Photos

Baboon cliffs, on Mpala land. We saw many, many baboons - they are startlingly human, both in their movements, social behaviour, and voices. When they bicker in the trees across the river at the campsite, they sound disturbingly like people in distress. We saw some babies, with thin, short black hair and pink faces, much cuter than the ruffed, fierce-looking baboon adults.


Sunset at the baboon cliffs, with a fever tree that had a bunch of weaverbird nests hanging in it - don't know if you can see them in this small picture, but they're those small black blobs hanging from the lower branches. All of the sunsets here have been amazing.


Acacia mellifora, in bloom. All of the acacia melliforas have been blooming, but none of the others. Not quite sure why that is. I'm getting better at identifying the different acacias. I can tell apart acacia mellifora, acacia drepanelobium, and acacia etbaica. (Too bad there are about 50 more varieites...)


Greg emerging from a Masai house.
The women build them. The roofs are made of a mixture of cow dung, soil, and water mixed together. Sometimes cow urine is used - not because it is a better liquid to hold it together, but because there's something significant about using the cow products to make the house. Inside, the houses are low and very dark; there is a fire-pit but no chimney, so all of the heat and smoke stays inside to keep the house warm at night, when the temperatures drop. The heat from the fire also helps bake on the roof mud. There are separate "bedrooms" for the husband and wife, and the children just catch as catch can.


Elephant spotted from the landrover - part of a fairly large herd with several babies. We were concerned for a bit that they might charge us - one of the young males mock-charged, but backed off. Landrovers have certainly been flipped by elephants before, and a British soldier was charged by one and taken to a hospital in Nairobi a couple of days ago. (The British army has training grounds nearby, and managed to piss off some elephants; it's never happened before, and the people at the Center were in fact more surprised that it hadn't happened already.)


A rhino! This female is 40 years old, one of the first ones at the Ol Jogi sanctuary. Absolutely amazing animal. Looks so prehistoric! Funny round ears. Dark, blurred, wise eyes with uneven lashes, staring out of mudcaked lids, regarding us. And astonishingly rare. There are about 600 Eastern Black Rhinos left in the world, most of them in Kenya. (It's a subspecies of the Black Rhino.)


Masai. Difficult to say what the experience of this village was, exactly... I couldn't tell if they were genuinely happy to see us; laughing at us; happy to profit from us; or irritated that they had to put up with our imposition on their culture in order that they could make some money. We danced with them, though, and it was wonderful.


Trained elephant at the Ol Jogi. Dude has his own circus, yo! This elephant could do tricks from grabbing one foot with his trunk and limping, to playing the harmonica. It was astonishing. We got to feed them, and the sensitive grasp of that moist, snuffling fifth limb was one of the most interesting things I've ever experienced... Got elephant goo all over my hand, which was fun. I also felt the rest of the trunk, which was much harder and bristlier than I had expected; I'd thought it would be much squishier. Beautiful, intelligent animal - the trainer would tell him what to do, and with an air of complete boredom, he would do it, while reaching up insistently to be rewarded with a carrot. "Why even ask me?" He seemed to be asking. "This is so far below my abilities, it's insulting. You know I can do the party trick. Just give me my snack."


Giraffe afterbirth, found while doing fieldwork with Nathan in the early morning. Looked, as you can see, like you'd taken someone, turned them inside out, removed all the bones, and slapped them down on the ground in a blob. It was beautiful and strange, and very fresh - probably hyenas have found it and eaten it by now. Imagine being out on an early-morning bird walk, and suddenly, with no warning at all, THIS appears in your path. Truly bizarre.


The group! Taken awhile ago, on top of Mt. Kenya. Top row: Greg Schundler, Nick Lilly, Laurie Elachi, Mark Dalgarno. Second row: Melissa Ivins, Kirsten Ruch. Third row: Nathan Gregory, Me, Paul Pawlowski. Nathan, in case I haven't already mentioned it, is our TA. He's an awesome grad student, and we're all going to cry when he leaves in 2 weeks. What will we do without him?

