BEAM Kenya: Lucky 2015 class

Hi all,

You've already heard that we saw wild dogs (twice!) in Mpala and lions yesterday in Soysambu, but I need to emphasize how lucky we are this BEAM trip! Our drivers have decided we must be good luck, and some of the students have half convinced me that they should stay in Kenya full time as research assistants (Since with their massively good luck, all our research on hyenas would get done in no time). Don't worry though. We did promise we'd bring them back, so I suppose we will. I can always make them stand around the lab while I pipette to ensure I get good results.

First to talk about the dogs: African wild dogs are endangered, with only ~ 6600 adults in the wild (and these distributed throughout ~17 countries in Africa). Many people live and work for years in Kenya without ever seeing a wild dog. Needless to say, we were all very excited to spot them. Both times, one of the students saw them before us or our guides, so they are (and should be) quite pleased with themselves!

As for the lions:
We always see lions on BEAM in the Masaai Mara, but we would have never expected to see them here in Soysambu, as they have not been sighted here for 10 months (And Soysambu does not have a resident lion group). Not only this, but it was a great sighting, with two lionesses and three cubs all out in the open and active. Lions are usually sleeping or resting - in fact, male lions can spent 18-20 hours a day sleeping and females 15-18. As hyena researchers, we ARE a little biased against lions (the Lion King got it so wrong), but I think we can all agree that this can get quite boring to watch. Not last night though! We saw both cubs and lionesses playing, including cubs deciding to crawl all over their mom's head. One of the lionesses THOUGHT about hunting a couple zebra, and we got to see her stalk towards them (although the cubs pretty much ruined that because they are terrible at being sneaky).

Lioness with one of her cubs

Lioness starting to stalk the zebras

Eventually, she actually brought a zebra carcass out from a bush, where she must have stashed it after killing it earlier that day. She kindly brought it out so she could eat it with her cubs in plain sight of the car. I appreciated it, even though she made me look like a terrible instructor, since I had just finished telling the students that lions weren't going to be around Soysambu. I did, however, feel better when I saw some of the other animals' reactions to the lion. A bunch of giraffes, upon catching sight of the lioness, seemed quite puzzled (and concerned).

"What? There are lions here!?"

Giraffes staring at the lioness (out of the frame to the right)

Finally, as the cherry on top, today we saw a golden jackal, which is the rarest of three jackal species in Africa and very difficult to spot.

I'll leave you with some pictures. The students are about to go on a hike up Sleeping Warrior, a small mountain in the park. I'll make sure they all have their cameras since, at this rate, they might spot bigfoot.