Wildlife Census

Three times a year Amboseli National Park and the Kenya Wildlife service conducts a census of the wildlife of the National Park. This is a pretty large effort involving thirty or so people and eight vehicles. The census is coordinated by Dr. Shem here at the SFS Center and we were fortunate enough to have it fall exactly on our last day in Kenya.

Dr. Shem invited Jim and myself to participate in the census and we of course jumped at the opportunity. Rising bright and early we headed out to the park with several of the Center's staff. Following a brief orientation, we were each assigned a specific region of the park and we set out to do the census. I was in a car with two KWS staff, a Kenyan student in her third year of University studying tourism, and SFS intern Jenna. We were in Sector 3, which included a huge track of swampy area where many animals come to drink. It was pretty clear that we were going to have a busy day. We would drive for a hundred meters or so and then stop, scanning the area for any and ALL individuals we could see. By all, I mean all. We counted 187 Wildebeest in one herd, several of which of course were lying in the grass making them difficult to see. We had to divide animals into male/female and juvenile and sub-adult. In addition we were looking for several species of birds and elephant remains - which we found on several occasions.

What an amazing, exhusting experience. I saw several species I'd never seen before including Water Buck and Jackals. The census activity allowed us to drive the landrover off-road in order to get close to the high grass of the marsh. Vehicles are not allowed off-road in the park, so this was a unique experience and we spent several hours bouncing across some pretty inhospitable terrain. I kept waiting for a lion to stick its head out of the tall weeds, but we didn't see any predators on this trip. We did see lots and lots of elephants- including a randy one who's amorous advances were decidedly unwelcome by the much smaller female he was pursuing. Not to get too graphic here, but an elephant penis when deployed with intent is larger than you might imagine - we're talking "does that animal have five legs?" large. The entire event inspired a bit of comic relief from the endless counting.

After about six or seven hours in the field, we returned to the National Park headquarters for a meal. We were served in true Kenya style - boiled meat of some unidentified origin, boiled kale and ugali. Ugali is a staple of Kenya. It is made by taking finely ground corn meal and mixing it with water and then baking the plaster-of-paris thick paste. The result is a white block of material with the consistancy of bread dough. The meal is served without fork or spoon - instead you break off a piece of ugali, make a depression with your thumb and scoop it into the meat and vegitables. It's pretty messy and I'm not certain Miss Manners would approve.

We got back to the Center in the early evening and got the opportunity to head out for a couple of Tuskers (beers) for our last night in Kenya. The Center staff have been wonderful and welcoming and I am truly sorry to be leaving. This morning we saw the students off on their safari day and there were hugs all around. It's a nice group and we've felt very welcome in their community. We leave for the airport this morning and it's going to be a long couple of days travel till we get to San Diego. Jim and I have a nine-hour layover in London so we may go into the city to see the Olympic craziness. 

Oloitokitok

July 27. There hasn't been much going on the last couplee of days. On Wednesday Jim and I took the students from the Center down to the "local" spring to take our final samples. This spring is within walking distance from the Center and we had a bit of a parade as we took 15 people to do the job of two. Those samples were the last of our field work here as we have literally run out of deionized water and several of the chemicals needed to do our work. We've been more productive than I ever imagined we would be.

Thursday was spent with light cleaning of the lab and the beginning of the process of sorting and packing our gear for heading back to the U.S. Thursday evening Jim and I gave a short presentation of our data with a view of explaining to the students what we had been doing over the last week and a half. The presentation went well with several excellent questions from students and staff. The Kenyan staff in particular seem to really appreciate the work we have been doing. I really hope that we will be able to turn this into a long-term project in years to come.

Today, with very little to do other than wait for our bacterial plates to "cook", we took off to the border town of Oloitokitok. This used to be a two-hour trip back when I was working for SFS in 2000, but now it's barely a half hour drive along a nicely paved road. This place has really changed over the past decade. Our expedition included Jim and myself as well as the Student Affairs Manager, Tara and our intrepid driver Moses.

