two traps out, move a couple around, and hopefully collect some more cool photos to share with you!

Smile for the Camera!

2011-03-11T09:42:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I put eight of my ten camera traps up. The camera traps are intended to give me an idea of the relative activity levels of different predator species in the habitats used by my tommies. As I said in an earlier post, mother tommies’ behavior should vary according to the predator assembly they are dealing with: if there are lots of large predators mothers should prioritize their own safety, but if there are many small predators mothers might spend more time and energy protecting their offspring.

The camera traps are Scoutguard SG550s ($200.00 retail if you want to put one up in your back yard). They are triggered by heat and movement. I have them set so that when they are triggered they take two photos in rapid succession. Then they reset and cannot be triggered for 30 seconds. Hopefully these settings will strike the right balance so that I am getting good photos of my predators without filling up the memory cards when a herd of zebras or cows decides to camp out around it. We’ll see.

Putting the traps up was hard work. I had the steel casings equipped with hardware so that I could mount them on steel poles that I would hammer into the ground. Problem: the ground is hard and I have the arm strength of an infant. The hammering was probably pretty comical. The poles also tended to go slanted if I stopped steadying them with my left hand, which was inevitable because my right arm was spent after about three and a half swings so I always ended up switching to a two-handed pounding approach. I imagine I looked a lot like some primitive and mentally-impaired primate, only less adept:

Blairopithecus hard at work

Most of the poles ended up pretty cock-eyed, but still vaguely oriented to an area where animals might walk.

I think the angle will give the photos an artsy feel

The four that I saw today were still upright also, so that’s a good sign.

Before I left I tested the cameras in the office and in my back yard. I leave you with a couple photos from the tests. Hopefully by my next post I’ll have some more exotic photos to show off. Come on, aardvark!

There, I Fixed It!

2011-03-07T02:55:00.000-08:00

Last Tuesday I went under the hood of my car to check the oil and water levels and generally check that everything was in order. This is something that one should do very regularly when so much of one’s productivity depends on an operable vehicle. When I filled the overflow bottle for the radiator, it leaked profusely onto the ground until it was a quarter full, right where it had started. This wasn’t ideal, but since it was just the overflow and it was holding at least some water, I didn’t feel it needed to be addressed urgently. I had not yet been cleared to get fuel and repairs done at Ol Pejeta’s workshop, Kamok, so I decided I would keep and eye on it and get it done as soon as I was cleared.

On Thursday after an overnight trip to Mpala, I checked on it again in preparation for driving the 30 minutes to town. No bottle. None. It must have jiggled loose and fallen out somewhere between Ol Pej and Mpala. Not being comfortable with the possibility of overheating on my way to town and just having been cleared to get repairs done at Kamok, I postponed the trip to town and got a work order to get the problem fixed. Kamok is about a 20 minute drive away, so I attempted a temporary fix by tying a water bottle in place with a piece of nylon rope. I wasn’t sure the knot was going to hold, but it looked like it would get me to the workshop anyway.

My bottle fell out on the way to Kamok, but I had made it and was eager for a more permanent, professional fix. I spent about two hours in the workshop (they also had to rewire the electrics for the windshield sprayer), at the end of which I had…a plastic bottle tied in place of the real bottle. They didn’t have the actual part on hand, so they had to order it and in the meantime, they jerry-rigged the same solution I had come up with. Granted, they did it a bit more securely than I did, fashioning a pouch out of canvas and tying the whole thing together with strips of old tire tubing. But still! I was pretty impressed with my bush mechanic creativity! Photo of the “solution” below.

Science Lesson

2011-03-06T06:46:00.000-08:00

An explanation of my project is in order for those of you who aren’t familiar with the science behind why I am halfway around the world.

I am studying maternal investment decisions in Thomson’s gazelle, or “tommies”. That is, I am interested in how mother gazelle decide how much to care for their offspring. Some of you likely expect that mothers are naturally caring and pre-programmed to sacrifice anything and everything for the well-being of their progeny. A warm fuzzy thought, but not so in the animal kingdom (or in humans, for that matter! For more on this, see Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s extremely interesting and accessible book, Mother Nature).

A mother’s evolutionary “goal” is to make the largest possible contribution to the gene pool. This is best accomplished by producing a large number of offspring who are highly reproductively successful themselves. Mothers are limited in their ability do to this in two ways. First, time is limiting: mothers only have from the time they reach sexual maturity until the time they die (or reach menopause, in the case of humans and some few other species) to produce offspring. Each offspring produced is also time-consuming: the female must first become pregnant (a quick step in the tommy’s case thanks to ever-vigilant and eager males), then the fetus must gestate (about five and a half months), and finally the female’s body must become receptive to pregnancy again (a relatively short two weeks or so in tommies, much longer in other species that experience lactational amenorrhea). Thus, a female tommy, who will reach maturity sometime between 9 and 12 months of age and, if she is lucky, will live to a maximum of 12 years in the wild, can produce at the very most twenty-two young (tommies give birth only to singletons, so we do not find super-productive Octo-moms).

So we might expect every tommy mother to produce a fawn every six months and invest identically in each fawn such that at the end of her 12 years she has produced the maximum twenty-two offspring. However, a mother is limited in her capacity to invest. According to parental investment theory, investing in one offspring decreases the mother’s (or father’s) ability to invest in other offspring. This decrease in investment ability can come to pass in two main ways: the mother can either suffer a survival cost (i.e. she dies before she can reproduce again) or a fecundity cost (she is alive, but not fertile). For example, a mother investing heavily in her young may attempt to defend it against an attacking predator. This benefits the offspring by increasing its chances of survival, but inflicts a survival cost on the mother by increasing her chances of being killed by the predator. A mother may also invest in her offspring by keeping it in an area of low predator density, as humpback whales, some caribou populations, and many seals do. These areas are often also lacking or completely devoid of food for the mother. Again the investment increases the offspring’s chance of survival, but this time the mother’s fecundity may suffer as a result of her reduced forage intake; she may have to fatten up before reproducing again.

Given that raising young is costly, mothers should be choosy about which young they invest in and how much they invest. So how do they decide? There are many variables that can influence a mother’s level of investment. She may invest more in stronger or older offspring as those are the most likely to make it to adulthood. Or she may invest in weaker or younger offspring because those stand to benefit more from higher levels of investment. She may invest more in one sex that is likely to have higher reproductive success. She may invest more when environmental conditions are favorable such that the cost of investment is lower. There are many predicted patterns of investment, few of which have been demonstrated conclusively or seem to hold true across all species. In my project, I will be examining four possible drivers of maternal investment decisions: predation risk, maternal forage intake, offspring age, and maternal condition.

