Lab Tent

Chris is busy today calibrating our water quality meters in the "garage" of our new lab tent. Camp is almost up and running, and we're heading out to the river tomorrow!

Home sweet home

Made it back to the Mara this afternoon. Celebrated our first night back with Mexican food, old friends and a lion roaring surprisingly close to our camp. Good to be back.

Traveling to the Mara

Today we left Nairobi at 6 am, headed for the Mara. It's now 4 pm, and we're almost at our camp. It's been a long, but beautiful drive, made longer by the terrible roads and small car in which we're traveling, and made more beautiful by how green the recent rains have made everything. It's also been fun to travel with our friends and drivers Peter and Stephen, neither of whom have ever been to the Mara before. That said, I can't wait to get there!

First night back

Celebrating our return with a few cold Tuskers on the balcony of the hotel. It's a great place to sit and enjoy a beer, although you have to climb out a window to get there.

On our way...

Thank you to everyone who voted on the number of bags we would need for this field season in Kenya. We really appreciated your optimism, with votes ranging from 1 bag (thanks William!) to 11 (same as last year). Sadly, we all lost the bet, when we totalled out at 12 (including 2 carry-ons each). Special thanks to the patient airline and TSA agents who got our bags here safely, though. We arrived with everything intact! Can't wait to get down to the Mara and unpack!

Featured Articles

Amanda and I are grateful to have had our work mentioned in several publications over the last few months.

Cheryl Lyn Dybas wrote about our work in the following journals:

• Africa Geographic: Cry me a River
• Volume 19, Number 10.  November, 2011
• BioScience:  Saving the Serengeti - Masai Mara
• Volume 61, Number 11.  November, 2011

Cheryl did a great job capturing the complex issues within the basin.  Thanks to Cheryl for helping to shed some light on the situation.  Check out these two articles for a great read.  

Irresponsible...

I believe this may be the most irresponsible thing by a safari guide that I have ever seen.  The problem here is not the depth of water...but the velocity.  I'm actually speechless.  I can't understand how a safari guide would actually attempt to cross that river.

I'm not sure which tributary of the Mara this river is...but it is likely one of the smaller ones feeding the Talek.  The tributaries to the Talek are very flashy.  They don't stay high for very long.  If the guide had only waited for a few hours, it would have dropped.  But he didn't...

A few hours away and a few days ago, 10 died while attempting to cross a flooded crossing - http://allafrica.com/stories/201111300032.html.

More Lab Work

Here is a shot of Amanda processing some of her samples on the flow analyzer.

Colors of the Mara River

Here is a quick picture of one of the analyses I'm doing on the samples I brought back from the Mara.  The different tubes have soil samples for different parts of the Mara catchment.  I'm trying to determine the relative amounts of clay, silt, and sand in each catchment.  There are only 16 tubes in the picture but I have over 120 samples!  The color of each tube really doesn't have anything to do with this specific analysis but I think that it was pretty interesting...the distinct colors from different portions of the catchment.

Hippo Pools...

One of the items we accomplished this summer was some intensive, 48-hour monitoring of several hippo pools.  Not everything worked out completely as planned but we got some very cool data.  We placed our in-stream data loggers above and below the hippo pools and set them to log every minute.  We also used a GoPro camera to record the actual movements of hippos so that we could tie those movements to potential changes on the in-stream data loggers.

Here is a short excerpt from one of the hippo pools near the Amani Mara Lodge in the Olare Orok Conservancy.  As you'll notice, we hid the camera in a small rock crevice.  We ended up pulling the camera shortly after this video was taken because there were baboons watching us and we were worried they would take off with the camera as soon as we left.  The hippos are all in the water directly in front of the camera.  If you look closely, you can see some of their movements.  I'll be posting some more exciting videos soon.