We drove to the outskirts of town and took an amazing hike down into a river valley to a gorgeous waterfall. We didn't see any wildlife other than some safari ants which we carefully avoided. I learned my lesson with those buggers on out first day in the field. They are tenacious and have a very nasty bite. We spent a few minutes at the waterfall and then an hour or so rock hopping our way downstream. We did a bit of mild bouldering and generally just enjoyed the peaceful little stream. It felt wierd to be walking along a stream bed without taking a sample or making a measurement. It was also nice to spend some time around clear water!

We returned to our starting point and headed back into town for a nice lunch. Service was a bit slow, but the food was excellent and it was nice to chill a bit after such a busy schedule we've been maintaining. Following lunch we drove up to an HIV support center where local women have set up a small craft store to help support their efforts of improving the life of folks with AIDS. Treatments have gotten better, but HIV is still a huge problem in Africa.

Tomorrow is our last full day in Kenya and we have had the wonderful opportunity to join the Wildlife Management faculty here at the Center in a wildlife game count in Amboseli National Park. Yes, we're getting another trip to the park! I am quite excited. More on that later....

Market Day

July 23: We departed right after breakfast, as has become our pattern. Today was spring day - we visited four different springs that provide water to local communities. Water here is funny. The landscape is dry - southern Utah dry, but every so often water bubbles out of the ground, having traveled many miles from the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. You don't see the little oasis until you are right on it. We never could find these things without our local "ambassador" Sipaya. The work went well and we got four stations in while seeing a great deal of landscape the safari-going tourists will never dream of.

July 24: Just two days of sampling left. We hit two more springs this morning and then went into the town of Kimana as Tuesday is Market Day. The place was packed with locals selling to each other. This is not a tourist event but a real, honest-to-god local market. We were the only white faces we saw the entire day, and not a few folks turned to look at the three muzungus (foreigners) walking between the stalls. You name it and it was for sale. All sorts of vegetables, housewares, shoes/clothing and lots and lots of Maasai fabric and beads. It was a cacophony of sights, sounds and smells. I loved it. It's fun to see the mix of people dressed in western clothing walking among men and women dressed in the traditional red and purple robes of the Maasai.

We also took the time to go to the local livestock auction. Groups of Maasai men stood around with cattle offered for sale. In this part of the world the cow is king. Buying, selling and breeding cattle is a way of life. There was a whole fenced off section, devoted to goats and in one corner of the property cloth, beads and swords were for sale. Yes, I said "swords". Maasai men carry what is the equivelent of a 12th century short sword to kill snakes and defend themselves against predators as they move their cattle from place to place. Life is a bit different when you aren't at the top of the food chain...

Our work is almost done. We have pretty much run out of deionized water and some of the chemicals we brought from the U.S. Jim and I have both been surprised how much sampling we've managed to do over a very short amount of time. Our time in Mexico has served us well.

A Walk in the Park

July 22: Saturday was a lab day and Jim and I stayed on site and got caught up with sample processing. We did get to go out that evening into Kimana and drink a couple of Tuskers and shoot pool on a scale model pool table. The balls were about 2/3 the size of standard pool balls, which did nothing for my not-so-great pool game. Good fun though.

Today (Sunday) was our only scheduled day "off". This is not a complaint - this trip has been a lot of fun, tramping around the backcountry looking for water. However today we scheduled a trip to Amboseli National Park which is less than an hours drive from the Center. We got up early to take advantage of the animal's activity in the morning and headed out.

We hadn't even gotten to the park's gate when we encountered a female cheetah with two kittens. Cheetahs are rarely seen so it was pretty amazing to encounter one, even for the brief look that we got.

Entering the park, we had a brief meeting with one of the Park Scientists and arranged for them to take some water samples for us. We'll hopefully get them later next week to run before we depart on Sunday. Following that meeting, we headed out into the park. What a fantastic experience. We saw loads of elephants, wildebeest, Grant's and Thompson's gazelle, zebra, warthog, secretary birds and water buffalo. The wildlife was amazing and there was something to look at around every corner.