Ungulate species employ one of two primary maternal care strategies. Horses, camels, rhinos, wildebeest, and caribou (among others) exhibit the “following” strategy wherein the offspring stays with its mother continuously from the time it can walk until it is independent. Tommies, along with all other gazelle, most other antelope and many cervids (deer) exhibit the “hiding” strategy. Hiding is a bit more complex than following. After the young is born and gains its feet, it selects a hiding spot in nearby vegetation. It remains crouched and motionless in this hiding spot for hours until its mother retrieves it, feeds and grooms it, and leads it to another hiding area where it hides again. This process repeats for the duration of the hiding phase, which can last anywhere from one day (in impala) to four months (in bushbuck). For tommies, hiding is intensive for the first two weeks of life and then tapers off until, by two months of age, the fawn no longer hides at all.

While field scientists have often marveled at the infant’s ability to stay more or less motionless for hours on end, waiting patiently for its mother to return, I am more interested in the mother’s side of the equation. It appears that hider mothers have the opportunity to greatly limit the amount of investment required of them and thus raise relatively cheap offspring. Compared to follower mothers, who must constantly monitor their young, be highly vigilant for predators that may target their vulnerable offspring, and endure their infant’s disruptive play, begging and general harassment, hider mothers seem to get off easy. They park their young for hours at a time during which they are free to tend to their own needs (i.e. maintain themselves in order to enable future reproduction). However, rather than leave to seek the safety of groups or lush feeding habitats, mother tommies often hang around near their hiding young, seemingly incurring costs that may reduce their ability to reproduce in the future. The point of this “hovering” as I have come to call it seems to be to enable the mother to intervene in the event of a predator attack. Tommy moms are known to vigorously attack jackals and birds of prey that disturb their young and even try to distract cheetahs and hyenas that come across them.

My primary goals are to determine just how costly hovering is to mothers and to identify drivers of hovering behavior. Do mothers hover only when it is cheap for them in terms of predation risk and feeding costs? Only when the environment is particularly dangerous for their offspring? Some combination of both? To this end I will be spending many hours watching tommy mothers and recording their behavior. I will also record the behavior of non-lactating females. These non-mothers will serve as a baseline against which to compare maternal behavior: they have no offspring to worry about, so their behavior represents the optimal behavior pattern for a female investing completely in self-maintenance. Deviations from this pattern on the part of mothers represent potential costs of maternal investment. In addition to collecting behavioral data, I will be setting up camera traps on the plains on which I am watching the tommies. These camera traps will hopefully capture images of predators that use the plains. Relative densities of predator species will help to contextualize mothers’ behavior: if there are many small predators that threaten tommy young but not adults, one might expect mothers to be more willing to hover (since the predation risk to themselves will be low, but the benefit to their young will be high). However, if the plain is commonly used by cheetahs, which are highly dangerous to adult gazelle, I would expect mothers to behave so as to reduce their own predation risk, perhaps by reducing their investment in their young. The last main component of the project is habitat analysis. I will return to the locations where I observe mothers and young and measure grass height, greenness and leafiness. I will also take vegetation samples from which I will measure various nutritional components. This will help me to determine if mothers are incurring a foraging cost while hovering by confining themselves to suboptimal foraging habitats.

So that’s roughly the project. I will try to go into more detail on particular components as my field season progresses!

Back in Laikipia

2011-02-25T07:51:00.000-08:00

I have made it to Laikipia. Not quite to Ol Pejeta yet, but to Mpala Research Center, which is about an hour away and is Princeton's home base in Kenya. I will spend the night here, pick up and pack my car in the morning and drive to Ol Pej to get settled. I had hoped to go to Ol Pej directly without spending the night here, but my travels were hectic and once I unloaded at MRC I just couldn't make myself get back in the car again.

The trip started well enough. I got to the airport early and made my (only somewhat tearful) farewells to Mike. My flight ended up being delayed 45 minutes or so because the plane was late for whatever reason. Once the aircraft door closed I shut off my cell phone for three months and prepared to take full advantage of the on-demand in-flight entertainment Delta offered. That didn't work out so well. I slogged through The Social Network at half speed, rewinding every 20 seconds because the picture blurred and the sound cut out. By the time I tried to start my next movie, the pictures was nothing but garbled pixels and there was no sound at all. So I slept, curled up in my seat and the empty adjacent one. I woke up about an hour before landing and fiddled in vain with the video controls.

Once the sleep wore off, I checked my boarding pass for the next flight to find which gate I would have to go to. Not listed. What was listed was the boarding time: 9:30am. A glance at the flight tracker on my screen (the only part of the entertainment that worked) told me that we would be landing at approximately....9:15 am. Somehow a 45 minute delay had turned into a 3-hour late arrival and my 4-hour layover in Amsterdam seemed woefully inadequate. I kept an eye on the flight tracker, hoping that perhaps it had overestimated our remaining flight time. "Just kidding!" it would say, "We will actually land with plenty of time for you to stretch your legs, grab some food, and stroll leisurely to your next gate!" Instead, I watched, increasingly distressed, as our pilot did two large, leisurely loops around Amsterdam, the projected landing time climbing to 9:26 before he announced that we'd been cleared to land.

We landed in a fog so thick that the thump of the wheels on the runway took my by surprise: it fully appeared that the plane was still engulfed in cloud. We then proceeded to taxi forever. Apparently Amsterdam's landing strip is located several miles from the airport, or possibly in Paris. What little time I had left to make my plane was dwindling and my hopes of my baggage making the flight were long gone.

When I finally made it into the terminal, I looked frantically for a board telling which gates flights were departing from. There were none. There was one Delta representative with such information, but she was swamped with people asking if it was too late to make flights that left an hour ago. I picked a direction and booked it until I finally found a board that told me my gate was two terminals away. More booking it to the gate where the last of the passengers were going through the at-gate security check for boarding.

I went through the security check, thoroughly unamused when my bag was pulled aside for extra searching. The security guy made a joke when he pulled my extra pair of socks from my bag. I looked at him with daggers in my eyes, annoyed at everyone plane-related. I made it onto the packed flight only to find that the aisle seat I had requested three weeks ago had apparently been given to someone else, leaving me with a dreaded middle seat. An hour delay at the gate gave me a sliver of hope that perhaps my bags would make it on the plane. The rest of the flight was uneventful: sporadic sleep and on-demand entertainment that worked.

We arrived an hour late to Nairobi. The visa process was mercifully quick, although there were a handful of those annoying people who think their time is somehow more valuable than everyone else's and who therefore skipped to the front of the line for some reason justified only in their own minds.

