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Published: March 28th 2008
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Port Bank
Making a steep bank to port in an attempt to get a look at a pack of wild dogs. The past few days have been a bit boring, I have to admit . . . I'm certainly appreciating having my days off, but I'm also spending nearly every minute wishing I were somewhere else. There's just so much of Kenya to see, and I feel quite helpless being stuck at Mpala. Excluding my first day off, which was spent nursing a hangover (barely left my banda all day) from a barbeque-turned-drinkfest at the River Camp, I've spent my days in front of my computer, napping, reading, and just generally relaxing. That would normally be a fine thing, except that I'm in Africa and can't help but feel like any moment not spent in the bush is a moment wasted.
Today, however, may make up for five days spent doing next to nothing (assuming my next couple days are similar to the past couple). Just before 0700, I heard a knock on the wrought-iron frame of my door, the sound not quite penetrating my sleep enough to convince me it wasn't more than a dream. A second knock , however, and I snapped-to just enough for a groggy "Hello?" The voice that answered was that of Kayna, who had come
Ranch House
The Ranch House is on the left with the red roof, ranch staff village at top, and schoolhouse (with blue roof) to the right. to wake me up for an early-morning dog search. But not just any dog search - we were going to locate 10 packs of wild dogs in less than two hours. How? By plane.
An immediate rush of excitement quickly sobered my sleepy discombobulation, and I was out of my banda and on my way with Kayna up to the airstrip in a matter of minutes. Shortly after arriving, Andrew, the pilot, touched down in his little 4-seater and pulled up alongside the Wild Dog Project Landrover. We hopped in, donned our headsets, and, after a quick taxi to the north end of the dirt airstrip, began our bouncy take-off that lifted us over the research center at the last second.
It's been a long time since I've been in a plane this small, and damn . . . what a rush! I am insanely jealous of Kayna for having a job whose description entails flying in small aircraft over the African bush tracking endangered charismatic near-megafauna. Such a unique way to marvel at the African landscape, simple yet majestic - grey and green bush, yellow grassland, and barren red soil, pock-marked with the outlines of bomas and
scattered kopjes, from tiny to mountainous, and scarred with dirt roads and ravines and riverbeds. We got relatively close to Mt. Kenya for a short time, and the flower farms in the foothills were the only straight-lined geometric disruptions to the landscape we encountered.
In the course of our two-hour flight around the Laikipia Plateau, we eventually found all ten packs of wild dogs that are radio-collared. The protocol seemed to be: fly to where the dogs were last found, listen for beeps in the headphones, switch between listening for the frequencies from the starboard and port antennas to determine on which side of the plane they're on, circle a few times to get an idea of their whereabouts, and move on to the next pack. On two occasions, we made very tight, slow, descending spirals in an attempt to get a visual of the dogs. Both times we were successful, though I only saw them the second time. Andrew and Kayna are both quite experienced at finding dogs from the air, and it amazed me how they could pick them out from the shade of an acacia as high as we were, going as fast as we were.
Wild Dogs from the air
A horrible picture, but you can still make them out. Pretty cool to see an endangered species from an airplane! It was a great day for flying, too - clear skies and no turbulence. I have to admit I felt a hint of nausea towards the end, but was fine the rest of the time, even when we made sudden banks and tight circles. These maneuvers always took me by surprise and could be felt throughout my entire body in ways I'm not at all used to, similar to a high-speed, loopy, upside-down roller coaster. It sounds like fun and games, which it is to an extent, but flying small planes in the African bush is also a serious activity not to be taken lightly - Johnathon Burchell and Ian Ross, two Mpala researchers working on the Laikipia Predator Project, died in a plane crash on June 29, 2003, doing just the same the tight descending spirals we were.
To add to the experience, we were treated with our own soundtrack for the adventure: I was startled to hear Alan Jackson suddenly burst through the headphones, followed by Alanis Morissette's
Jagged Little Pill. Apparently Andrew has a cd- or mp3-player hooked up in his plane, and we rocked out during our transects in between pinpointing packs.
We
generally flew pretty high, but still low enough to see some of the larger animals, including giraffe, buffalo, and even a herd of elephants. Once we had found the last pack, however, Andrew steered us into a monstrous spiraling dive to turn around, and we flew back to the research center low enough that I could have hit the plane with a rock if I were on the ground as it passed overhead! Low enough to look into the eyes of dik-diks . . . I swear we would have skimmed the horns off a giraffe. What a rush!
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