2/6/10; 2/17/10; 2/19/10; 3/2/10: BEST OF AMBOSELI

Jambo! Jambo bwana! Habari gani! Mzuri sana!

That is the first line of that “Them Mushrooms” song I was telling you about earlier in the . . . month. Sorry for being so neglectful! After we got back from Tsavo, we went pretty much directly into finals, which fried my little brain like a chapati (delicious East African tortilla-equivalent). And then we had to move out of our bandas to make room for the Tanzanians, who proceeded to invade our camp and defeat us by a very slight margin in the Olympics. And then I went to sleep and woke up in Tanzania with my hands tied with a bandana and covered in bees . . . luckily my classmates were with me or I’m not sure what I would have done. But that’s another post! Or several (also, that last part, the part with the bees, didn’t happen). Right now, since I’m in The Amazing New Zone of Almost coNstant Internet Access (T.A.N.Z.A.N.I.A.), I’m going to take this opportunity to show-and-tell you all about Amboseli National Park, the centerpiece of the Tsavo-Amboseli Ecosystem and probably, despite encounters in Tsavo and KBC and around the group ranches, of most of my memories of Kenyan wildilfe.

We went to Amboseli four times over the course of the semester, and I took a whole lot of pictures. So here are some of them, along with the stories that were happening when they were taken (the sad part is that, by necessity, the photographer misses part of the story because she is busy taking pictures so that she can better remember/tell what she saw of the story later. But hopefully between the words and the pictures some decent account will emerge, although of course you all just should have been here, and then none of this would be necessary, jeez).

The drive into Amboseli is about 45 minutes of straight red dirt road. The animals like hanging out in the park because it’s about 400 square kilometers of farmless and fenceless space (53% grassland, 22% woodland, 25% swamp! an oft-repeated fact and a favorite of Shem’s), but they don’t know where the park’s borders are, so the drive in is often interrupted by giraffes or zebras or elephants heading out into the surrounding group ranches, probably to try to eat some pumpkins or something. Like these guys:





We encountered all of them on our final visit, the elephant on the way in and the zebras on the way out. At the beginning of the program, our professors said at the beginning of the program that by the time we left Kenya we’d be so tired of elephants we’d never want to see another one again . . . halfway through, though, and they’re still bringing us to seatbelt-necessitating halts (I’ve still got a bruise from the slingshot maneuver Molly pulled when we saw that elephant, I think).

After the road, you get to the gate! Here’s where we get accosted by mamas and other hawkers. And sometimes . . . ACTUAL HAWKS!


This guy was wheeling above us for a while, and occasionally landing at the very top of acacias to survey his domain. By the way, he is actually not a hawk. He is a martial eagle. But! There was a pun to be made, and so I made it.
This was on our first visit and we were all very overwhelmed and excited. My dominant feeling (which I still sometimes get here) was that someone had taken over my optic nerve and was photoshopping amazing things into my field of vision. Even though we weren’t in the park yet, my friends here seem to agree:



(on the ground, from closest to farthest away: Becca, Suzzane (blue shirt), Coral (awesome shades), a mama accosting Coral, Clinton (with camera), and Sam. In the faroff cruiser, from the left: Ian, Jen and Olivia. In the closeup cruiser, from the left: Ryan, Amanda, Mambo, and Christine).

On that first day, we were ostensibly there to start a Wildlife Management exercise that involved keeping track of social organization and behavior of large mammals. Of course, we mostly ended up driving around and gaping at things and then remembering after the fact that we were supposed to write them down. According my notebook, that day we saw a lonely warthog, four elephants, some fighting impala, and a large colony of baboons, including one Mickey Mouse-eared baby:



Other highlights of that first trip included: when, in order to turn around in the rotary associated with a defunct lodge, Daniel drove us through a curtain of dangling electric wires at full speed with the hatches open (twice!); when Daniel’s car broke down (this happened so often over the course of the program that we started blocking time into field exercises for car repair . . . alright, I’m exaggerating. But it happened pretty often. “Maasai don’t need to know how to drive” etc. etc.) so we had to quickly disperse into the three other cars while Harrison, our mechanic, fixed it up in said rotary; when Jordan’s mammal field guide fell off the roof of the car and Mambo had to jump out of the car and bravely fetch it; and, finally, when we drove through the swamp and spotted a rare saddle-billed stork and my camera, in a spectacular show of encouraging me to live in the moment, ran out of battery. So you’re out of luck on that one. But if you google it I’m sure someone else has taken a picture at some point!