Fifteen minutes at the baggage claim all but confirmed my suspicion that my bags would not be arriving. Unfortunately, it was impossible to get anyone to tell me if more bags were on their way, and there were a lot of people still waiting. Hope kept me waiting for twenty minutes more after which I got in the long line of people reporting delayed luggage. By the time I was done with that, it was almost three hours after I was supposed to have landed and I was afraid my ride would have given up and left. But my name was there on a piece of paper when I walked out and at that point I was so relieved that nothing else mattered. We went to my hotel where I had a late dinner, wrote some emails, took a cold (ugh) shower with my few toiletries, and went to bed around one.

Compared to yesterday, today went very smoothly. My driver and I stopped first at Nyayo house so I could go to the Immigration office and get my pupil's pass stamped into my passport. Then we went to the airport to claim my luggage, which had obediently arrived on a 7 am flight. From there it was straight to Mpala, after pinballing between several gnarly Nairobi traffic jams and finally finding an unobstructed route out of the city. I stayed awake the whole trip, although I did not hold up my end of the conversation with the driver very well.

Now: Mpala, a hot dinner in five minutes, a (hopefully) hot shower thereafter, and an early early bedtime so I can finally get settled tomorrow.

9 Days

2011-02-14T08:09:00.001-08:00

I have nine days until I return to Kenya for another 3-month stint. Preparations are going well, but I still have the requisite nerves about my departure. It helps a lot that this is more or less old hat by now and that I am familiar with my field site and many of my methods. That consolation only goes so far when faced with a three-month absence from home though!

I have a couple new project components that I will describe in more detail once I get to the field and start blogging in earnest. For now my main difficulty is that I have acquired 10 camera traps, each requiring a heavy steel case, multiple batteries, battery chargers & assorted other accessories. Total weight of this new equipment is a whopping 40 lbs. I have a 2x70 lb-bag luggage allotment on Delta (thank you Silver Medallion) in which to pack that equipment and just about everything else I'll need for three months. We'll see how this goes!

To celebrate my return to the blog and imminent return to the field, I present you with the following diagram of a Thomson's gazelle as seen after a long field trip. Image is courtesy of the immensely clever and charming Mike Costelloe. See more of his work at www.mikecostelloe.com.

Roommates

2010-06-12T10:32:00.000-07:00

Living in a banda (basically a circular hut with a thatched roof), I have grown accustomed to bugs and spiders as ever-present roommates. I simply move my bed away from the wall so that when the spiders descend at night they do not do so on my face and avoid walking around without shoes on.

However, lately my roommates have become a bit more substantial. Most of them are frogs and toads. It was just toads at first and they were fairly cute. I tried shooing them out the door or catching them and releasing them, but there are many of them. As soon as I shoo one out, I find two more hopping around. I would say I average four toads in my banda at any given time. The frogs are a little more bothersome, only because their skin is wet so in their travels around my room they collect all the dust, dirt and old spider webs behind the furniture and along the walls (it is best to keep at least 6 inches away from the walls at all times). They are also clumsier and floppier with their big webbed feet so they make a lot of noise.

One night I finally gave up on shooing them out and decided to embrace them, figuring they were probably making a dent in the bug and spider population. The next morning when I was preparing to put my shoe on, a toad jumped out onto my chest, causing me to make a noise I hope to never utter when there are people around to hear me. Despite this incident, it is far easier to leave my shoes on my chair at night than to endlessly shuttle frogs and toads out of my banda.

Today I returned from the field at lunch to find my suitcase outside in the driveway. I had no idea what that was all about until I went into my banda and it was clear that it had been mopped. I figured the cook had moved it out to keep it off the wet floor. Sort of. The cook had only mopped because when he was sweeping he smelled something and upon moving my suitcase found a deceased frog. His English and my Swahili are both poor, so I am unsure if he found my corpse under or inside my suitcase, but I prefer to think it was under. This incident has caused my to regard these pets more warily, but still there are like a billion of them so I can't really keep them out. I am just making sure my bags are zipped.

In the last couple nights I have also sighted a shrew. I first saw the shrew a couple days after moving into my banda when it ran across the bathroom and into a hole in the wall. Since then he has become more bold and this morning I watched him for a good ten minutes as he crept along the wall and among my shoes snatchig up spiders and eating them. All in the full beam of my flashlight. The shrew does not fear me, clearly. He is cute though, and I actually saw him doing his part to rid my banda of spiders, so he can stay so long as he doesn't decide to die in any of my belongings. Hear that shrew? He's behind my chest of drawers at the moment. I am currently taking suggestions for names. My favorite will be given to the shrew and all runners-up will be assigned to frogs and toads.

One for the Birds

2010-05-28T10:11:00.000-07:00

I figure it is time to join Corinne and Jenny and put up some bird photos (or "birdie pickies" as Dan once amusingly referred to them).

This field season I have found the avifauna particularly eye-catching and intriguing. There are many, many varieties of birds here and I encounter a few in particular every day. Unfortunately, my knowledge of birds and my ability to identify them is pathetic, so I can't tell you many of the names, and most of the names that I will provide were told to me weeks ago and I didn't write them down so I may have gotten them wrong. Apologies to those who know better, and feel free to correct me.

First there are the weavers that live in a dense colony in the one fever tree here at the research center. They have woven dozens of gourd-shaped nests, many of which currently hang in the branches like Christmas ornaments, but most of which seem to be rejected and end up scattered on the ground below. They are yellow, and pretty, but I don't have a satisfactory photo yet.

There are many other birds that live around the research center. The most annoying are probably the doves that hang out on the banda roofs and call loudly, usually at 5:30, a half hour before I wake up. Other birds call in the morning as well, and it is by their calls that I can tell, when I wake up and it is still dark, if it is nearly time to get up or if I have a couple more hours of sleep.

My favorite research center bird is the roller (I think...possibly the lilac-breasted roller?). Such a gorgeous and cute bird! As my possibly made up name suggests, its chest is lilac and then the rest of it is a patchwork of deep blue, turquoise, burnt orange, gold, black and probably some other colors. There are one or two that show up periodically at the center and I feel lucky every time I see one. The photo below was taken out in the field.

Another of my long-time favorite birds is the crowned crane. It is elegant, as cranes tend to be, with a puff of gold feathers on its head. I remember first seeing one of these at the Louisville Zoo one summer during Zoo Camp. I was definitely a mammal girl even back then, but this bird caught my eye and when it came time to decorate t-shirts with puffy paint, I painted a crowned crane. Here is a crane I managed to capture in flight. It spotted a cheetah I was photographing and landed near it (but not too near) and proceeded to announce its presence to all of the would-be prey by calling loudly, hopping up and down, and flying quick circles above it. Very amusing to watch.

