Amboseli National Park!

February 15, 2014

                Wednesday afternoon I decided it would be a good idea to go for a walk around the track even though it had been raining the past few days. My friend Anna and I got about half way around when all of a sudden my foot was ankle deep in mud and my shoe was lost somewhere in the muck. By the time I got the shoe back, both feet were completely coated in mud and both shoes were filled with mud. I walked in my socks back to camp and spent a little time scrubbing my shoes in the laundry sink. It was my luck.

Thursday we started the day with a field lecture near local Maasai agriculture and housing developments. We hiked up this giant ridge and all put out our camp chairs at the very top. It was a nice break from the chumba. It’s difficult having hours of classes in the same room, but luckily the teachers understand and give us five minute breaks every once in a while. It was really nice to get out and learn about local ecosystems and their interactions with the local community while being able to physically see the locals going about their daily lives. It was crazy hot though, I’m definitely not used to the African sun. The staff see us all getting sun burns and having to lather on the sunscreen and tell us it’s because we’re mzungu, which means white person. After our lecture we headed back to KBC to make some lunches and head out to Amboseli! I was so excited I could hardly sit still for the hour drive. Once we arrived we were ambushed by mamas trying to sell us bracelets and other trinkets. Finally, we were able to enter the park in our jeeps. The roofs came off so we could all stand up and look out of the tops. We were given instructions to count every group of mammals we saw and record them into our notebooks. Of course, that meant we had to put our cameras down long enough to actually do the work we went there to do! It was hard because we were all basically kids in a candy shop. The highlight of my day was when we ran into a pair of hyenas. The one was lying on the side of the road in some mud, trying to cool off, and we were able to drive up right next to it. We got some really cool pictures but the part I’ll never forget was when the hyena looked up at me. We made eye contact and it looked right through me; I was completely locked into its ebony gaze. It was one of those earth shattering moments where everything you’ve been working towards is laid out right in front of you, no more than five feet away, just as alive as you. I stared into those deep, primal eyes and something changed in me; the passion I have for my future tripled because all I could think about was making sure I would always see these amazing creatures out in the wild, thriving. After we left the hyenas we stopped for lunch at an overlook and were able to watch some elephants interacting with their babies and mates.

                Today we got to go to the park again, which everyone was really excited about! Before we even entered the park we saw a whole herd of elephants and their babies. We were supposed to be keeping track of all the mammals for our class assignment but we were also helping with a census for the Kenya Wildlife Service! They basically gave us a zone and we were in the park from about 10:15 until 14:00 counting all the specified animals in our zone. It was really cool to know we were a part of a wildlife management project, if only for a day. It made me really excited for our Directed Research projects in a few weeks. I wanted so badly to see a carnivore today but Moses and Sapaya said that all the grazing animals were leaving the park in search of foraging opportunities and the carnivores were following their prey. The grazing animals tend to leave the park more frequently during the wet season because Amboseli has a lot of wetlands and it gets swampy very quickly. This creates a huge human-animal conflict because the grazers take peoples crops and the following carnivores tend to go after livestock. I’m getting really interested in human-animal conflict because it looks like that is the center of conservation and wildlife management. One of my favorite things to do is just sit with the staff and chat over a cup of chai. They’re all so nice and willing to talk about the wildlife management issues from all sides.