Mount Kenya Safari Club

A few weekends ago we ventured into town and treated ourselves to the Mount Kenya Safari Club Sunday Brunch. You know its fancy when there's a peacock just struttin' around. The food was incredible, they have 10 tables with food from all over the world, fresh-made naan, all sorts of sauces, meat roasting right in the courtyard, and desserts, oh the desserts. After 3 plates of food, I realized that there is in fact, an entire separate stomach for dessert. The science has been done.

The food was amazing, but that was not the best part of the trip. The club runs an orphanage for animals unable to return to the wild after injury or abandonment. AND YOU CAN PET LITERALLY EVERYTHING! We moseyed on over after brunch to check it out....

There is basically a huge enclosure where all the ungulates, birds, and primates hang out waiting for people to come feed them treats. Here, I am feeding a bongo some delicious grasses. Bongos. Love. Selfies.












So what is a llama doing in Kenya? Apparently a very wealthy businessman from South America visited Safari Club and decided that the climate would be perfect for some llamas, and that Safari Club could benefit from them as well.

We even got to feed Black and White Colobus monkeys that hang out around the club. The most surreal moment for me was when you realize exactly how similar we are to these little guys. (Other than looking like a grumpy old man). When another primate species is holding your hand, with it's uncannily similar hand, and looking into your eyes, with all too familiar eyes, you realize the depth of this animal. That they have complex feelings too, and also love snacks. There's no denying evolution.
























 

I was feeling zen with the crested crowned crane, in crane pose. 

 When I said that you could pet everything, I really did mean literally everything. This is why I love Kenya, because there are no rules. We got to meet this sweet girl, Duma. When I knelt down to pet her, the hair on the back of my neck stood up as she made this grumbling noise, primitive parts of my brain apparently still work. Then I realized that she was PURRING! Cheetah's are the only large cats that can purr. Like a big fluff ball, she wanted her ears scratched and let you know it.

 Naturally, I wanted to take a cheetah selfie, but Duma had another thing in mind...  

She leaned in, right up against me but as you can see, she was not paying any attention to the camera, rather my hair that slipped and brushed her face. In feline fashion, she sniffed it and decided to test this stuff out. She reached up and bit the ends of my hair, giving it a playful tug (Thanks mom for training my scalp with a no-mercy hairbrush policy when I was a kid). Although I didn't capture the hair biting, I did get the interest on her face a few seconds before the incident. After a trial tug, and a good reaction from this hair stuff, she full on went for it, paws and all. Cheetahs are large spotty kittens. With non-retractable claws.

 

 

Independence Day!

Mpala-tics

This past Monday there was a demonstration on Mpala by the workers because of their issues with the administration. There is a certain member of the administration that creates problems not only with the Kenyan staff, but also with researchers creating difficulties with studies. Grievances include things like letting the sewage in the village overflow causing sicknesses, hiring only family members, and forging research documents, and laundering money from the centre. This issue has been going on since the last time I was here in 2014. I don’t know all the ins and outs of the situation, but I feel I have a firm enough grasp to explain. Now that there is a new director at Mpala, the village council had sent him a formal letter with over 20 grievances and notifying their concern with the situation and their plans to strike if he continued to work at Mpala. 




The board of trustees were all here last week along with the problem person. The staff got news that said person was here and as they wrote, went on strike. What a better time to have a demonstration than when the people filling the pockets of Mpala are here? 




This is where I get angry.




 Let me start off by saying all the researchers, students and techs were 100% safe during the protesting. These are the men that save our lives in the field every day, if anything we supported them. Our own field guides even called and messaged us telling us not to worry that they had no problems with us and they love us. 




When the protesting started, we were all at lunch, the director and a trustee, I’ll call ‘A’ (who had only ever been in Kenya TWICE for a total of 3 weeks) shuttled all the students, techs, and even researchers into the library. After about 10 minutes of being confused and angry we were crammed into a small space, A came in announcing ‘So who wants to know what’s going on?’. Obviously everyone. She then went on to explain that the administration was trying to put into practice ‘normal procedures for any normal institution’ such as not being allowed to hire your relatives and certain payroll organizations that the Kenyan staff ‘didn’t understand or weren’t used to’ so they got angry. This explanation is complete bullshit. The reasons for striking were the exact opposite than the trustee’s reasons.




The next morning, after fuming for the rest of the evening, A approached me at breakfast with ‘Are you ready to go?’. To which I responded something like ‘Would you like to tell me where I am going and why?” Apparently overnight the staff had gotten too scary for the trustees although they assured us that we were safe. Hindsight is 20/20 though and after our group had packed up and were forced to evacuate, we realized we were just being used as a pawn in the trustee’s negotiating ploy. Look at your livelihoods driving away because of your opinions is basically the message the admin were sending. As she was taking photos of our ‘safari’ our car was fuming and decided to break the caravan and go back into town to stay with our friend instead of being chaperoned by bigots with big pockets. 