I have no idea what the next bird's name is, but it is a constant presence out in the field. I think they are ground-nesting birds. I first noticed them because they are always along the road when I am watching tommies, but it wasn't long before I noticed that the tommies were particularly vigilant to their alarm calls. These birds freak out whenever jackals (or humans, eagles, or other predators) are present and since tommies, especially fawns, are also vulnerable to jackals the tommies tend to pay attention when these birds speak up. Because I am interested in jackal-tommy interactions, I have also found myself looking around for the offending predator when I hear the birds' shrill cries.

Finally there are the ostriches. Enormous, gangly birds. I hadn't given ostriches much thought before this field season, but I am developing a mild dislike of them. They seem to be intent on disrupting my behavioral observations as they constantly walk between me and my subject animals and stop right in my line of sight. This happens with a suspiciously high frequency given the relatively low numbers of ostriches about. I think they do it on purpose. Besides their attempts to sabotage my research, they are just weird-looking. And not just because they have ridiculously long legs and necks. I think all of the features I find unappealing on them I would probably also find unappealing on any other bird, if those features were large enough for me to see them on other birds. Ostriches just take everything and make it way too big. In their favor I will say that their mating dances are amusing and it is eternally fascinating to me that you can actually see whatever they swallow travel all the way down their necks.

In non-bird news, research is going well, but is slowing down as of late because, well, the births are slowing down. The hartebeest have not really been productive since I got here, but the tommies were at first and now have died down. Both species are supposed to be year-round breeders and birthers with pronounced peaks near the rains. I think with last year's severe drought though, even these fairly drought tolerant species stopped cycling. According to Ol Pej's hartebeest monitoring data, hartebeest infants are about half as abundant as usual. I suspect I am seeing few non-peak tommy mothers because of the drought as well: if they stopped cycling and conceiving during the drought last year and then all started up again when the rains came, this year should be particularly synchronized for births, meaning that I am now running short on moms to watch. I am still out there every day watching moms with older infants and non-lactating females and am constantly on the lookout for new moms. I just don't see them. Nothing to do but to keep trying.

Vegetation Work

2010-05-16T07:14:00.000-07:00

This week I was finally able to start whittling away at my vegetation work. I had previously been waiting for the armed guard assigned to the research station to return from his time off, but when it turned out that he was getting back on May 19 and not May 10 as I'd been told, I was assigned an unarmed guard, John. Since I am working mostly in wide-open plains, the gun probably isn't very necessary. Mostly I need someone to keep an eye out for any buffalo that might unwittingly creep up on me while I am crouched in the grass. Since you can see everything coming from far off on the plains there was little chance of a surprise encounter and so little need for a gun. But I should have the regular armed guard next week.

The purpose of the veg work is to detect differences in habitat selection among females of different states (mothers vs non-mothers and mothers with older infants versus newborns). At the beginning of my focal observations I record the location of the female by taking a GPS point where I am in the car and then measuring the distance to the focal animal with a rangefinder and the bearing from the car to her with a compass. Then I return later, park the car at the GPS point and follow the compass the necessary distance until I am (approximately) in the same spot the female was in when I watched her. Starting from this point, I study the vegetation along a 25 meter transect. Every meter I poke a thin metal pin into the ground and then count how many leaves and stems are touching the pin. I also note whether the stems and leaves are green or brown and measure the height of the tallest piece of veg in contact with the pin. I have helped with other much slower transects for which the species of each piece of vegetation had to be identified. I am glad that that level of detail is beyond my needs.

I also try to characterize the hiding spots of infants I observe. I note the spots during my focal observations and then return later with a 50x50cm piece of cardboard I've colored in 10x10 black and white squares. I think put the cardboard in the hiding spot and take photos of it at 2, 5, 10, 25, and 50 meters away. I take a photo from my knees, to imitate the viewpoint of a cheetah, and one from a low crouch, to imitate the viewpoint of a jackal. By looking at the pictures and estimating how much of the grid is covered, I can figure out how hidden the infant was in that spot. Since the grass is so high, I've had a harder time finding infant hiding spots than I expected, so I've only done a few of these so far.

My first day of veg work was Wednesday. John and I went out at 7 am. I had donned Nathan's canvas snake leggings, which he had left at Mpala, for the occasion. They were slightly large, but they did the job. I think it's fairly unlikely that I will run across a snake, but better safe than sorry. The morning started out really well. It was nice to be out of the car, walking around, and getting to know the landscape in a different way. I saw many interesting insects and butterflies I just wouldn't notice from the car. The morning was cool and pleasant, despite that I was soaked from the knees down within ten minutes due to the dew and the previous night's rain.

Around 9:30, the sun came out in earnest. It got hot very quickly. Somewhere around my 7th transect I started to get head rushes when I stood up because I had spent so much time squatting and because my water intake was fairly low. As in none. I have a lot to carry on the transects (meter stick, pin, notebook, GPS, rangefinder, compass) so the water bottle stayed in the car. At just before 1 I finished my eleventh transect. I had hoped to complete around ten all day, so I was really happy to find that my pace was quicker than expected. I returned John to the staff camp and rushed home for lunch.

When I got out of the car, the consequences of my productive morning began to assert themselves. I quickly downed almost a full pitcher of water at lunch and polished off a ton of food. Then I noticed that my legs felt like lead and the balls of my feet felt like I'd pounded them a few hundred times with a hammer. I began silently cheering on the approaching rain clouds: if it was raining I couldn't go out for more in the afternoon because my notebook would get soaked. Happily, the rain came just in time and I arranged with John to put off the next veg session until Saturday morning and then went out to do focal work.

The next two days were agony for my legs. 11 transects equates to 275 low squats, which was a little more than I was prepared for after a month and a half of no lower body excercise beyond operating the pedals of my car and walking between places to sit. My legs objected to any and all movement and my quads absolutely refused to hold my weight past a certain angle. Sitting down in chairs became a sort of free fall punctuated by groans and yelps instead of a controlled descent. When I had to step up or down to go in and out of buildings, I looked like I'd just had both my hips replaced.

Things had not improved by Saturday morning, but out I went. After the first few agonizing pin drops my body decided to relent a bit and I loosened up. I was still making funny noises and half-falling over at points. John watched the show amusedly while enjoying his mid-morning cigar(?!?). He probably thought I deserved it for dragging him out there so I could fiddle with grass and photograph cardboard all morning. Still, I made it through the 8 transects and four photo points I wanted to get done, so it was a good morning.

All in all, I do enjoy the veg work. It's a break from my normal routine and a chance to actually interact with the ecosystem instead of just observing from my wheeled bubble. Also I've somehow avoided getting any ticks so far, which helps. I am still moderately sore but yesterday's work seems to have taken the edge off. Hopefully if I can make this a regular activity I won't have to suffer the soreness from here on out.

