Recycling

Took me two skewers to figure out where the skewers came from....recycled bicycle tire spokes. The meat was fantastic.

Mara River Water Users Association, 2013 Thiess International Riverprize Winner!

Congratulations to the Mara River Water Users Association (MRWUA) on winning the 16th annual Thiess International Riverprize!

The Mara River Water Users Association (MRWUA) is a community-based water resources management organization, with the primary objectives of 1) promoting the protection and conservation of the Mara River Catchment area, 2) supporting the sustainable and efficient use of water, and 3) assisting relevant authorities with water resources management and issuance of water use permits and water conflict resolution. Their primary office is based in Mulot, Kenya, on the banks of the Amala River, but there are a number of sub-catchment groups located throughout the basin. The MRWUA has worked closely with Kenyan Water Resources Management Authority, WWF, USAID, Songoroi Ltd., and other NGOs and partners in the region to accomplish an impressive amount of conservation activities, including protecting 40 km of riverbank, educating 1,000 farmers about land and water conservation, and protecting 40 springs.

The Thiess International Riverprize is awarded by the International RiverFoundation. They have been awarding this prize for 15 years, but the Mara is the first African river to receive the award! Stuart Bunn, a member of the judging panel, said,

"With a clear vision and in anticipation of potential conflict arising over scarce water resources, the community based Mara River Water Users Association overcame significant challenges and successfully collaborated with farmers, community groups, NGOs, consultants and many other stakeholders to implement the Mara River Environmental Management Initiative."

The prize not only comes with international recognition for the incredible work the MRWUA has done in the basin, but also a large grant for the MRWUA to continue and build upon their work. It also includes a grant for a "twinning" project, in which the MRWUA can help start up and mentor a river conservation project in another country.

We are so proud of the MRWUA and all their accomplishments, and we look forward to sharing more of their story with you!

Breakdown!

A few days ago we had a minor breakdown.  It was the day before I was scheduled to go to Tanzania.  Which...makes it a bit more of a stressful breakdown.

One of the main support bolts came loose for one of the tie-rods.  It fell out somewhere along the way from Talek to Emarti.  We noticed it pretty quickly because the steering became erratic just after Aitong.  

We made a quick call to Lerijin and two of his brothers came out from Aitong on a pikipiki (motorcycle) and helped us get on our way.  Funny....because their father, Lokakwar, helped us replace a bushing on that bolt a week prior.  At that time, I remember telling him, "I have loctite, please put it on the bolt so it doesn't come loose."  And he replied, "We don't need loctite, I'm going to double nut it!".  

I snapped a quick picture to illustrate how Amanda was making good use of our breakdown by filtering samples in the middle of a cow herd while we were working on the truck.

Camp Baboons

Baboons are pretty cute on video...especially the young ones.  They're not cute when they steal a bag of flour from you as you're trying to make bagels...like they did to me last week.

Here is short video of a young baboon catching a ride on his mother's back.

River of Maggots

While sampling in the Mara River, we found a huge "bloom" of maggots floating downstream from the area in the river where all the carcasses have been rotting.  It was an amazingly disgusting sight... but also very interesting.

In the following picture, look closely at the water.  What are all those little white dots floating in the river?  

Here is another picture....a bit closer shot.  What are they?  What could they possibly be?  

That's right.  They're maggots.  Thousands of them... floating downstream to Tanzania.

Here is a short video of it.  I tried to capture it as best I could with my phone camera.

More on this to come soon....

Camp Day

Days like today, are necessary.  Today was a Camp Day.  A day we stay in camp and tend to everything that we've neglected for the last week.

I'm amazed with all we got done today...

• oil change for the Land Rover
• oil filter change for the Land Rover
• fuel filter change for the Land Rover
• Geemi spent 3 hours cleaning the interior and exterior of the Land Rover (I didn't recognize it when he was done!)
• 4 hours of computing statistics for our research on the computer (until the battery died)
• drying the last week of sediment samples in the solar oven
• cleaning the "lady cave" prior to Amanda's arrival, so she'll never know we were there
• making bagels for the upcoming week (including pesto bagel pizzas for dinner!)
• cleaning sample equipment with deionized water
• going through the previously downloaded footage from the game camera

And with that...I leave you with video of a HUGE elephant tusking our game camera in camp.

No time for laundry or showers yet.  If you're planning a visit to camp, come by after Friday.  :)

The Lady Cave

Amanda joking refers to our laboratory tent as her "Lady Cave", because she spends so much time in there.  Well now...we can officially call it the Bat Cave!

A family of bats have moved in...and she has only been gone one week!

Cheeseburgers

It has been a rough week.  A ton of wildebeest have died in the river, our gearbox has serious issues (no first gear), I just learned our clutch plate is trashed and we have a crack in our pressure plate, we haven't showered in a week, it has been raining every day so we're covered in mud and our solar system hasn't charged anything, and we're running low on food.

