Sylvester and Friends

Our tent is nicely situated in a brushy/wooded area of the tourist camp as the picture I posted earlier kind of showed. It’s a lekker (Afrikaans for good or sweet) spot to be sure. The best thing about our spot is the diversity of animal life that hangs around our place. Every day Allison gets a visit from the family of Natal Francolins while I’m out working. Francolins are essentially big quail, and we have a whole family that hops up onto our porch and begs for food. There is also a pair of Crested Francolins that come running for a handout when they hear me pour my granola in the morning. (As I sit on the porch writing this, Zeb the Zebra Mouse just ran through the yard). Harry the Yellowbilled Hornbill likes to catch pieces of banana that I throw at him. Morty the Masked Weaver has built a nice hanging nest in one of the Acacia trees right next to the tent and signs in his raspy, cough-like, somewhat annoying rattle every morning. (Actually, he has built three different nests. The first two were torn down by the females he was courting – inferior craftsmanship to be sure. He seems to have gotten it right this time though.). Hendrick the Honey Badger shows up from time to time and trots through the yard in search of trash cans to knock over. At night we often see Ginny the Genet climbing around the trees looking for reptiles and birds. Allison even found her on the porch one night rifling our trash, and one evening Ginny sat in the tree next to the tent and watched us eat dinner before slinking off into the darkness.

Ned and Nan the Naughty Squirrels are our constant nemesis. Turns out this pair of ground squirrels were hand raised in our tent a while back by some previous researchers. So they think our tent is home. They are quite fond of avocados, peanuts, and pasta with tomato sauce (go figure), and I returned from the field one day to find the avos inside my tent with nice teeth and claw marks in them. The next day Allison wakes from a nap to find Nan inside the tent. She tries to chase Nan out but Nan can’t remember how to get out so the two of them do laps around the tent before Nan hides under some of our gear. Allison decides to wait her out and pulls up a chair to read a book. An hour and a half later, I come home from the field to find Allison waiting on Nan. She tells me how the whole thing unfolded and I think surely the squirrel has escaped the tent unnoticed so I start digging around the equipment pile for Nan. Sure enough right under a sleeping bag is Nan hunkering down for all she’s worth. I make a move to shoo her out and she leaps into the air, lands on Allison’s leg, and bounds out of the tent flap. Thoroughly traumatized, Nan has yet to return to the tent. Ned however finished the leftover pasta primavera from the other night.

Sylvester the Slender Mongoose is the star of the show. Unfortunately, most of the stories about Sylvester are all related to my by Allison as I’m usually in the field when he performs, so I will try to do them justice. Sylvester is quite a character. Our tent is on his daily route through the camp, and he usually comes sauntering up the path, stops, looks at us, and carries on his merry way looking for things to eat. One day, Allison was feeding Terry the Leopard Tortise some cabbage in the yard when Sylvester runs up the path, hops onto Terry’s back, looks around, and trots off. I guess good vantage points are hard to come by, and Terry didn’t even seem to be aware of his status as a lookout post – too busy stuffing his face. The most entertaining moment also happened when I wasn’t around the day that Sylvester walked right up to the front of the tent, sat down, and started licking himself not 10 feet from Allison. After he was properly groomed and feeling frisky, he strolls over to a piece of pipe that’s in our yard and proceeds to hump it from every conceivable direction (so says my wife). While I’m sure he was just scent marking his territory, it could be that female mongoose companionship is just difficult to find.

So life here is just as interesting inside the camp without the lions, wildebeest, and elephants.

Welcome to Africa my friend

Thought I would take the opportunity of being around fast internet to post a couple fo times.

The last couple of weeks have been rather hectic. We are in the middle of building all of the exclosures that I will be using for my research for the next couple of years. To build all of these animal exclosures (120, 7 meter diameter fences) we have hired a local work crew of guys about 20-25 years old. They are amazingly hard workers and just blast through building the cages in 40 degree C heat (that's 104 degrees F to us metrically-challenged Americans). One of the hardest things for me is that we pay them about $15 a day to work. While this is a good wage for this work in South Africa, its hard to pay them so little when I could easily pay them more. I was asking one of the crew what he does for a job when he doesn’t work for us and he said he didn’t have one. When our building was over, he said he would just be sitting at home but that he desperately wants a job as a game tracker, but can’t afford to get more training or a drivers license. He’s a bright, young guy that really knows the bush and would be excellent as a tracker so it really hurts to see him without the opportunity to follow his dreams that you and I take for granted. It makes me want to drag out the exclosure building for much longer so that they will have jobs, but I won’t because I have to do my job and get the research done.

The work has definitely been frustrating at times. The worst is working at Scientific Services in Skukuza (the main rest camp in Kruger). We’ve had a bugger of a time getting money to pay our work crew to build exclosures, get access to our webmail websites (they actually blocked my Yale email after I had been using it for three weeks), and in general organizing anything. Everything is twice as complicated and half as efficient as I am used to, and it seems that the bureaucracy is denser here than in the US. I spent several minutes complaining to one of my friends in Satara who does game viewing drives for the park about the inefficiency, etc. and his reply was “Welcome to Africa my friend”. So I’ve been trying to cultivate a more detached attitude. Everything will happen in its own time (certainly not on my schedule), all the exclosures will get built (even if our fencing supplier brings us crappy materials), and the data will be collected, but its damn frustrating working here at times. Well, doing the actual work is fun, challenging, and rewarding, but actually getting ourselves in the position to do the work is the frustrating part.