Little Big Cats

2010-05-09T10:51:00.000-07:00

I had a pretty amazing sighting this evening. Benoit and I had gone over the Sweetwaters Tented Camp staff camp to get some Tuskers from the staff store. When we got there we had to wait a half hour because the store clerk was playing in an evening soccer game and no one else had the shop key. We were troubled by the delay at the time, but it turns out it was for the best. On the way home with our crate of Tusker in hand, the car headlights picked up a dark spot in the road ahead. We kept going, expecting whatever it was to move, but soon got close enough to see that it was not the usual hare or guinea fowl. There were two of them and at first I thought they were genets - large genets - but as soon as Benoit said "Leopard cubs!" it was clear. They were a mottled dark brown color, their spots not yet clearly developed, and their eyes shone a light blue-grey in the car headlights. The closer one gave us a miniature hiss before the two scampered off into the bushes by the road. We didn't have a light (or a camera) with us, so finding them or their mother was impossible. Nevertheless, we were elated with our 15-second sighting and totally forgot the hassle of the delay with the beer. It's amazing that I spend most of my time here out in the field hoping and looking for cool sightings, but the best one so far comes out of pure luck when I am not even looking for it!

Movin' On Up

2010-05-08T23:16:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, as my companions here at the research center were beginning to leave, I got to move into one of the double bandas they vacated. I was looking forward to it: it would be nice to have more space and hopefully more furniture in which to store my stuff. The small set of shelves and desk in my small room were overcrowded and cluttered. Also, the double banda has an attached bathroom, which is especially nice if you have to get up to go in the middle of the night.

I am not sure exactly what I expected, but it wasn't this. There is more furniture: I have a bedside table with some storage, a desk with more drawers, and a big cabinet with hangers. There is an attached bathroom with a sink, a toilet and a shower. I probably won't use the shower since they are currently only heating the water in the more public showers in the research building. My bed is bigger and, most importantly, the mattress still has some life to it. It's a foam mattress, so by morning when I've slept the whole night in the same spot, I've sunk down so I can feel the bedboards, but it's cushy when I first get in and am falling asleep. My pillow is better too!

The strangest part of my new accommodations is the space. The room is massive and the furniture does not even begin to fill it. There are four lightbulbs in the whole place, and two small windows, so it is usually fairly dark. With the concrete floor, the space, and the low lighting, I feel like I am sleeping on a dancefloor or something. The room definitely does not feel like it was designed to be a bedroom. There are also bugs. Many more bugs than in the smaller room. They tend to stick to the walls though, and since there is room for all of the furniture to be pulled out slightly from the wall, the bugs haven't been a big problem. That is, except for the first night which was after a big rain that brought a lot of bugs out. It was difficult to sleep that night.
So while I think I prefer the coziness and relatively bug-free atmosphere of the smaller banda, given the length of my stay the big banda is definitely the way to go. Having the attached sink and toilet is excellent and falling into a comfy bed after my long days in the field is a blessing.

In other news, a new researcher has arrived. He is very welcome, since I was mildly dreading spending the month alone. His name is Robin and he is British, doing a Masters at a University in London (I forget which one). His father is a diplomat in the foreign service and is currently stationed in Nairobi. Robin is doing some predator monitoring, mostly of lions and hyenas. Benoit, the last of the guests who was here when I arrived, has ten more days left in the country and may or may not be spending most of them at the coast. So I have a small group of friends, and come June at least Lisa the undergrad and Jennifer the new grad student will be coming to join us. So I have gained some privacy with my new accommodations, but am spared the solitude of being at the research center alone.

As a side note, I am working with Mike's sister Kate to promote the products of Kolo, the company she works for. They make high-quality photo albums and scrapbooks and a neat little travel journal called the Essex. I have an Essex here with me, so I send periodic updates for the Kolo blog at http://www.koloist.com/ showing how I am using the journal on my trip. Check it out for more photos and snippets about my travels and research, and check out Kolo's excellent products.

Derby Day

2010-05-01T05:52:00.000-07:00

The first Saturday in May. I should be in Louisville, wearing a big hat, perhaps a sundress, and drinking a mint julep. Instead, I am in Kenya, dressed in clothes that seem to be increasingly composed of dirt. I have just eaten a Snickers bar though, which was nice (but not as nice as a julep). Had I thought of it I probably could have traded my left arm for some bourbon in town, but I am not sure I'd be able to find mint, even if I'd been willing to part with my right arm as well. Sigh.

A quiet end to a busy week: Fieldwork all week except a whirlwind trip to Mpala on Wednesday to see Stephanie and pick up some things. I was supposed to work this afternoon, but there was torrential rain during lunch and even after I waited an hour for things to dry out attempting to get to my field site was like trying to drive through pudding. I got to watch all of my animals this morning (although not all for quite as long as I'd like), so this afternoon is not a big loss, and I am really appreciating the unexpected opportunity for relaxation.

This week also saw the departure of the rest of the research center residents. One left Wednesday, another a 5 this morning. The third is gone for the weekend, will be back for a day or two, gone for another four days, and then back for a couple before going for good. After that, I have no expected company, as far as I know, until June. It should be a productive month!

I am not up to date on my Derby news, but Mike sent me the most important information: the horses' names and silk colors. He even threw in a couple sentences of performance description from the Courier-Journal's website. My pick is American Lion for what should be obvious reasons. Hopefully next year I will be able to watch the race in person, or at least on TV. Oh well. For now, I leave you with photos of the closest thing I've got here to a horse and American Lion's mascot:

Meet Hank

2010-04-28T01:37:00.000-07:00

On my past trips to Kenya, I have driven some interesting cars. The first year, there was the intrepid, decrepit Suzuki that Corinne and I nicknamed Twiga ("giraffe" in Swahili) due to its resemblance to a giraffe carcass we saw on our first trip in the car. Twiga was very little more than a tin can with wheels, but it ran faithfully and gamely tackled every obstacle it encountered.

Last year there was The Matatu, Dan's white pop-top tourist van. While miles above Twiga in terms of comfort, The Matatu had its own issues: no four-wheel drive, very low clearance, a steadily worsening oil leak that eventually required a refill every two days, and an increasing unwillingness to start in the mornings without a lengthy push-start by five or so Ol Pej security workers. Add to this the ridiculousness of me driving an entire van for just myself and the constant hassle of being mistaken for a tourist van that had found something interesting to watch, and I would prefer to drive Twiga any day. But I take what I can get and regard the problems generally with amusement rather than frustration.