Lunchtime brought us to one of the lodges in the park where we had a 5 star buffet and then hung around on an amazing veranda looking out at the savannah. We stayed there for three hours or so as the animals are very inactive in the noon-time heat. It was very peaceful and I really enjoyed the downtime from running around in the field and running samples until well into our evenings. We left the hotel around 3:30 with the plan to drive around a bit more before heading back to the Center.

The only thing we hadn't seen on our safari was lions. During the morning, we had gone into plenty of the palmetto habitat that they tend to frequent, but other than seeing some prints along the side of the road, there were no Simba to be seen - we had pretty much lost hope. One last pass through some of the territory we had covered in the morning brought us some success though. We found a male lion with a female and a couple of cubs sleeping in the shade of a palmetto patch. The males usually group with more than one female and indeed after a bit of watching we saw two more females away from the group of four. We watched them for the better part of an hour, but they didn't do much more than ocassionally raise their heads or roll over. Still, it was amazing to see them there about 40 feet from the side of the road. I swear the male's head was gigantic and his paws were the size of dinner plates. Amazing to watch. It was a very good day.

End of the Line

July 20: Our plan had been going well. Each day we have been getting further down the river. We figured that two more days and we would have the whole transect finished. It was going well, perhaps too well....

We departed the Center directly after breakfast, just like the previous three days. The plan was to head downstream from where we had left off the previous day. However, soon after leaving the main road, we encountered the first of the day's snafus. A large irrigation ditch which ran across the road was full of running water. It was unusual to see so much running water out of the river, which was interesting. It was also problematic as we needed to get across. Our vehicle is an 11 passenger Land Rover, the work horse of Kenya, and our intrepid driver Sapaya gunned the engine and started across. Half way we heard (and felt) the undercarrage land firmly on a large rock. This entailed us piling out of the vehicle while local appeared out of the bush to help us dig the rock out and work the vehicle across the ditch. The entire process took about a half hour and really demonstrated the challenges of traveling in the Kenya backcountry.

Ten minutes later saw us again stuck in an irrigation canal, and again pushing the vehicle out of the mud. I was surprised to see all the water flowing in the canals, but we soon discovered the water's source...

When we arived at the river bank, there was no river to be seen. A thin muddy trickle remained from the flow we had seen a mere two kilometers upstream the day before. Every bit of water had beeen diverted to the irrigation canals we had crossed. Speaking to the Maasai who were gathered near our vehicle when we stopped, we discovered that since there was so little water, a committee had been organized to allow farmers along the river to divert the water, each in turn, to feed their fields. The group we spoke to were cutting brush in preperation for their turn to divert the water the following day. It is truly amazing how little water is keeping this community alive.

Instead of going back and dealing with the irrigation ditches, we drove across the empty river bank and drove upstream to where the diversion had been constructed. It was just below the station we had sampled the day previous. The farmers had build a dam out of brush and logs which diverted the flow into a large hand-dug canal flowing along tomato fields. The entire process looked extremely labor-intensive and there was not a tractor or backhoe to be seen. It is a back-breaking existance these folks live.

With this development, it was clear that the river portion of our project was over. The second leg of the work involves the sampling of boreholes (a kind of well) and natural springs. We spent the next three hours or so bouncing across parched landscape to sample two different boreholes. These are holes dug into the desert with pumps attached to supply water to folks who live too far to walk to the river. The first of these had a large T-handle pump to bring the water to the surface. The second, suprisingly had a small generator-powered pump which could be switched on to make the water flow into a trough for cattle to drink. In this part of the landscape, there are only cattle and goats - there's not nearly enough water to farm anything. It's only adjacent to the river where farming is at all possible.

We only managed to get stuck in dry ditches a couple of times on our way out of the bush. The entire adventure took us a bit longer than planned, but we made it back to the Center by mid-afternoon and Jim and I returned to our little lab set up off the main dining area. Saturday is going to be a "lab day" where we catch up on some of the chemical analysis that needs to be done. We plan to sample some of the water from the spring-fed stream that flows through the Center's property though. We thought it would be nice to give our hosts some "local data" on their own water.

