A Night in the Museum

10/17/14

I had to go back to Nairobi to do some more work at the museum.  As it’s an expensive ride into Nairobi, I was able to convince almost everyone at the Centre (Matt, Julia, George, Colin, and Ann) to come down with me.  They all had things they could do in Nairobi as well.  Sally was the only one who couldn’t come

On Wednesday, upon arriving to Nairobi, I went around to a couple parts of Nairobi to look into some things about shipping my insects home via either DHL or Fed-ex.  In the evening we all went out to this amazingly tasty and very cool Ethiopian restaurant.

I spent most of Thursday in the Entomology department of the museum working with Laban who is the head of Invertebrate Zoology for the museum.  When I got done in the evening, I ventured down to the mammalogy section of the museum where Colin was looking at ID’ing rodents (he’s doing a study on rodent parasites in villages) with Julia and Ann.  While we were there we got a tour of the mammalian section as well as the herpetology and ichthyology section.  They have lots of stuffed wildlife in their maze of rooms (everything from leopards to lions to rhinos to bongos to whales) and lots of different reptiles and fish in jars.  When I was in the rooms with all the huge stuffed animals, I was imagining what it would be like at night there if the Kenya museum came alive at night like the museum in “Night in the Museum”  In the evening we went out to a really good Indian restaurant in westlands where everything was served on top of flames, which was cool.

Today I worked all day at the museum again.  Everyone wanted to leave in the early afternoon, so I couldn’t go with them.  Thus, I’m staying one more night at the hotel before taking a matatu back to mpala tomorrow.

On the way to Nairobi to, we got lucky and saw a cheetah as we were leaving Mpala

the oldest insect specimen at the nairobi museum of natural history

ID'ing insects

big ole beetles

gorgeous beetles

a cheetah we saw on the way into Nairobi

"No one poaches african elephants, they're so much better fried"

Oct 1.

The Title is a quote from the Colbert Report tonight.

Today we found out that there had been an attempted poaching on one of Mpala's Elephants.  It had been shot in the shoulder but had survived.  So we went with the KWS vet to see what we could do to help it.

When we got there, the vet immobilized the mighty elephant with a tranquilizer dart.  After the elephant fell over and became immobilized, we rushed over to it to clear away all bushes and try to make it comfortable.  The vet then went ahead and cleaned out the wound, checked to see if the bone was broken (it didn't appear to be, if it had they would have had to shoot it b/c it wouldn't survive), gave it lots of hydrogen peroxide to remove puss and then lots of antibiotic shots.

The vet then gave the elephant the reversal drug and we all ran back to the safety of our vehicles.  The vet told some of the KWS rangers that if the elephant was unable to stand back up, they must shoot it dead, so we were all cheering for the wobbly elephant to be able to stand back up.  Fortunately it was able to!

Shadowing a Cheetah

9/19

In the morning we got super lucky and spotted a female cheetah (we also saw a leopard very early in the morning on the way to work).  Helen had left for the week to go to the Serengeti, so it was just Stef and me.  We’ve been wanting to collar some cheetah’s to get Helen’s project off and running, but cheetahs are super hard to find here.  So as soon as we spotted it, we decided to follow it and stay with it.  We contacted some vets (a vet is needed to immobilize a cheetah here) but the earliest they could come would be Monday.  So we were looking at the possibility of staying with the cheetah for 3 days until we could get a vet in.

It’s difficult following a cheetah as it can move through the landscape much better than our landcruiser can.  Plus it blends in and hides so easily in the dense shrubland.  But we stayed with her the whole day as she moved from shade bush to shade bush and unsuccessfully tried sneak up on different prey items.  Twice we lost her, but somehow managed to find her again.  In the late afternoon as we were watching her sunbathe across a ravine, I spotted another bright spot in the distance across the ravine.  A 2^nd cheetah!  We decided to stay with this new male cheetah so that we could get some photos of it as well for later photo ID’s. 

We stayed with the cheetah until past dark when we figured the place he was resting would be where he would stay the night.  We had followed a cheetah from 7am until 9pm.  We went back home for some quick food and bed and then got back up to where we had left the cheetah at 4:30am so that we could continue following it.  Unfortunately, something had scared it away during the night, so it wasn’t there.  We searched for him for a few hours with no luck.  The good news is this meant that we were able to make it to the french toast brunch that Sally was making for the group at the director’s house (I mentioned before that Sally is house sitting for the month while the director is gone, right?) on account of some Jewish celebration.

Saturday night Sally threw a nice party at the director’s place, which included a lot of beer pong, which is always a fun time.  We also did some dancing and made a big bowl of tasty mac n cheese.

9/21

We went down to the confluence of 2 of the rivers that go through Mpala for a nice relaxing Sunday afternoon of swimming in the river.  The group is so small now, so it was just Julia, Sally, Stef, George, and me, which is a fun group.  On the way home we saw  a rare caracal (a small cat with tufted ears) and another cheetah!  We couldn’t follow this one though b/c we were in Julia’s truck which is not suited for bush bashing off road.

9/23  We were hanging out with the wild dogs when a herd of elephants came through.  The elephants were spooked by the dogs and did a lot of crazy trumpeting.  It was really fun to watch them chase the dogs around