Intruders...July 13, 2011

Poaching is on the rise again. We have heard several dogs and baboon groups alarm calling as well as gun shots very close to camp.  At the same time we are seeing two baboon groups in the our groups range. One group in particular, the Kayai group, has taken up temporary residence in one of our groups most frequent sleeping site. I expect that at one point our group and this group fissioned into two and that they are closely related. Unfortunately for our group, the Kayai group is larger and seems to displace our group who have moved to other sleeping sites nearby. As the Kayai group isn’t habituated it makes it hard to know what is going on. Time will tell .We are collecting as many samples as possible for genetic comparison but the samples cannot be identified to individuals. Luckily none of our females are cycling. They are either pregnant or have dependent, nursing infants so no wiley males can come in and have “sneak copulations” with our females.

Males and Infants!!!

Kinda Males and Infants

At the moment we have 11 dependent infants in our group. No females are cycling and males have time to concentrate on things besides mating. We are seeing lots of plays as the infants together are learning to climb, jump, and wrestle. We are also seeing a tremendous amount of male grooming to adult females, juveniles, and infants.  Jojo likes our new female infant Bela and her mom Beth. Beth does not seem fazed when Jojo comes to collect Bela, awkwardly carry her 10 meters away and begin to groom her. Muma, our dominant male has a special affinity for Lady Godiva and her infant Robin and Gipsy and her infant Guthrie. Axel, Nina, and Prince all tend to be near Mr. Cookies, and Mr. Wizard won’t leave MJ and baby Madonna’s side. Every day an adult male surprises me.

July 9, 2011 - Two Kinda males protect an infant

This morning at the mushitu Muma and Mr. Cookies, two of our high ranking adult males were sitting on either side of Gipsy and her one month old infant Guthrie. All of a sudden a snake eagle swooped down directly towards Guthrie. At the same moment Muma began lunging and barking at the eagle and Mr. Cookies grabbed Guthrie and put him on his stomach ventrally. The eagle flew up onto a nearby branch. At this point Mr. Cookies  gave Guthrie to Gipsy and he and Muma climbed up the trees barking and alarm calling at the eagle until it flew away. Awesome!!!

July 12 2011 - Poaching with Dogs

Tonight I am listening to a group of baboons screaming barking, and going crazy. At first I thought it was a leopard or something. Then I heard dogs barking. The baboons were getting ambushed by poachers with dogs. It is a distressing feeling to know that I cannot stop what is happening. Apparently this is the season when poachers use dogs most. They go after anything but prefer warthog, bush pig and baboon.

Wednesday July 13, 2011 Elephant Season

It is officially elephant season here at Kinda Camp. The monkey oranges are ripe and the elephants are back. It is strange to only have a few glimpses of them for 6 months and then have them visiting several times a week. Unfortunately elephants go wherever they want and do whatever they want. While I was away in Lusaka after Shayna’s send off the elephants stuck around for several days. Unfortunately they came so close to the reed structure that Kingston and Desmond sleep that Kingston was forced to fire a shot again.

I have been informed that a good way to keep elephants away without having to fire shots, which I prefer to avoid, is to make bricks with elephant dung and crushed chili peppers. Once fired they can be placed in a fire and burn for several hours keeping the elephants at bay.

I was about to post this when I heard that while I was away my scout Kingston was being harassed by elephants. He radioed the lodge to say that he was worried about my things (video camera, GPS, etc…) as the elephant was tossing it into the air! He failed to tell me this story. 

July 8, 2011 Grand Send Off

Since building Kinda Camp I have had two visitors; my brother Willy and my friend and colleague Shayna. Their trips overlapped by a few days. On Willy’s last evening we decided to have a “sundowner” (African term for a cocktail while watching the sunset) in the large Fibwe Hide. We were headed to the hide when Willy turned back to camp. He said he would meet us there he wanted to grab his IPod. After 10 minutes of waiting in the hide for Willy we began to call his name. Finally he answered in the direction of Kinda Camp. He yelled that there were elephants. When he was initially coming to the hide he ran into a large elephant at the scout camp. He went back to camp and he and Desmond waited. I told him to have Desmond bring him around the other way. Willy made it up to the hide safely. As we enjoyed our sundowners we also listened to the elephants in the scout camp breaking branches. Kingston, our scout, researcher, and elephant protector was with the baboons at the time. After about 30 minutes we heard yelling and then a very very loud gunshot. Kingston came to the hide to escort us down. He said when he returned to camp an elephant was running straight for the camp attendant David and he fired a shot to scare the elephant away. This was Willy’s first full view of an elephant at Kasanka. Just in time for his departure.

Shayna also had an elephant send off. It started first with our close encounter away from camp. Later that evening after we went to bed Shayna heard noises around her tent. After about 30 minutes she realized it was elephants. They were circling her tent and breaking branches above her. She stayed awake all night in fear. The next morning as we were loading up the vehicle to head to Lusaka Kingston came into camp. He had his gun ready. I looked and an elephant was running just behind Shayna’s tent. It looked like it was headed towards camp but diverted into the mushitu. So Shayna also received a thrilling, terrifying send off from the elephants.

Are they saying goodbye or are they angry that my visitors are leaving. I like to think they are trying to scare them into staying J

July 6, 2011

Shayna’s First Elephant Encounter

Shayna Lieberman a graduate student at Yale University was out visiting. On her last evening here we decided to see one last Kasanka sunset. We were walking to the “sunset hide”, chatting and laughing, the sun was in our eyes. We looked up and 50 feet away was a large elephant. Everything seemed to happen in slow motion after that. The elephant turned his head towards us, flapped his ears, and let out a big trumpet. Shayna screamed “what do we do”. I screamed back “jump in the grass”. Unfortunately we jumped into the grass on top of an ant colony. We couldn’t move so became covered in ants. The funny thing is that two minutes before I was telling Shayna that it is good she is going game viewing in South Africa as she did not see an elephant in Kasanka