Grevy's paper available online

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

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!

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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!

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

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.