This year, I once again have a new ride, graciously purchased for me by Dan. I cannot overstate how thankful I am for this purchase, as it has saved me from being stuck with the Matatu (whose engine was entirely rebuilt since last summer and apparently runs fine, but still lacks four wheel drive and clearance and is generally an unwieldy field vehicle). I knew this car, a red Suzuki Maruti, from last year as it previously belonged to Stefan, who went to Ol Pej with me last summer and studied Grant's gazelle. While I was recruiting people to help push-start my giant white van in the morning, Stefan was motoring effortlessly away to begin his fieldwork. To say I coveted Stefan's car is an understatement. I first drove the car three weeks ago when I left Mpala for Ol Pej. To my delight, it ran beautifully and got me to Ol Pej with no problem. I spent the hour-long drive contemplating the car's name, and by about halfway it was clear that its name is Hank. Hank is simple, with no frills, but friendly and accessible.

In the past three weeks I have spent probably as much time with Hank as I have asleep and have gotten to know his various quirks quite well. First, Hank is not a morning person. I have to choke him a bit to get him started in the morning, but after that initial coaxing, he runs fine the rest of the day. Hank's tires are balding, which makes for interesting adventures when it gets muddy. I was wary of going out during or directly after rainstorms for fear of the mud, but I was assured that it is nearly impossible to get a Maruti stuck because of its light weight and good four-wheel drive and that if I did manage it somehow, all I had to do was call the Ol Pej Control office and a truck would come pull me out. It turns out that all of the Maruti's mud-proof qualities are negated by tires with too little grip. I got stuck two Fridays ago without even lodging my wheel in a hole. I just did not have the grip to motor through the slick mud and once I lost momentum I was done. Control came to pull me out, scoffed that I wasn't even stuck, but conceded that maybe I had been right to call when they couldn't get me going without using another truck to haul me out. They blamed the tires, but aside from this one stuck incident and some slipping and sliding after it rains, I really can't complain too much.

Last year I was amazed when Stefan told me Hank's tape player worked and that he could play his iPod through a tape hook-up. I brought my tape hook-up this year and after some fiddling, found that the stereo does indeed work, but that the volume for some reason does not get high enough to be of any real use. Perhaps some more fiddling will fix this problem, but looking at the stereo, which is barely attached to the rest of the car and constantly jiggles loose from its casing, I think I should consider myself lucky to have achieved the functionality I have.

Hank's grey hard top is technically removable, although I am not sure quite how. I think it would be amusing to motor around with the top off at some point, but the difficulty of removing it and, I'm sure, replacing it as well as the exposure to the elements probably makes the effort not worthwhile. Removing the top would probably also be the only way to get more dust in the car than there already is.

True to the Suzuki name, Hank has all the shock absorption of a cardboard box and rough roads can be quite jarring. The windows don't quite close all the way anymore, and when it rains, water leaks onto my feet through a mysterious hole by the clutch pedal. The backseat is very high up for some reason, so that passengers cannot even see out their windows, and there are a handful of unexplained noises that periodically issue from various parts of the car. By my American standards, Hank is a heap of junk. But by my field standards, Hank is awesome and perfect. He gets me from A to B with very little hassle and is generally comfortable to sit in hour after hour while watching antelope. What more can I ask for?

Big Cats

2010-04-16T11:08:00.000-07:00

Zebra Plain, where I've been watching my tommies, has been the place to be the last couple of days. Yesterday afternoon when I arrived after lunch I noticed that the ungulates were more clumped to one side of the plain than usual and were a bit jumpy. Things were also unusually quiet: usually the buffalos are grunting and the zebras are making a commotion as they chase each other around. It didn't take much effort to figure out what was up.

Many ungulates exhibit "fascination behavior" when they detect a predator which involves not running away but rather staring at and even approaching or following it so as to keep and eye on it. Gazelle are faster than all their predators except for cheetahs, so as long as they know where the threat is and are not surprised, they can generally escape with ease. Even cheetahs typically must get within a certain distance of their prey undetected to be successful at killing it, so by keeping tabs on the predator, the prey avoids a surprise attack and is relatively safe.

Thus by following the gaze of a group of fixated hartebeest I was able to find the cause of the ungulates' strange behavior: two cheetahs, a mother and a nearly full-grown cub, were crouched in the grass, with just their heads peeking out. I watched for awhile, but they were a fair ways off and all I could see where the tops of their heads. I snapped some pictures and headed to the end of the plain where all my study animals were grouped.

As evening approached, I finished up for the day and started heading back. I checked for the cheetahs on my way, figuring that they had probably moved on since it had been several hours and all the prey on the plain knew to avoid them. Not so! I spotted the cub near a small bush about twenty meters off the road. Soon mother's head popped up in the grass nearby. It was clear that she held out some hope of snagging and unsuspecting meal, since she was well-hidden in the grass, surveying the distant herds. However, junior was bored and not cooperating. While his mother tried to keep a low profile, he stalked and pounced at birds, gnawed on the branch of the bush, and generally made his presence known. He ran up and pounced on his mom, who gave him a bite on the head to get him to pipe down. He caught on to his mother's plan at this point, but proceeded to botch things up anyway: a group of zebra with a young foal crossed the plain a couple hundred meters away from the cheetahs. They were way too far away for the cub to hope to catch the foal, but he tried anyway with only a half-hearted attempt at stealth. As he sprinted towards them and they ran easily away, his mother sat up in the grass, giving up. The cub got another bite on the head when he returned and mom flopped down out of view in the vegetation. I had gotten many excellent shots, but junior decided to help me out some more. He approached my car until he had about halved the distance between us and sat there modeling for me for about ten minutes, until the light was too low for photos and I just sat and watched.

This morning I set out bright and early and as soon as I arrived on Zebra Plain I spotted two lions. I had seen lionesses before, and gotten some good pictures, but had never gotten a good look or photo of a male lion. Here was my chance: it was a female and a male with a big dark mane. They were in a hurry to be somewhere, so I only got a handful of photos, but as far as I was concerned that was a great start to the morning. Things got even better when, continuing on, I found another lioness and two tiny cubs on a small unidentifiable carcass. These were less obliging than the cheetahs and stayed mostly hidden in the grass, but I got some good photos and got to watch them for awhile before the lioness got antsy and moved the cubs a bit further off the road.
Remarkably, none of the tourists who are constantly passing by during my focals and even interrupting to ask if I've seen lions or rhinos or cheetahs were around for these sightings, save for a carful that stopped by the cheetahs as the light was fading. It was nice to be able to enjoy these amazing moments quietly by myself.