Is there any interest in seeing photos of my paintings at all? They're basically just sketches, but I'm rather fond of them. On the other hand, I don't have any reason to photograph them unless you want to see them NOW instead of waiting till I get back.

Tore my pants climbing trees at the campsite. Those pants are henceforth exclusively tree-climbing pants. Oddly, shirt not torn.

Still working on my brevity, I promise. As well as cutting down on the superlatives.

Let me know how you are!

Jenn

Quick note (actually, became not-so-quick)

Just a quick post to say that yes, I am still alive. Not sure when I'll have time to post in detail about any of this, so I'll just give you a swift rundown of recent happenings here at Mpala Ranch...

- Spirited discussions about conservation of African landscapes. It's really been fascinating - to me, an ideal framework in which to learn about the land we're currently inhabiting. Conservation covers such a range of things - politics, cultural traditions, ecology, history, behaviour, technology, money-grubbing from wealthy American philanthropists, international trade, pharmaceuticals (did you know that viagra caused a decrease in rhino poaching, because rhino horns are sold in Asian markets as an aphrodisiac?), geology, etc etc etc, and all of it somehow needs to be woven together into a coherent plan. I wish I could transcribe the conversations we've been having, both in class and out. We've been talking to a lot of interesting people here at the center, who have the most spectacular ranges of experience... From peppery American professors to droll British gentlemen, to softspoken Kenyan gamekeepers.

- Dylan Sherlock, a friend from high school who happened to be in Kenya, came to visit us at Mpala with his friend/brother Joe! I'm going to utterly fail at describing Dylan's program, but as his emails say, he is an "Africa-Canada Eco-Leadership participant." Summary: he's been living in Kenya for about 3 months with a family in Kimende, a small town south of Nairobi, along with the other program participants - 6 each of Canadians, Tanzanians, and Kenyans. They do ecological stuff, and actually get to hang out in cities, unlike us. Their visit to Mpala, at any rate, was a lot of fun; it was good to meet Joe (Dylan is actually staying at Joe's house in Kimende, while - due to some strange protocol - Joe lives at a different house) and to hear some stories of other students living in Kenya.

- Not to belittle the Princeton program. Though it would be great to spend a few days in Nairobi, I wouldn't trade this for anything. The camp is wonderful. We are living outside. Every kind of wildlife is nearby. I climb trees all the time. The staff is wonderful. The food is surprisingly good. You can just lie on your back and look at the stars all night, shooting star after shooting star streaking across the Milky Way, and it's difficult to think of things to wish for because this is as close to perfect as any life I've found so far...

- Went to a Masai village and saw all the cultural stuff - on the one hand, it's a touristy excursion where we get to take part in dances that we have no business taking part in, and we spend outrageous amounts of Kenya shillings on their handicrafts. On the other hand, they do actually live in huts made of spindly branches and cattle dung, and they are actually a very significant portion of Kenya's population. So. Hopefully more on that later.

- Today, visited the Ol Jogi Ranch, which belongs to a French billionaire and was possibly the strangest place I have ever been. Certainly the most ostentatious, outrageous, literally unbelievable display of wealth I have ever seen - and in Kenya! Irony of ironies. It's an enormous private ranch, with a game reserve that contains approximately 10% of Kenya's rhino population. He has a private zoo/animal orphanage - I had my face two inches from a cheetah. He has an animal hospital which is probably the best-equipped hospital between here and Nairobi. He has 5 planes. And he spends a few months a year - probably less - at Ol Jogi per year. Ridiculous. But amazing. We saw wildlife far closer than we ever have before, and saw rhinos for the first time (they exist only in heavily protected sanctuaries, because the poaching is so severe.)

- This course ends the day after tomorrow. 1/4 of the semester, almost done! Unbelievable.

- Was going to post photos, but blogger fails at life, and we are going home to sleep. So, goodnight.

Detail, photos, poetic observations, etc, coming soon.

Jenn

Day Off! Nanyuki and Mt. Kenya.

