Walkin' on Kimana

11.18.10

Day 1 of fieldwork!

I love my life. Today was such a good day, and I’m on fire for how exciting this is going to be.

The goal of day 1 was to map Kimana Wildlife Sanctuary. We are the first to be allowed to research there, so there aren’t any maps or grids about what’s inside. This area of land is about 46 square kilometers, and is situated with other sanctuaries to support wildlife corridors (where wildlife disperses from national parks during the wet season). So Kimana Wildlife Sanctuary forms a sort of line of land with other sanctuaries so that wildlife have somewhere to go from the national parks.

We’ve split into four groups of 2-3 students to complete field work. Today, each group was dropped off at some point on the sanctuary boundary with a local guide (who knew the boundary well enough to lead us around it), an armed KWS guard (to protect us from elephants, etc), and a GPS! We mapped coordinates with the GPS as we walked the boundary, and composed a map based on these points.

Working with four groups made the work go pretty fast, but I must say, we had an exciting day. Besides seeing wildlife (elephants, zebra, waterbuck, Grant’s gazelles, impala, warthogs), we got stuck in our land cruiser. It was crazy. Our advisor, Shem (renamed “Chui Kubwa” - “Big Leopard”), was driving and soon as he hit a big mud pit, he realized and said, “Ooooh, I’ve made a blunder.” Bahaha. We were tilted in this pit of mud, which was entirely engulfing one of our rear tires. To get out, we had to be towed with our other vehicle and commission all of our guards to push. The hole that was left behind was about two and a half feet deep. Kinda crazy!

I’m very excited to be so close to wildlife. It feels like we’re taking an 8-day walking safari, and happened to be taking notes. We’ll start transects and animal counts tomorrow!