By: Stephanie Holmes, Carleton College
Seeing incredible wildlife on transects is cool, but have you ever had them wreck your camp? This was the predicament we faced in Mababe, our last concession of the semester, where baboons, hyenas, mice, and even the weather teamed up to destroy as much as they could.
When we first pulled into camp, we were awestruck by the beauty of the Mababe River, flowing past just a couple hundred meters away. As we sat around the campfire that night, we could hear hippos groaning at each other, and hyenas whooping nearby. In our very first camp in Khwai, we had nicknamed the hyenas who visited our camp “Peewee,” to rhyme with phiri (hyena in Setswana). We hadn’t seen camp hyenas in a long time, and we were (mostly) delighted to see them sniffing around the outskirts of our camp again. Little did we know, however, that these phiri were much bolder than the ones we’d seen before, and had a penchant for eating sponges.
It was an unfortunate day when we woke up for transect and discovered that they’d figured out how to knock over the dish pit, scattering our dishwashing buckets and all of the clean dishes in the grass. Like poorly-trained dogs, hyenas love to chew things, and they found an excellent source of chewable material in our dishes. Thank goodness we’d purchased a pack of ten sponges in Maun before leaving for the field, because our first sponge met its demise that night. They also loved the handle of the bread knife, which was completely covered in tooth marks the next morning. “Hyenas are so metal, they eat knives for breakfast,” our instructor Lily joked. Every night thereafter for the next week, we’d wake up sometime in the wee hours of the morning to hear the clatter of the dish pit being knocked over again. After the second time, we started leaving all the dish racks on the metal counter under our kitchen tree, but the hyenas managed to get past that too. On average, we lost a new sponge every two days, and often had to redo the dinner dishes in the morning.
Another problem we encountered almost immediately were the mice. We knew they were around, but we figured that as long as we kept the kitchen tent firmly zipped shut, they wouldn’t be an issue. We were wrong. These mice got creative. We never actually figured out how they got in – we suspected they chewed a hole in the ceiling under the rain fly and dropped in, Mission Impossible-style – but we started finding them in the tent almost every morning, and we lost a little more food nearly every day. A bag of granola and a package of flour were the first victims, followed by a brand-new bag of powdered milk, which had seven separate holes chewed in it, and a bag of raisins. Thankfully they couldn’t figure out how to get into the produce cooler, so our fresh fruits and veggies remained safe, but anything in the dry food box and breakfast box (which are made of metal) was at risk, alas.
The hyenas and the mice were nothing, however, compared to the baboons. We’d seen them around the campground, but they generally kept their distance. After a week, though, they had no such reservations when we all went out on transect. Sierra and I were on a bird point-count with Dix, so we were the first car to get back to camp, and as we pulled in, a scene of chaos met our eyes. It was like that moment in Jurassic Park when they realized that velociraptors learned how to open doors, as we saw with dawning despair that the baboons had figured out how to open the zippers on the food tent. Chips and peanuts were strewn among veggie scraps, grocery bags, lollipops, and random assorted trash both inside and outside the food tent, alongside dozens of scattered colored pencils. The tent door hung open, a half-eaten watermelon leaning against the zipper, and most of our produce was either gone or had bites taken out of it. All five loaves of bread had been devoured, too. It took a good half an hour to clean it up, and we vowed to be more vigilant the next time we all left camp. We put a combo lock on the zippers, and assured ourselves that surely the baboons wouldn’t be able to open that.
You can probably see where this is going. When one door is padlocked shut, another opens… or is forcibly ripped open, in this case. The next day, Berkley and Colin returned to camp first, to a scene of carnage even worse than before. The baboons had managed to tear a meter-wide hole in the back of the tent and wreaked havoc on everything they could get their hands on. All of the leftover food had been pulled out and scattered behind the tent, pasta and lentils were spilled everywhere in the dry box, and milk had been poured on the floor of the food tent. Not content to just destroy our food, the baboons took out their frustration on the kitchen itself too, knocking over everything they possibly could and tossing the contents of our cleaning box everywhere. One had even jumped from the tree onto our table, bending it in half and overturning it, sending pots, pans, and stoves flying. They turned their gazes to our personal tents, too – the girls’ tent had been crazily flattened where they threw themselves at it, but thankfully they didn’t get in. Lily was less lucky; they somehow managed to snap one of her tent poles in half, and they stole her toiletry kit, throwing its contents all over camp.
Between the mice and the baboons, we were rapidly running out of food at this point, but we assured ourselves that we’d be fine for the last day or two we had left. The weather, however, had other ideas. That same afternoon, a series of heavy thunderstorms passed directly over our camp, dumping at least three inches of rain on us in the span of a couple hours. Normally this wouldn’t be much of an issue, but the wide-open hole in the back of the food tent meant that anything not protected by metal or sealed plastic was soaked. (Even with our rain flaps shut, our personal tents had puddles near the doors too, and a couple students had to sleep in the cars because their stuff was too wet.) By the time we pulled out of camp to head back to Maun the next day, the only food we had left were a few lucky breakfast items and our canned food.
Despite the overly-destructive nature of our wild neighbors, we were all sad to see Mababe receding in the rear-view mirror. It was our last time in the field, and we all knew that it was an experience we weren’t soon to forget – and, as this blog post can attest, it sure made for a good story.