Yesterday was our first day off. We decided that the course for the day would be to drive to Mt. Kenya and go for a short hike or just relax at the top of the track (it is possible to drive up above the tree line, but you can't very close to the peak.) On the way to Mt. Kenya, we stopped in Nanyuki to look around and buy some souvenirs if we wished - it was our first chance to actually visit a Kenyan community. We drove into the main part of town and stopped in front of a row of shops with a row of stalls facing them. Even before the land rover had fully stopped, a swarm of people - mostly men - had gathered, hawking various goods or advertising their stalls. It was overwhelming. As soon as we stepped out, we were pushed back against the sides of the land rover by an insistent crowd trying to sell us DVDs, sunglasses, watches, or invite us to their stall with various incentives or pleadings. They introduced themselves, shook hands, asked where we were from, told us about their families, asked how long we would be in Kenya for, tried to barter for our belongings, and explained why their goods were better than anyone else's (in fact they were all essentially the same - additionally, the whole crowd of stall-owners actually operate in a cooperative manner and share out the profits of the day.)

Armed with 5000 kenya shillings, I innocently went with one of the stall owners and ended up being the first sucker of the day, overpaying outrageously for a teak elephant carving, a bangle made of brass, copper, and iron which I am wearing right now, and a teak hair clasp. “Please, I will give you a good deal,” the vendor explained, taking out a pad of paper to write down his prices, shoving various items into my hands, well aware that he had a beautiful opportunity to make a killing on someone who hadn't any idea of the correct price for things. “Please, promote me. Promote me. Be my first customer of the day! It is good luck for both of us.” So, what the hell. I was vaguely aware of being suckered, but then again, the cost was still good by North American standards.

Afterwards, a small crowd of other vendors descended upon me - next in line was Patrick, who gave me a beautiful story about how he wanted to trade me a pair of salad spoons for my hairbands, because he would bless them and give them to a group of girls in the community who did hair. “I am a collector, I only want the hari-bands,” he pleaded. “Take these,” handing me various salad spoons. Waiting for the other shoe to drop, I accepted the salad spoons, only to return them to him when he explained that he needed money to cover the cost of the wood. “Only the cost of the wood! The price it costs me. For you, this good price, because I am a collector, I only need the hari-bands for the girls. For the girls, you understand.” Rejected. Sorry, Patrick. I left him one of my hari-bands, in case it was actually of any use to him, and was promptly latched onto by the next in line.

“My name is Bob.” Bob and I got along well - by this time my sucker-status was fading, and as he more gently pressed items into my hands, some of his carvings of Masai soldiers fell over with a massive clatter. “It is an omen! It means they want to be sold!” he exclaimed, but began laughing, as did his friends, as did I, at the ridiculous line. After a bit of bargaining, Bob offered me a price about 1/6 of what the first guy had charged, and I paid for two more carvings. Live and learn. I certainly won't pay any more than what I gave Bob, after this. I'd feel badly about the first guy getting the big profit, except that Nathan told us they share it out afterwards. Indeed, the whole process was cooperative - I only had large 1000-shilling notes from the ATM at Nairobi airport, and to give me change Bob had to get notes from all of his friends that had gathered around.

I spoke with a woman who had actually traveled to Victoria to visit family she had there - it was quite a shocker to have the second person I talked to in Nanyuki be someone that could talk about Saanich, Douglas Street, and the University of Victoria. “It was too cold for me!”

We drove through more of Nanyuki on our way to the highway out, and it was a chaotic, seething, dusty, colorful mess. Very few personal vehicles, as might be expected - many rickety old bicycles, trucks, matatus (this is how everyone gets around; like a cross between a cab and a bus, they are minivans that get crammed full of people and drive from settlement to settlement. Till recently they were extremely dangerous, because the drivers would cram in as many people as they could and drive as fast as possible. Many people died in matatu crashes. Now the government has regulated the maximum number of passengers, and I think they are constructed to have a maximum speed. There are frequent roadblocks all along the highway to inspect the matatus. Nevertheless, they aren't completely under control; some will still be overstuffed, a white passenger will inevitably be overcharged, and many of the traffic cops are corrupt.) The roads were all dirt, and the stores were a patchwork of dilapidated buildings, shacks, and mere wooden frames walled with fluttering sheets of black plastic, all with people spilling in and out, back and forth, clothed in a mishmash of random American t-shirts and plain cloth. It's quite a contrast from being up at Mpala, where most of the Kenyans we see fall into two categories: the workers at the center, or Masai pastoralists, who still bear spears to herd the cattle and dress in traditional clothing and beads. In Nanyuki the atmosphere was frantic, overstuffed, a miasma of dust kicked up by the traffic coating all the brightly painted signs and rainbow of clothing.

