Things have been greening up here, finally! After several
months of drought, everyone is happy with the rain: baboons, wildlife,
livestock, and humans.
All the rain has provided more food for our babs, so they can rest and relax a lot more:
Megan has now become an expert in baboons and their behavior. She
has mastered all the IDs and the data collection, and remains cheerful pretty
much 24/7. She’s awesome. Here are some photos of her in the field – cool as a
cuc (one of her favorite sayings). She even celebrated her first birthday
abroad!
Joan came to visit! The big boss came to visit the baboons
(and us!) in late August. She settled easily into baboon work again, learning a
bunch of IDs in just a couple of weeks – what a pro! We filled all hours in
between the baboons with discussions of baboons, data, fun field stories, and
HBO’s Newsroom. It was a blast and, yet, very productive. We miss you!
This is Corinna Most, Shirley’s PhD student from UCSD. She’s
smart, hilarious, and a perfect fit here at baboon camp.
Corinna is focusing on mother-infant relationships and early social development, so she pretty much gets to follow little baby baboons all day long (poor her, eh?). This is her 3rd time out here after two pilot seasons and she’s aiming to be here until December 2015 collecting the bulk of her dissertation data. She is focusing on Ngela, a large troop neighboring ours (Pumphouse Gang and Enkai). I tagged along on this beautiful day:
The baboons spent a lot of time feeding on mineral deposits in this dry riverbed:
Corinna and Ngela tracker, Ngoya, with their troop:
Gobs of data!! We are quickly approaching our 1st anniversary
here in Kenya. Laura and I got to camp around the 1st of October
last year. Data collection was up and running sometime in mid-November 2013. In
the time since we have collected 3,817 focals, that’s over 950 focal hours so far, on
our 43 focal baboons. That is AWESOME. I’m so proud of my team, past and
present, for getting so much data despite health and other challenges. Way to
go team!
But it’s not all hard work, we’re still making time for fun:
Here’s a recent sundowner where we enjoyed the green
views and practiced our yoga (which we actually do about once a week together
after baboon work).
The complete new crew: Megan, Corinna, me, and Laura
And, of course, the local troop joined us (I wonder what they thought of the yoga....).
We also went on a picnic at the river, complete with sunbathing and a game of bocce ball!
Things are going really well right now. Working hard and playing hard results in happy, healthy, and productive baboon researchers.
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