Continuing Downstream

July 19: Our days are beginning to take on a recognizable rhythm. Get up, organize gear, eat breakfast with the student group and staff here, and then load the land rover for the day's work. Today Moses, Sipaya, Jim and myself headed out to some of the mid-river stations we had plotted out. Sipaya assured me that these roads would be better than the two days past, but again several of them were pretty much glorified goat trails and we have to spend time cutting and filling around basketball-sized boulders and deep flood-cut ruts.

 Our first station was at a bridge near several bomas. In less than fifteen minutes, I'm standing in the ankle-deep waters of the river. Back home we would call it a stream (or a "crick" where I grew up). When I looked up from measurement I was making, there were twenty or twenty-five Maasai men standing around Jim watching him write data onto the clipboard. They seemed fascinated with what we were doing and Sipaya (who is himself Maasai) spent some time explaining what we were doing. Over the past decades a lot of water has been taken from the local people, piped to the ever-thirsty city of Nairobi. They are suspicious of anyone messing with their river, especially I suspect a couple of Muzungus. They seemed satisfied with Sapeyea's explanations. I can't imagine trying to do the work we are doing without our two locals. Sipaya especially is our passport to interacting with the local Maasai.

 The last station of the morning reinforced in my mind some of challenges faced here. Right on the bank of the river, with a little gasoline-powered water pump supplying water to the adjacent field, were a small group of empty pesticide bottles. The farmers mix their chemicals right down on the river where they also draw their drinking water.

On the way home, Sipaya learned that I was unmarried. He solemnly informed me that he could easily find me a good woman. He was quite serious and I fully believe that if I can find the price of a good cow or two I could have a bride. Just how bad do you want me to get married Mom?

 After diner we had our first chance to catch some night life. A group of us (without students!) drove into Kimana to visit a local bar - one of two I understand. The place was incredibly familiar reminding me of every bar I've ever been in the Caribbean. Two lopsided tables covered with an umbrella of palm dried palm fronds. Loud, distorted music blared out of a speaker that looks like the one I had in my room in eighth grade. If the poster on the wall had been for Guinness Stout instead of Tusker, I never could have told the difference.

Looking for the water

July 18: Today was a good day. We got out of the Center around 8:00 and headed back up to the headwater stream system we were sampling yesterday. According to the geological survey maps made ten years ago or so, the river we are focusing on has three major tributaries that feed it. We sampled two of them yesterday and today we had planned to sample the third. After an hour or so of driving over some incredibly bad "roads" - paths really in some places, we failed to find the river. Fortunately our research team includes a Maasai who works for the Center. Sapaya (I'm probably misspelling his name) grew up around here but was not familiar with this specific region.  As we drove along, we encountered some local Maasai who were very helpful. They looked at our maps with us and explained that the river was blocked and being piped to local farms. He got in the vehicle with us and we headed up to the spring that feeds this ex-river. On the way we passed numerous bomas (hut/houses) and farms including a farm where they breed camels - not something I had seen before in Kenya. We got to the spring, which was two concrete barriers with pipes sticking out. Two of the pipes let water flow freely and several local women were filling water jugs that they carried by foot up and down to their homes. The other pipes led away to storage tanks, thus denying the river of any water. We sampled at the spring and continued back to the river proper to pick up three more stations before returning to the Center. Processing has been tedious, but we are starting to see some interesting, if depressing results. The river where we see folks taking drinking water, and driving cattle and all sorts of other activities has a great deal of coliform (gut) bacteria. This indicates that sewage is making its way into the water. In addition, the water is very high in nutrients, likely from agricultural runoff. More importantly, there are very high arsenic levels which can result in some real health issues for the folks who live here. Tomorrow we continue downstream and will try to occupy three or four more stations.   

First day in the field

July 17: What a difference nine hours of sleep makes. I awoke refreshed and only a bit jet lagged. We departed today to seek out the head waters of the river system we will be studying. Off the main road, we drove down a series of dirt pathways that, were they rivers, would have been white water streams! An hour's drive brought us to a spring with water gushing out from a hole in the ground. We understand that this spring is water being pushed from the pressure head that is Mount Kilimanjaro. The stream starts out cold and clear but less than a mile downstream it is cloudy with what appears to be runoff from the numerous agricultural fields tended by the Massai people of the Kuku group ranch. Our sampling took us overland via foot across fields and brush, passing the Bomas (mud huts) of the farmers. Our team included Jim and myself as well as two staff members from the Center for Wildlife Management. Those guys are real troopers, hauling our gear across hill and dale, all the time smiling and serving as the ambassadors for the crazy Mzungus (foreigners) who wanted to tramp in their streams.