With that rant behind me, we had a brilliant couple of days last week. Made one trip down to Skukuza for supplies and saw lions, elephants, rhinos, buffalo, and leopard all in one drive. On Sunday, we went for sundowners (drinks at the end of the day) on a rocky hill near one of our research sights. As we were climbing the rocks, we noticed a herd of elephant on the other side of the outcrop. We were only about 10 meters away from several of them before they noticed us and loped off. There were in total 40 members of the herd, with lots of young and three big bulls following the mostly female herd. Fantastic. We were lucky we were actually on the outcrop when we saw them as elephants don’t climb rocks well. Otherwise it would have been a rather tense situation being that close to elephants on foot. One of the sayings around here is that no one gets injured by an elephant (meaning if an elephant gets to you it kills you, usually by kneeling on you and crushing you). On our drive back from the outcrop we saw three white rhinos at close range and a leopard up a tree. A magnificent day.

I got a chance to post a few pictures on Flickr. The website is http://www.flickr.com/photos/kruger_park/

Cheers
Deron

Sorry that I’m such a lazy blogger. I apologize to all of the both of you that read this.

Got to go help on a lion capture the other night with one of the other researchers in camp who is studying lion predation patterns in the Kruger. He needed to change the radio collars he had on a couple of the lions before they went dead. We went out about an hour before sun down to set up the lion darting station which consisted of a couple of trucks, a big block and tackle to weigh the lions, a cadre of vets and their staff to monitor the lions’ condition, and a huge loudspeaker that played calls of hyenas on a kill and a baby buffalo in distress that is used to attract the lions. The lion guy had a reasonable beat on his pride from the radio collar so he and the game capture team drove out into the bush to dart the lion and haul it back to the darting station where they would change the collar, take blood samples, weigh the lion, etc. They got a nice sized lioness, about 320 pounds. What a beautiful creature. Amazingly muscular. Its difficult to imagine living with the threat of being stalked and eaten by something like that.

They were trying a new drug that theoretically let them bring the lion out from the tranquilizer within about 10 minutes whenever they wanted as opposed to the old way of just letting it wear off over about an hour or more. With the old way they had to keep watch on the lion while it was coming out so that hyenas wouldn’t kill it. So when they wanted to wake it, we hauled it to the edge of the bush and they pushed the antidote. After about six minutes, the lioness stood up, looked around the trotted off to find her mates – none the worse for wear. Very cool.

After they finished changing the collar on that lioness, we tracked a second pride with little luck. So we stopped to play the hyena and buffalo tape to try to draw them in. Well before we got all that set up my wife, Allison, had to go have a wee in the bushes. The vet staff assured her it would be fine since they hadn’t started calling in the animals yet and they even shined a light around in the bushes before she went it. Well as soon as she gets in there to do her business, they start playing the lion attractor. Just a few seconds after that we hear from behind the bushes “hyena”…”Hyena!”… “HYENA!!” Turns out a small male hyena had snuck to within about 10 feet of Allison. She stayed surprisingly calm, stood up and just shooed the hyena away. Hyenas are nervous animals so it just kind of scuttled off but came back to check out her scent. Since hyenas are her favorite animal, she was pretty stoked about the whole encounter especially when the vets decided they wanted to try a new drug on the hyena so they chased it down and darted it.

Hyenas are amazing creatures. Pound for pound it took 50% more drug to take down the hyena than the lion, and the hyena took 23 minutes to go down versus 3 for the lion. The vets did their thing on the hyena, weight, blood samples, etc and Allison got to pet it which pleased her no end. But the hyena had the last laugh. We were all standing within a few feet of the hyena when the vets gave the antidote to the drug. The hyena awoke and just sat there not really knowing what was going on. After several minutes it stands up and squats to take a giant pee on the stretcher the vets had used to weigh it and then runs off. Score one for hyena-kind.

You can be a vegetarian in South Africa, but only if you eat lamb, steak, and sausage

Although not a vegetarian, I can imagine being one here is tough and I’ve eaten more meat in the last three weeks than I have in the last few years of my life. One of the other researcher’s father has been around the last week and we’ve done quite a bit of braiing (that’s barbecueing to those Americans out there). Typically you get steak and potatoes with cheese wors (a wurst) as the side salad. Or you get a couple of different type of wors as the appetizer and then lamb chops for the main course. It’s as if the South Africans must keep their cholesterol levels from falling below a certain level. The only vegetables on the menu are the ones that the Americans bring to the dinner table. That said all that meat is darn good. South Africans know their way around a grill and the meat here is fantastic. One of my favorite treats so far is biltong and dry wors which are both variations on what we think of as jerky. Very nicely spiced and it comes in every type of animal you could think of, kudu and gemsbok (both types of antelope), beef, ostrich, etc. The kudu is fantastic. Unfortunately, they are also beautiful, majestic animals – think white-tailed deer face with huge curled horns and beautifully striped coat (See the pic with the post). Allison refuses to eat them.

We’ve secured a nice permanent tent here in Satara that belonged to a now defunked program studying tuberculosis in the buffalo here. It’s quite nice with a wooden floor, nice porch and is surrounded by trees and shrubs (See pic). Have a nice gas-fueled triple burner stove and refrigerator. We typically get visits from honey badgers, mongoose, genets, lots of different birds, hares, tortoise, etc. We go to sleep to the sounds of hyenas calling most nights and hear lions from time to time. Makes for a pretty nice home.

Stay tuned. Next post is about a recent lion capture I went on.