Arriving in Samburu after a few days in Nairobi feels like I’ve landed on another planet. A beautiful, peaceful and completely natural planet. I wake up in the mornings to the sounds of hornbills and sights of vervet monkeys playing in the trees outside my spacious tent. They are enjoyable so long as they remain outside the tent, not causing havoc within! There is always something to see here – if not vervet monkeys, it’s the baboons, or the delicate klipspringer who eats from your palm, or mongoose, or hyraxes, or a scorpion boldly running across the floor. That was exciting for me as I have never seen one before – and also a reminder to watch where I step!
I am lucky enough to be assisting Lucy King and Joseph Soltis with their sound experiments on the Samburu elephants. It’s a fascinating study and very important in furthering understanding of elephant vocal communication and threat responses. At the moment, I am getting used to the specific behaviors elephants display, and also trying to learn to identify different families and age and sex the calves. I’ll be writing a small thesis for my Masters of Environment degree back in Australia, focused on elephant calves, and I have to say I never dreamed I would be studying something so exciting.
It is hard to describe how magnificent and beautiful the elephants appear up close. The matriarchs are so proud and dignified, and the calves so innocent and uncoordinated. It makes me feel very small when there are elephants surrounding the research car from all angles. It is a lot more challenging then I would have expected to spot elephants from a distance, or to determine group size and composition. For such a large animal, they blend into the landscape amazingly well. And when there are zebra, giraffe, kudu, warthogs and oryx around, it’s easy to be distracted! It must be a challenging time for the wildlife in the reserve because the river is almost completely dry and dusty. They badly need some rain, although perhaps not as much as last year. It’s hard to imagine the river full of water, let alone flooding.
All in all, I am loving my first week in Samburu and can’t wait to spend the next ten weeks learning as much as I can from Lucy, Joseph and the rest of the team.