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,