But hey...we're having cheeseburgers tonight!  I dug out our secret stash of ground beef and Geemi and I grilled up some cheeseburgers on our biolite.  We had enough ground beef stashed so we cooked up and hooked up the neighboring researchers as well.

AND....I got my phone fully charged so I could make this post!  Things are starting to look up....

Another Failed Crossing Today

Another 1,500 wildebeest died today in the Mara River.  That brings us up to approximately 5,200 wildebeest dead in the last three days.

Last night, a flood pulse came through the Mara at around 11PM.  This flood came from they upper catchment.  The rising waters of the flood washed many of the wildebeest carcasses further downstream into Tanzania.  The following picture was taken at the Purungat Bridge at around 8AM this morning.

This picture, was taken at the same spot at around 4PM this afternoon.  

There were three large wildebeest crossings today in the southern half of the Mara Triangle.  The first one was between 9AM and 10AM, just downstream of the Serena Lunch Spot.  The crossing consisted of approximately 1,500 wildebeest and every single one of them drowned.  They crossed at a better location than the previous two days but the water was just too high and fast for them to make it across.  As you can see in the following graph, the water was highest today at between 9AM and 10AM.  This was courtesy of the Talek Catchment.  There must have been some heavy rains in the Loita Hills early this morning.  This also ended up causing a crash of the dissolved oxygen in the Mara at the Purungat Bridge.  

A second crossing occurred at approximately 2PM near the Hippo Pool, just North of the Purungat Bridge.  The crossing consisted of several hundred wildebeest and only 4 drowned.  The third crossing happened at approximately 5PM at the same spot.  All survived.  

While we were taking samples and surveying the river today, I tried to count what was left of the original herd that continues to try to cross at the Serena Lunch Spot.  There seemed to be only about 500 wildebeest left, on this side of the river.  The other survivors are somewhere on the other side.  I hope they don't try to cross tomorrow...with the river this high, they don't have a chance.  

I also checked on the wounded mother wildebeest from yesterday, the one who had broken her leg on the rocky bank at the crossing.  She was still alive.  Her young wildebeest son, was no longer there.  I'm guessing he left her there and joined the herd.  

3,857

It all started with a dream.

Yesterday morning, I was talking to Amanda on the phone (she's in the US, I'm in Kenya).  Amanda said she had a dream that 2,000 wildebeest drowned and that I should go check the river.  Immediately after hanging up with her, I forgot.  

At around noon that same day, Charles, the Warden at the Purungat Bridge, called and told me that one thousand wildebeest had died in a crossing that morning.  I was shocked.  Then I remembered what Amanda had told me.  Geemi and I grabbed our gear and we immediately went down to the river.

The crossing that Charles was talking about happened at the Serena Lunch Spot between 8AM and 9AM on September 25th.  We arrived down in that area at around 1PM, grabbed a Ranger, deployed our monitoring equipment, took samples, and counted the carcasses in the river.  We counted 1,510 carcasses in a 3.5 kilometer stretch of river.  Over 2,000 wildebeest likely died in the crossing yesterday, the other 500 floated their way into Tanzania.  

Today, another ~2,000 wildebeest died at that same crossing.  We arrived in the area approximately 20 minutes after the crossing started and we counted over 1,300 bodies floating past us just downstream of the crossing. Overall, our total estimate for both events was 3,857 wildebeest.

Why did so many die over the last two days?  A brutal combination of higher than average flows in the river and the wildebeest choosing a bad crossing point.  There has been tons of rain in the Mara over the last week and it has been speculated that the wildebeest chase the rain.  Maybe they're crossing so much right now because of all the spotty showers?  Who knows...

As you can see in this picture, once they get to the other side of the river, there is no way up.  Maybe 50% make it up the hill, and the others drown.  

Once they drown, their bodies float downstream and eventually get hung up on rocky outcroppings.  

These drownings are a natural part of the system and seem to have been happening for a long time. We found a paper from the 1970's discussing the deposition of wildebeest carcasses in the Mara River. However, the size and frequency of these drownings varies from year to year. We're trying to understand when and where these mass drownings occur and how they impact the river ecosystem.  Even though we've documented a few of them, they are always tough to see.  The sounds of a drowning wildebeest are haunting.  

It is exceptionally difficult to witness this...a young wildebeest and their mother...having safely made it across the river and up onto the rocky outcropping...and the mother ends up breaking a leg on the rocks.  The young wildebeest doesn't seem to understand what has happened, and just waits.  We checked back on him four hours later after this picture was taken and he was still waiting.  Heart breaking....

We counted carcasses again this evening.  As of 6PM, there are 1,846 wildebeest carcasses in a 3.5km stretch of the Mara River.  

At least 3,857 wildebeest died in the Mara River in the last two days.