There are schoolchildren everywhere, recognizable by their uniforms, and we passed crowds of them - as well as every other kind of person - as we drove down the road towards Mt. Kenya. The kids would look up and wave and shout at us in Swahili as we passed.

Mt. Kenya was beautiful. But this is getting too long, and I have reading to do, so I'm going to cut it a bit short, and leave you with a few vague lines:

Lying in the tussocky grass up at Mt. Kenya talking to Greg or Laurie, smelling the sharp fragrant alpine herbs and feeling the swift blustery chill that falls when the clouds cover the sun. It's as though the thin air is infinitely weak, infinitely unable to hold onto the heat of the sun.

The shift in vegetation is swift as well - after two weeks of nothing but parched ranch land, the thick forest going up Mt. Kenya was almost too much for my eyes. Vines? SHADOWS? Trees with more leaves than thorns? What's going on???

I painted on my real watercolor paper for the first time and was fairly pleased with the results - if it photographs well, I'll post the painting, as I didn't take any photos up there. I'll try and get ahold of someone else's photos.

Additional news: yes, my digestive health has been fully recovered for ages. However, due to my own foolishness, I smashed my fingers under the land rover's roof and now have a little band-aid on my pinkie finger. Not serious, no worries. Obviously I am still typing like a maniac.

Working on my brevity (with little success),

Jenn

Send me mail

Though Prof. Rubinstein had warned us that our friends/family should only send us mail if "neither you nor the sender care if it ever arrives," Melissa successfully received mail a couple of days ago. So, if you have the burning desire to make my dreams come true, send some snailmail to:

Jenn Ruskey
c/o Mpala Research Center
P.O. Box 555
Nanyuki
Kenya

We're finishing up the first half of the first course: we give our presentations of our research projects today, and tomorrow we have our exam and a party. Wednesday is our first day off; we'll probably drive to Mount Kenya and possibly do some shopping in Nanyuki. Then the second half of the course begins.

We went for a night game drive last night. Very interesting to see the herds of impala lying like lumps on the ground. The moon was dazzling, creating layered shadows and silhouettes of mountains and ridges for miles into the distance. The artificial lights of nearby ranches burned like beacons, though we can't see them at all in the dusty camouflage of daylight.

Jenn

Photos

At last, photographs!
Sorry they're small; the fault of blogger. At least they don't take as long to load. I'll try to figure out a better way of doing it; or I'll upload them into a separate directory somewhere so that you can view the larger versions if you wish.

Leave me comments, let me know you're alive!




Marketplace seen outside of Nairobi, from the van.


Sunset over Mpala ranch


Acacia drepanelobium (this is the one that is mutualistic with the acacia ants. If you poke them, then tons of acacia ants come swarming out of the swollen thorns.


Elephant, seen from the land rover.


A fish eagle, sitting in a fever tree by the hippo pond. Didn't include hippo photos as they were not very good - hopefully will get a good one later on. P.s., there are some wonderful photographers on this trip, with beautiful fancy cameras, so hopefully I'll be able to direct you do some of their photographs as well.


Old bandas (huts) - I don't know how long they've been abandoned. I took this photograph from inside one of them. Things take forever to decompose here because it's so dry - that's one of the reasons that termites are important, because by eating the cellulose they break it down much faster than it would be otherwise; they keep the nutrients cycling through the ecosystem more quickly.


Sunset over the campsite.