Along the way, we passed a small group of school children hiking the muddy path on their way to school. They were wearing their school uniforms and smiled and let me take a picture. I made the mistake of showing them the picture on the camera's screen, so I then had to photograph each of them in turn so they could each see their picture on the little screen. Very cute.

We sampled through to the early afternoon and then returned to the Center to process samples. We quit (but did not finish) just after ten and will return tomorrow. Good day, very productive.

In the shadow of Kilimanjaro

July 16: We got to the San Diego airport three hours early, ten and a half hours to London, six hours in Heathrow and then eight and a half to Nairobi airport. We got off the plane at dawn but my body told me it was time for bed. The trip was uneventful and all four of our cases of science gear made it all the way around the globe. We jumped into the Land Rovers and made the four plus hour drive to the Kilimanjaro Base Camp (KBC) of the School for Field Studies. I hadn't been in the part of the world for twelve years, back when I worked for the School for Field Studies. Amazingly, there are still a couple of people working here who were with the school way back then. It's amazing to see this place again after such a long time away. In some ways, nothing has changed - the smells, the dusky green of the flat-topped trees and the beautiful sight of Mount Kilimanjaro hanging on the horizon. Other things, like a paved road that used to be a rough dirt track, are pleasant surprises.  Jim and I spent the afternoon unpacking gear and meeting with the Center staff to plan our research excursions. The Center is giving us an amazing level of support and I think we are going to be able to be pretty efficient in the field.  This evening, I took out my spotting scope and spent a while watching the troop of baboons that seem to own the north end of the camp. I had a National Geographic moment when I watched a mama baboon scoop up her baby and plant the infant on her back and gallop away from some sound in the woods. I'm pretty spent and my eyelids are fighting my desire to stay up to at least 8:00 so I can get my brain on the local time zone. Tomorow we go seek a spring that feeds Kilimanjaro snow melt into water used by the local comunity. 

Ready to go!

I've been at the University of San Diego the past three days, packing a getting ready to head for Kenya. We get on the plane tomorrow (Saturday) evening and get to enjoy two consecutive red eyes. The first to London (ten and a half hours), a six-hour layover and then the second to Nairobi (eight and a half hours). Should be fun.  

Desert Paddling

July 1: From Vegas I drove Jim back to San Diego, primarily to pick up my sea kayak which as been sitting at the University of San Diego since last summer. The story of this kayak is long and sordid, but suffice it to say that the School for Field Studies gave me a bargain I couldn't refuse last summer and I ended up owning a second boat. After transporting it up the length of the Baja peninsula, last August, USD generously let me store it till I could come get it.

While in San Diego I also got to meet with Jim and Michel over our coming Kenya trip. I haven't been to Kenya since 1998 and I'm excited to see the place again. I used to go over there all the time when I worked for SFS and I still have a couple of friends that work there. I'm looking forward to seeing them again. We leave in mid-July and will be over there for a couple of weeks working on a water quality project in the southern part of the country.

Leaving San Diego, I spent a couple of days with my Aunt Jean and Uncle Jack in Arcadia. It's always great to visit with them - I don't get to see them often enough. We had a good visit and I headed out transport my new boat to the desert - an irony that is not at all lost on me. After a quick stop in Vegas again to hang with John and enjoy another small loss in a cash game, I continued northward.

Where's the water at?

Instead of heading directly back to Sandy, I decided to take the boat to Lake Powell for a couple of days of paddling. I decided to paddle out of Hite Marina, a couple of miles south (and on the other side of the lake) from Bullfrog - a marina a group of us staged a previous Lake Powell trip from. To get there, I drove south around the lake and came up through Monument Valley and then the town of Mexican hat. What a cool name for a town. From there, the map said that Utah State road 261 would take me to Hite. Sometimes a line on a map is more than you imagined it would be. This road went into the shear side of a mountain and began to climb what looked like an impossible face. As the sun set, I kept going up hairpin turn after hairpin turn as pavement turned to dirt. There were no guard rails and many places were barely a single lane. This is the most exciting road I've ever traveled in Utah.