The second time we went to Tsavo was for Wildlife Management again, this time to do a mammal-counting exercise that led to lab analysis of species’ habitat preferences within the park. We split into groups, and each group was given a section of the park (also known as a transect) and instructed to count all the mammals while keeping track of the habitat types (because this is SCIENCE, it was slightly more complicated than that, but that was the general idea). Moses, who had taken a break from running the duka to be our driver, decided that it would be best to take on our transect by circling it clockwise and always counting out the right side. I believe we counted around twenty animals over the course of two hours. Meanwhile, on our left side, in another transect, this party was happening:



As you can imagine (and as my ratio of left-to-right pictures proves), it was kind of hard to pay attention to the correct side of the road.
Since we were not invited to the swamp bonanza, it was lucky that our group happened to meet one particular small carnivore whose ministrations were much more heartfelt than the fickle showboating of those big overdramatic grazers and browsers. Amboseli’s manmade water distribution system (necessary for rainy season drainage) has some culverts that necessitate the occasional small bridge, and as we were driving over one, we stalled out quickly to take pictures of a passing Grey-Crowned Crane:



A few minutes later, as we revved up the engine to start out again, the noise scared this guy out from under the bridge:



We all hung out for a while, looking at each other (sometimes, you know, words just aren’t necessary). Then, after we were done with our transect, we stopped by a few more times to say hi. He was always under the bridge, and he always ran out when he heard us rumble over. (except once, when we caught him picking over a pile of nearby bones). We named him Troll, after the story about the billy goats. I have a lot more pictures of him . . . he was an excellent model.
That was also the day we interrupted one elephant’s shower and got sprayed:



And, soon after, ticked off another elephant and got trumpeted at:



Maybe that’s why we don’t get invited to parties.

Trip #3 I actually largely described in my second-to-last blog post, as it was the day of the cultural manyatta and Serena Lodge. One thing I failed to mention about that day (on purpose! ha! SECRETS SECRETS ARE SUCH FUN) was our encounter with A LION:



Psych! That’s a concerned Cape buffalo (but I wanted to put that picture up just because. It was strange, during the incidental game drive over to the manyatta I actually took better pictures of animals than on either of the earlier, wildlife-centric trips). This is the real lion:



As with Troll, I have many more pictures of Neville Chamberlain (I named him this because we were all pretty sure he was going to attack a carful of German tourists). As we were driving to the manyatta, we found a large clump of cars all pulled over and filled with tiny gesticulating silhouettes sticking out through the tops. This is generally a good sign in a national park. It is also why, if you are a group of wanafunzi (students) who have a strange aversion to the very watali (tourists) who are keeping the ecosystems you have come to love alive with their extravagent spending habits (hint: despite efforts against these instincts, we are such wanafunzi), when you see something cool, you pull over very quietly, and point often and extravagantly at the sky, so that all the safari vehicles that come by think you’re looking at birds and move on.

We joined the fray, followed everyone’s line of sight, and were treated to two lions, a young adult male and female, on some kind of first date under a big acacia. This was our second lion sighting, and our best at the time – during our second trip, Mambo somehow spotted a few lionesses and some cubs dozing at the edge of the woodlands much too far away for pictures. Through binoculars you could see the yellows of these guys’ eyes, so we were very excited. And then, when boy lion decided he’d had enough and got up and headed towards the road, we were very VERY excited. And then when he looked like he was about to rear right through the front window of the German tourist vehicle we got kind of scared. But then he just crossed the road, like he was in a bad joke or something, and proceeded to mark his territory on the other side. An even more effective message than an attack, in some ways. So that was our first male lion – check out that half-mane! – and our closest one as of then, and we chattered about it all the way to the manyatta, where the most exciting animals were donkeys:



p.s. that girl with the donkeys is the infamous Coral.

Then we went to Serena Lodge, home of the fearless hungry vervets:



In the backpack, teasing the monkey: Lia. In the background, reacting in various ways: Chelsea (in blue, acting calm), Olivia (in white, despairing), Sam (in maroon, ready for action) and Jen (in orange, shocked).

Our forth trip to Amboseli was techinically for a traveling lecture, but we ended up at Serena Lodge again somehow. Before that, though, we found ourselves on Observation Hill, where we ate our lunches/saved them from superb starlings, which look regal and shiny but act like their scrappy cousins. Here is one in flight!



From the hill, we spotted a hippo! So we went closer to investigate, and he found us rather boring, or perhaps tasty:



One really cool thing about seeing animals in the wild instead of in zoos: many of them hang out in large herds. On several instances we saw hundreds of elephants at a time, all shifting and blotting out the horizon. Here’s a smaller group, soccer-team sized and able to fit in my camera lens:



The first couple of pictures were also from that fourth day. And so is this last one, of Kilimanjaro, handsome overlord of all Kenyan parks and students, draped in one of many storms he sent our way that day:



Well, that was Amboseli. Someday I’ll go back. Next up, my week at Tsavo West, Amboseli’s older, tanglier cousin who has pet leopards. Depending on how long it takes me to upload this one, that next one might have pictures too! If it’s not feasible though I can just show you guys later. I miss you all!

p.s. the picture quality did not turn out so large or so good. So hopefully I'll get to show you the originals at some point because they are less grainy because my camera is (/my parents are) awesome.