Description of a Day

We're up at the center at night right now, as I write this (though it will likely be day again by the time I post it.) It's been another long day - we woke at 6:30 as usual, washed and dressed and had breakfast. The Kenyan staff who maintain the campsite for us live in a little village just to the east of the food tent, and they bring us hot water in the morning so that we can wash our faces, etc. I am often woken by the splash of steaming water into my washbasin, if the sunrise hasn't already stirred me. The tents face south-ish, so the light doesn't stream right into them, but the sky lightens and the birds start calling... For the first few days, all of the animal noises would wake me periodically throughout the night, and the strange bird calls would wake me in the morning, but I'm acclimatizing quickly and I slept straight through the night last night.

Anyhow, we woke at 6:30. Breakfast at 7:00 - it's usually delicious fresh mango and pineapple, toast, eggs, and sometimes sausages. There are always green oranges, passionfruit, various cereals, biscuits (by which I mean plain cookies, not biscuits&gravy), the ubiquitous tea, peanut butter, honey, butter, marmite (!), jam, and some long-life milk. The staff cook everything in the village and then bring it to our food tent. Today we left promptly at 7:30 and went for a long game drive to the northern end of the Mpala ranch, up into more arid country that looked much like the American Southwest. The acacia savanna blended into rockier, barer ground with many different cacti - some of them flowering with bright red succulent flowers. Slightly confusing because I thought cacti flowered after a rain? About 20% of them were flowering, I would estimate, so perhaps the percentage goes up when it rains.

We saw warthogs, which are bristly and ugly, with huge noses and tusks. They dashed around on the dusty ground with their short legs, chasing impala back and forth and rooting around with their snouts. The warthogs kick up big cloud of dust when they run, cornering with their stubby legs, whereas the impala bound effortlessly along the dry earth, thin legs and slender hooves barely disturbing the dust. Sometimes we can see a herd of impala in the mornings across the river, frolicking in the grass. The young impala run in circles or back and forth, back and forth, leaping and kicking up their heels like a bucking horse. Nathan - the grad student who is here with us from Princeton and is living down in the campsite with us - tells us that it means they're happy.

After the game drive, we went back to the center, grabbed some tea/water, and had a short lecture by Nathan on his dissertation work. A different grad student, some years ago, did large-scale burn experiments: the savanna burns naturally, and he wanted to investigate the ecological differences between areas that had been burned, and areas that had not. So he actually burned enormous swathes of land - 180 hectares was the largest patch, I think - but he did many, many patches, some large, some small. I would've loved to have seen it - enormous fires scorching through the dry grasses, smoke rising everywhere. (Moral of the story: Ecology Is Fun!) Nathan helped with the burns, and is studying the differences in birds inside and outside the burn areas. That's the way a lot of the experiments work here - someone will do a large-scale experiment and many other scientists will take advantage of it to examine their own area of interest within the context of that experiment (in this case, Nathan's interest is in birds). Prof. Truman Young from UC Davis has been doing large-scale herbivore exclusion experiments for at least a decade, and there have been zillions of spinoff studies. He sets up giant fenced-in areas that keep out different combinations of herbivores, from ALL herbivores to only elephants and giraffes.

After Nathan's lecture, we had our normal lecture from Nick Georgiadis, then lunch, which is at the center with the rest of the people staying here. Then we went out to do field work in the afternoon: measuring different things inside and outside of an exclosure. We've been measuring dung, grass, trees, and insects, and have measured inside and outside of an old boma site, a burn site, and now an exclosure. It is immensely rewarding to learn about these things in the morning and then actually DO them - in AFRICA - in the afternoons. I can now tell the difference between at least 7 different kinds of dung, and have picked up, examined, broken open, smelled, juggled, and drawn many more dungpiles than your average college student. (Hurrah!)

After field work, back the campsite. I painted a picture of the river (still figuring out how to see things here; it's so different from any other landscape I've ever painted! I have to learn how to look at the colors, the shapes, the quickly-shifting light. More than ever, the landscape seems like a canvas that the sun can paint upon at will.) We had dinner, which is by the light of kerosene lanterns, and then went back up the center for awhile to enter data, write emails, etc..