By the time I got to the top, the sun had nearly set and the cactus and sand of Monument Valley turned to Aspen and evergreen. I found a lonely deserted BLM road and camped for the night. The next morning arriving at Lake Powell.  The boat handled great and it is much better at handling overnights than my other boat. Lake Powell was wicked hot and I decided to limit my time there to just a couple of days. Powell is a bizarre place - blue water in the middle of red rock and yellow sand. There's not a tree to be seen and at mid-day, shade is a heat-dazed fantasy. You can always jump in the water to cool off, but there is no way to escape the sun. It's a huge place, but there are boats everywhere and you really can't get by yourself for very long. I spent the better part of an hour paddling up one side canyon, but the entire time I was surrounded by buzzing ski boats and jet skis. Not the solitude I was looking for. After a couple of days, I was ready to head for home.

Leaving Las Vegas

June 23: I've had good and bad summers in Vegas. "Good" and "Bad" of course being measured by money won or lost. While I'm not much motivated by money, it is the way we keep score in poker. So what was my score? I played five different tournaments over the course of the week, and didn't manage to make any money in any of them. Disappointing, but not shocking - there is a great deal of what poker players (and statisticians) call variance in tournament poker. Over the course of my lifetime, I am well up in poker tournaments, but it's still a bit depressing to have a string of no cashes, especially at the beginning of a year with no salary!

On the cash game front, I was up and down all week, ending just slightly to the positive. The overall total would still have been in the red were it not for my friend Jim and his deep run in the World Series $1500 event. Jim had won a seat through a poker league and I bought up 5% of his action. What this means is that I gave him $75 and I was entitled to 5% of his winnings. Through excellent play and a lucky turn of the card here and there, Jim managed to make it to 76th place out of over 2600 entrants. This translated into a $6700 win and a few Benjamins in my pocket. Thanks Jim for turning a small loser of a trip into a small winner! I also got to watch my friend Rob go pretty deep into a Golden Nugget tournament and hang out with John and Justin over the course of the week. A good time as always in Vegas and I look forward to next summer.

Vegas Bound

June 15th: Anyone who knows me, knows that among my many hobbies is playing poker. I have a great group of friends here in Utah that play, and most weekends find me at one or another tournament or cash game. We play for pretty low stakes and not much money is won or lost. The game appeals to me though, in a way that no other game ever has. There's something about the combination of math (figuring the odds, making "correct" decisions) and psychology (figuring out your opponents motivations and strategies) that holds an endless facination for me. I'm not the best player in the world, but I enjoy the competition and am always trying to get better.  Over the past six or seven years, the beginning of the summer has always meant a pilgrimage to Las Vegas and the World Series of Poker. I go not to play in the Series itself, but to immerse myself in the carnival atmosphere that is six-weeks of high-stakes poker playing. It's fun to watch and there are always tons of tourists in town that play in lower-stakes tournaments and cash games. This year I'm traveling down there with my friend Justin and staying with Jim, my poker connection in San Diego. This year Jim has managed to luck box his way into a $1500 entry into a World Series event. I'm looking forward to railing (poker slang for watching) him and hoping that he can do well in the tournament.

Free at last, free at last

June 14th: Most teachers won't talk about it, especially with their students, but we get just as excited about summer vacation as they do. Instead, as professionals must, we carry on encouraging them to stay focused and finish the year strongly. Of course all the while we are chomping just as hard at the bit - anxious for the freedom of the coming long days of summer. For me, the coming days were all the more sweet as they were bringing a fifteen month hiatus from my life at Waterford. Now don't get me wrong - I love my job. But the idea of an opportunity to have a long stretch of time to pursue other interests held (and holds) a great deal of appeal. Money is great - but time, real blocks of time, are precious. I fully understand the fantastic opportunity I've been given and I hope to make the most of it.