Home Sweet Home for the Next Three Months

2010-04-14T03:29:00.000-07:00

Now that I have gotten my modem working, I am back to hopefully semi-regular blog updates. Last Wednesday the insurance sticker finally came for my car. After another short delay (the latch on the back door was stuck, so that had to be fixed) I was on my way to Ol Pejeta. I had no idea what to expect really; I had arranged for a place to stay, but I was supposed to have arrived two days earlier and my emails about my delay had gone unanswered. I did not know if there would be others there, if I would have to go into town for food immediately, if I would be able to get fuel at the conservancy, if the roads would be mush because the entire conservancy is on the soupy black cotton soil.

I arrived with no trouble on the roads and was greeted inside Ol Pejeta’s gate by an elephant that literally trumpeted my arrival when I passed (not even that close!) in my car. I found the research station buzzing. It was full to capacity and they had to set up an extra room for me. There were several people here who were working with the chimps in the Sweetwaters Sanctuary and there was a big group of people here to help with the release into the conservancy of several Northern White Rhinos from the Czech Republic. There were also a couple people that were doing marketing work for Ol Pejeta. I was relieved that I would not be going it alone, although the glut of people forced me into the room that opened onto the dining room, right next to the kitchen. Since the dining room is the only room at the research station that is not a bedroom, whenever people were awake and not out in the field, that’s where they were. Since the door to my room was a visual barrier only, whenever anyone else was up, so was I because of the noise. This was particularly unfortunate the first night, when I, struggling with the last of my jetlag, tried to turn in at 9:00, but instead listened to the Czechs discuss their photos from the day until 11:30. Then at 4:15 the first of the groups were up to head to Lewa for the day. I tried to go back to sleep, but ended up lying in bed fighting bugs until I finally got up at 6:15.

Ah yes, the bugs. I tend to prefer the tent-style housing of Mpala’s river camp to banda housing for several reasons, one of which is that tents are much better at keeping bugs out. It is currently beetle season apparently. Hundreds of small golden-colored beetles inhabit the research station. They are fairly innocuous during the day, but at night they are attracted to light, and if there is none, they fly about frantically trying to find some. There were many such beetles in my room by the kitchen. The only light in the room when I closed the door came in from the top of the door and cast a beam on the wall above my bed. The beetles for some reason were not attracted to the actual light source (which would have lured them out of my room and into the kitchen) but rather to the strip of light over my head. They would make their buzzing, bumbling way over to this strip, collide full-on with the wall, and fall buzzing into my hair and face. Any dead beetles that fell to the floor were soon swarmed by tiny black ants, which was also mildly unpleasant, but not too obtrusive. There was also an abundance of spiders, including one silver-dollar sized one that inhabited the corner opposite my bed. The only thing worse than having that spider there would have been trying to get rid of it, so it got a stay of execution provided it stayed in its corner, which it did. After my first night, I spent a few minutes before bed searching for and destroying golden beetles. Other bugs, such as the spider and a giant moth, were inspected and urged to remain quiet and out of my bed corner. This worked fairly well and after the first night, I mostly only had to deal with the late nights and early mornings of the other research station inhabitants.

A couple days ago, some of the rhino people left and I was able to move to one of the outdoor bandas. It’s not one of the nice double ones that I think are four times the size and meant for double occupancy, but it does have a full-sized bed, a small desk and a set of three shelves for my stuff. The bed is big, yes, but the mattress is thinner than most bathmats and the pillow has the approximate consistency of gravel. I can make do with the mattress, but I have been sleeping with my fleece folded over the pillow to try and make it softer and less lumpy. Next time I go into town the first order of business will be to find a new pillow. There are many fewer bugs in my banda, which is wonderful, and I am generally satisfied with the accommodations except for the pillow. In about a month and a half, the people inhabiting the double bandas will depart and I hope I will have the option of moving in, mostly to satisfy my curiosity about what they are like.

Hurry Up and Wait

2010-04-05T23:55:00.000-07:00

Yesterday my goal was to get my car and get to Ol Pejeta. But that wasn't going to happen until 8 or 9 am, and a group of Masters students from University of Leeds needed an extra pair of eyes in their van for a morning ungulate transect. They were driving a 14 km loop along the river, up to the airstrip and back to MRC, counting and recording locations of ungulates along the way. I was eager to see Mpala in all of its green glory, not to mention check up on the state of the ungulate populations, so I volunteered. They were leaving at 6:30 and expecting to be back by 9:30 so that would leave plenty of time to get the car and get to Ol Pejeta early in the day.

We didn't see much of interest on the transect, but the greenness was amazing in its own right. I proved to be useful in the identification of species and genders and had a good time. When we got back to MRC, I sought out Joseph, who told me that my car was in fine mechanical condition, but had no insurance sticker. The sticker should be here Wednesday. Great. If I drove without insurance and the police stopped me I could be arrested, so in the interest of avoiding African jail, I am grounded until Wednesday. There is little I can do here to prepare for Ol Pejeta, so I am stuck spinning my wheels. I read a bit, dithered around on the internet and generally hung out. In the evening, I went on another ungulate transect with Leeds. Again, nothing of particular interest. No young babies, which I am trying not to worry about. Same thing for the transect this morning, although there were a

couple solitary females, which are promising baby-wise. I am re-honing my ungulate spotting ability, which will be helpful at Ol Pej, but not being able to get anything done is frustrating.

In other news, elephants have been causing mischief around the center. The first evening I was here, I was in the library sending email before dinner. There was another girl in there with me who left about ten minutes before I did. When I left it was very dark and I had forgotten to bring a flashlight. I walked hurriedly towards the dining hall and got about halfway before I was met by an askari (guard) who was alarmed because I had walked within ten meters of an elephant that was browsing calmly on the nearby greenery. Apparently there were elephants all over the Mpala lawn, but no one had bothered to tell me or check the other buildings for unaware people. Great. The girl who had left before me told the askari that I was still in the library, but he didn't do anything about it. Wonderful. Luckily everything turned out alright and I have a permanent mental note to not forget my flashlight again. We watched the elephants grazing on the lawn for awhile before dinner.

Yesterday evening there was more elephant trouble. I returned from the evening transect eager to freshen up a bit before dinner, so I walked back to my banda. When I emerged to go to the washroom to wash my face, I noticed three or four elephants coming out of the woods right for the washroom (or rather, the basins of water behind the washroom). I decided to forgo the facewashing and booked it to the dining hall, where I found some others who were living in my building cluster and an askari. The askari drove us up to the bandas where there were now at least a dozen elephants, all but one of which were directly in front of my door. A little revving of the engine got them to move off, but I was stuck in my room until the askari returned to fetch me for dinner. When I arrived at dinner some of the elephants had taken up their place on the Mpala lawn and we watched them again before dinner.