And that is A Day In The Life Of, etc.

the most spectacular creatures have become commonplace

Since time is short, I will go for the shock tactics. Here is the list of animals we have seen:
(We have seen MANY of each.)
Elephants
Giraffes
Hippopotamuses
Baboons
Vervet monkeys
Hyraxes
Mongooses
Hares
Squirrels
Impala
Thomsons gazelles
Grants gazelles
Dikdiks
Cape buffalo
Water bucks
Bush bucks
Oryx
zebu cows + normal cattle
goats, sheep
donkeys
grevy zebras
plains zebras
bushbabies
jackals

possibly more that I am forgetting. Most of them have babies - the baby elephants follow their parents around, waving their thin trunks and tails; the baby baboons cling to their mothers' backs and ride along, odd humped tails aligned with their mum's, looking around with their devious baboon faces; the baby zebras have spindly legs, perfect tiny stripes, and fuzzy brushes of mane; the baby impala are like flawless, slender miniatures, meticulously stepping where their mothers step, grazing.

This list does not include the birds, which have been magnificent, varying from enormous Marshall eagles (we saw one winging off, prince of the sweeping sunset bowl beneath mt. kenya, with another bird caught in its great talons), to flitting, bright yellow weaverbirds, to the pied kingfisher, which hovered like an oversize hummingbird above the river and then plunged down to catch a small fish. The Kenyan assistants who maintain our camp fill a birdfeeder in a stand of trees every morning, and flocks of superb starlings (brilliant, irridescent deep blue, with carmine bellies) come to feed. The starlings are everywhere, anyhow; the most spectacular creatures have become commonplace in the space of 6 days. It no longer seems odd to see a giraffe's graceful head and liquid, long-lashed eyes rise out of an acacia to peacefully watch the land rover cruise by. I've been standing with my head out of the safari top, just opening my mouth as wide as I can and breathing wind.

We also do work. Measuring stuff. Ecology. Lectures. In fact, we are sort of "in class" from about 8-8, every day. But it don't seem much like work to me.

Digestive system at about 80%. I remain hopeful that they won't have to get a doctor for me.

Hope you're all doing well! Leave me a comment letting me know what's up.

Jenn

Arrival

We made it safely. Computer situation not quite sorted out yet, so this will be short and photo-less... it should be better organized in the future.

Kenya so far is amazing. We got in late at night to Nairobi airport and drove to ICIPE to have a midnight dinner and go to our rooms. The rooms provided a last burst of luxury - I had a BATH - and the next morning we had a big breakfast before driving the 4-5 hours from Nairobi to Mpala. The drive was fantastic - we were all in one van and saw the succession both of urban -> rural and dry -> even drier. The sights alongside the road were fascinating, from the teeming slums of Nairobi to bustling tourist traps to crowds of uniformed schoolchildren (almost all the schools here are boarding schools, a holdover from the british colonial days), to more pastoral scenes. (Though I would imagine that most of those who still live a traditional pastoral lifestyle don't live so close to the highway!) The colours were gorgeous - denser sunlight here because we're right next to the equator, it makes everything pop out in dazzling intensity.

We've already seen elephants, giraffes, baboons, vervet monkeys, impalas, dik-diks, lizards, african squirrels, innumerable birds and insects, strange plants, a tawny eagle, fever trees, acacias of many varieties, and lots of domesticated animals - everywhere along the road there would be scrawny cattle or goats tethered to stakes or fences, grazing where they could.

Mpala is lovely. The weather is amazing (dry! so it's not too hot at all), and we are living IN THE WILD. Our campsite is a 10 minute drive from the center, and we live in canvas tents. There are bucket showers and dim kerosene lanterns - when the sun sets at 7 or so, that's it! Put on your headlamps! We can tell from the dung that elephants wander through our camping area just a few meters from our tents, but we haven't seen any - they usually come through at night, and we've been warned to poke our heads out and look, but absolutely NOT to leave the tents.

I've actually been sick all day with diahhrea, vomiting, etc, and have been lying in bed in one of the bandas up at the center, but I feel okay now and I think I'm going to rejoin the group for our field expedition this afternoon. At least I've gotten it all over with, right?

Very excited, though severely dehydrated,

Jenn

Still In Princeton

Have successfully set up online travel journal. To be updated as often as possible, with pictures when available.
Soon I'll be on a plane on my way to Nairobi!
Outrageous.

Jenn