We were able to come back the following morning, and the staff were so excited to see us back and none of them were informed that the trustees forces us to leave. Well, none of them except our field guides who we communicated with the whole time. Our guys even told us that the kitchen staff were still planning on working that day so we would all be taken care of. Hm. 




As wonderful as this place is, there are obviously still issues. Issues that can be fixed if people just listen, if people just spent some time with the people in the country they work in, we would all be understood a little better. Easier said than done, huh. 


When we returned we found out that the problem person was no longer to be at Mpala, but had to finish some work for the centre. There are still a ton of issues that need to be solved, and hopefully are solved all at once so this doesn’t become an even more drawn out process. For now, all of the staff are happy to have us back and are happy with what steps have occurred.

work work work work twerk

Anyone who has ever done field work will know the feeling of looking at your field notes or data sheets and thinking "what the hell was I thinking?!" because no matter how hard you try you'll never "remember what I meant later". That basically sums up last week for me, nothing too drastic, but just a few extra minutes of thinking about what I had written in the field. It also probably didn't help that I drew my data sheets instead of printing them. My independent research is going well, except that baboons and elephants had ruined my seed collection trays. I am still really excited about the data I am collecting on cactus density near trees, it looks promising!!

So in light of field failures (well, mostly because we just like to have fun), last weekend we went into Nanyuki town for the weekend. Friday we had lunch with our field techs, did some shopping and visited with some friends in town. The friends with the bunnies, which I am still trying to not take home. And OBVIOUSLY we planned to go dancing!

Milka and I

There is a little boutique next to the grocery store in town that I like to pop into whenever I’m in town. I’ve never actually bough anything from there because it’s a bit pricy, but one day there were a group of the ladies that work there talking about boys. Which is a subject I frequently talk about. So, after a fit of giggling, picture sharing, and general girl talk, I ended up getting all my friends invited to the store owner’s birthday party which took place last Saturday.

Kenyan birthdays are SO MUCH FUN! There is a lot of singing, dancing, drinking, laughing and of course, cake literally shoved into everyone’s faces, wedding style. What's a party without dancing!?! After a get together at Milka's house, we ventured to Sporty's, the local club/bar/hotel and danced until 4am.

                                                                               I even DJ'ed for a bit in the Captains booth.



















               And Rhiannon made the sweetest new friend.














Everyone there had such contagious smiles and personalities, we all had so much fun celebrating together and met some beautiful, strong Kenyan women.

Updates and LIONS!

The internet has been down all week so here's a compilation of what I have been up to all week: Sunday night and Monday I had some sort of stomach bug so I spent the whole day in bed. Tuesday and Wednesday we spent in the field conducting vegetation surveys in our plots. We have 15 radial plots that are 20m in diameter and we measure each cactus in the plot, for my portion of the project I also measure proximity to native trees. Each plot had 3 days of camera trapping data to see what animals are visiting the cactus. While my boss was in town Wednesday afternoon, I accidentally spent the afternoon searching for lions instead of finishing up data collection so we finished the vegetation data Thursday morning. Today (Friday) Anne-Marie, our field techs Gilbert and Samson, another researcher and myself came into town. We treated the guys to lunch and then did some shopping and are staying at our friend Arnold's house in town for the weekend. Arnold is the one with the bunnies sooooooo I'll be resisting the temptation to take one home, but they are the cutest things ever.

Wednesday I spent the entirety of the afternoon sitting on the roof of a Land Rover, hair tossing in the wind as we bumped and bounced our way through the savannah looking for lions. We heard that seven of them had made a zebra kill earlier in the day and were also seen in the afternoon. When we showed up there were already three cars looking for them and shortly after a few more pulled in. At that point the passengers of all 6 vehicles were standing on the roofs of their cars, scanning the tall grass and whispering, okay yelling, to one another in English and Kiswahili about what the best course of action would be to get the best view. 

Gilbert drove our car through the tall grass and acacia and we spotted what we could. I have learned that if a wild animal, especially a feline, does not want to be seen, it won’t be. At least not with a clear view. As our engines got closer to the lions resting place, I was able to spot the black spots on the back of one’s head and barely the movement of shoulder blades trying to slip away without being noticed. The grass came up just above their shoulders so only when she lifted her head to check out the humans were we able to see them. Like I said, if they don’t want to be seen, you won’t see them for long.