While I was confined to the bandas, I decided to take a shower. Easier said than done. There was not enough water flow to allow me to get water out of the shower head. I could only get it from the thigh-high faucet. So ensued a bent-over head washing and an awkward series of contortions to get myself lathered up and rinsed. Somehow, despite the miniscule amount of water (inexplicable given the amount of rain that apparently has fallen) and the abundance of sun yesterday to bake the solar panel, the water did not even approximate warm. Oh well. I was cleanish and it was probably worth the effort.

This morning's attempt at cleaning myself was less successful. I just wanted to wash my face before heading out for a transect. I wet my face and lathered it up and then found that I could get no more water from the sink. Not even with both handles turned on full blast. No water from the shower either. Rats. I wiped the soap off with a towel and used a handful of water from my water bottle to rinse a little. So much rain! Why no water? Perhaps because the elephants drink it all.

There is a slim chance that my insurance sticker may arrive today, but I am not getting my hopes up. It looks like another day of reading and emailing, dithering and waiting. I will probably look back longingly at these low-key days once I get into the full swing of my research (at least I hope I will be that busy!)

Hopefully my next post will come from Ol Pejeta!

Safe & Sound

2010-04-04T07:04:00.000-07:00

I have finally made it to Mpala! The trip was long but relatively free of set-backs compared to what I was prepared for. The only snafu was a possible block or cancellation on my debit card due to my activities in London, but it looks like I will be able to get that resolved with little problem.
The flight to London was unexpectedly short: only 6 1/2 hours compared to the 8 I expected. I suppose it is closer than the rest of Europe. Unfortunately, this meant I didn't get as much sleep as I expected. They kept the cabin lights on for about the first hour and a half and the last hour, which made it impossible to sleep during that time. All told I think I got to Heathrow with three or so hours of broken up sleep. The plane was a bit late getting in, which, combined with some confusion about how to navigate the Tube, resulted in my being about 20 minutes late to meet Caroline and her friends. They were still waiting though, so we were united and off to the British Museum soon enough.

The British Museum was very cool. I am still shocked that it is entirely free and open to the public. It truly is the museum of stuff the Brits stole from everywhere else. It was very cool seeing some of the stuff, like the Rosetta Stone, but for a lot of the artifacts it was just a shame that they could not be seen in the proper context. The best examples of this I think were some of the Egyptian and Greek statues. Some of these things were massive and imposing even in the sterile museum. I can only imagine that they must have been even more so in their intended context. But an impressive museum nonetheless.

From the museum, we found a lunch spot where I had a delicious burger with prosciutto & avocado as my last meal in the Western world, and then hopped the Tube to go see Big Ben, Parliament & Westminster Abbey. This is when I found out that my card wasn't working and started to stress & panic a bit. Luckily I was able to send a couple emails to Mike and Mom to see if they could contact the bank, Caroline lent me enough pounds to get me out of the country, and everything seems to be working out just fine. In a weird coincidence, I found out that James, one of Caroline's friends, went to Wake Forest with Christopher Browder, Martin Schindler & Will Rawley (from Collegiate). What a small world.

The flight from Heathrow to Nairobi was awesome because I got an unexpected upgrade to business class. I was sitting in my assigned seat and a guy came up to me and asked if I would switch with him. He had been upgraded but was traveling with his brother, who was sitting in my row, and they wanted to sit together. I jumped at the chance. It was lucky that he asked at that point before everyone had boarded: I was the only person in his brother's row, but we were on opposite ends. Later the plane completely filled up and he would probably have tried to switch with someone who was next to his brother. Anyway, business class was great: more room, more comfortable chair, better service and more sleep!

I got through the Nairobi airport with no trouble at all and found my ride to Mpala. Once I stepped off the plane I was hit with the earthy, human smell of Kenya's air and finally started getting excited about this trip. The ride up to Mpala only increased that excitement. Kenya is at once a familiar and foreign place at this point, so as I watched out the van window I felt weirdly both at home and out of place. The most amazing part was how green everything is, especially in Laikipia. All the plants are lush green, there is a carpet of grass where I am used to seeing dusty brown ground, and red, yellow and white flowers dot the landscape. It is very beautiful. My first wildlife sighting (besides a Maribou stork eating trash by the Nairobi airport) were some impala, but shortly after I saw two huge leopard tortoises. They were a fair way off the road and I know I wouldn't have noticed them if the ground had been its normal brown color. But against the bright green grass they stood out plain as day.

There are some familiar faces here at Mpala, which is nice. Since it's Sunday (and Easter) not much official business is happening and I will have to wait until tomorrow to obtain my car. It's nice to relax anyway. I took a low-pressure but semi-hot shower and zonked out for an hour and a half. Dinner will be served soon and the board says we'll be having chicken curry. Yum!

Day of Departure

2010-04-02T08:40:00.000-07:00

I leave tonight at 9:00 pm from Newark. From there I'll head to London, where I have a 12 hour layover. By a crazy coincidence, Caroline left for a European vacation yesterday and will be in London tomorrow, so I am planning to go into the city to meet up with her, see some of the British Museum and perhaps get my picture taken in front of Big Ben before heading back to Heathrow. Then it's another 8 hour flight to Nairobi and a four hour taxi ride to Mpala. I'll spend the night at Mpala, collect my car and some field equipment and head to Ol Pejeta, which will be my home base for the next three months. Sounds easy enough; we'll see.

I am usually a very light traveler. My two previous trips to Africa (1 and 2 months in duration) were conducted out of one medium-sized red suitcase. My crowning light-packing achievement was the week-long spring break trip two years ago to visit Paige in Ireland, when I packed entirely in a large carry-on. That was fine despite my mother's attempt to sabotage me by pouring leek & potato soup down one of my two pairs of pants. However, this trip is not a light trip. Three months is a long time and I've opted to bring along extra items that I hope will make my stay a bit more comfortable. I'd like to feel settled there, not like I am traveling for three months. On top of that, I have a fair amount of necessary and bulky field equipment. So for this trip I am taking the normal red suitcase, plus a duffel bag that meets the Virgin Atlantic size requirements (just barely) and a carry-on backpack that carries my computer & camera equipment. Both checked bags are packed right to the weight limit. My carry-on is a problem. Virgin Atlantic puts a 13 lb limit on carry-on bags. With only my computer & camera equipment, the bag weighs 17 pounds (I do not have *that* much camera equipment; Virgin's carry-on expectations are just ludicrous). I cannot check these items for fear that they will be damaged or stolen out of my bag. I have put everything else I would normally have in a carry-on into my very large purse, which I hope I will be allowed to bring on board despite its size. I just have to hope that they don't actually weigh my carry-on, but since Corinne was made to check her carry-on a couple months ago, I am not expecting such a free pass.

So we'll see! Hopefully I come out of this with all of my belongings and don't have to spend the whole journey worrying about the fate of the backpack.