croc around the clock

Harnas' two crocodiles, (Ina and Claus--whose names I'd didn't know for a long time so I called them Newman and Kramer) have been here over ten years. They'd never produced eggs, so people were wondering if they were, perhaps, the same sex. (It's difficult to ask a full-grown crocodile to "roll over" --and it wouldn't help anyway.)

But this past October, they began to dig holes, and sure enough, around 40-50 eggs appeared. It's been suspenseful waiting, and when the time came and left (mid-January) for the eggs to hatch and the mother to dig them out, we all got worried.

On Marieta's and my trip to Otjivarongo (note this new and correct spelling of the town), we asked the owner of the croc farm lots of questions, and he told us to dig them up and see if there were any living babies. (Although he also said hatching can take up to 6 months in the wild--and the changes with global warming has affected a lot of the animals in various ways.)

First of all, you need to know that a very small percentage of baby crocs are hatched, healthy, and strong enough to survive the first few days. Out of the eggs, we got six or seven living crocs, 4 of whom survived the shock of entering life (also normal. The owner of the croc far, said they are easily affected by stress and often die from it when they're babies.)

To protect them, then, from people peering at them and picking them up, Marieta has put them in one of her bathtubs with a heater in the room to keep them warm. They all seem to be doing well, and by my count, it will be easier to take care of 4 rather than 40.

Today Marieta and I will start feeding them--chicken, with tweezers to protect our fingers. They already have teeth (and they squeak!).

Despite growing up to be true monsters in size and aggression, they're actually cute at this age. Well, maybe not puppy cute, but cute in a baby dinosaur way.

Road Trip

Thursday night Marieta asked me if I'd go on a road trip with her. It seems her John Deere tractor had broken down, and the only place that services John Deeres in the whole country of Namibia is a place called Otjiwarongo (O-chee-va-rango). I agreed so we left the next morning at 5:00 a.m. We were supposed to bring along a Bushman with us in case we had a flat tire, but Marieta forgot to ask one, so we left hoping we wouldn't need one.

I failed to mention that Otjiwarongo is a small town over four hours away--a trip that is entirely on gravel roads. (I'm currently looking for a donor to replace my damaged kidneys, by the way.) The road goes through the Herero tribal land, and looks amazingly like the deserts of Arizona (minus the saguaro cactus). And the scenery never changes. Ever. I mean never.

As you can see by the pictures, we had a good time. We did some shopping at the Pick and Pay, visited an upscale bar and then an entertainment center, finally picking up our parts for the tractor at Theo's.

I jest, of course. These are pictures I took along the way so you could see what I saw for four-plus hours there on Friday and four-plus hours back today. After seeing the scenery, I was a bit worried about what I would find at Ojtiwarongo, but in fact, it's a fairly good sized town for this part of the country--12,000 people? It's one of those towns whose sole purpose seems to be the place rural people come on the weekend to get supplies. So, fancy--no, but decent, yes.

Our hotel turned out to be quite a nice little lodge called C'est Si Bon! Hotel--translation for non-French speakers, approximately "It's Good! Hotel." But this time advertising lived up to its name--palm trees, tropical birds, grass-roofed bungalows, a decent restaurant.

The one interesting thing we did Friday afternoon in town was visit the crocodile farm--raised mainly for handbags, belts, and shoes. We had some questions about our croc eggs at Harnas (more on that another day), so we visited the place and took the tour, such as it was. The guide took us in the 2-year-old room where probably about a hundred crocs were swimming around behind a three-foot high cement wall. (They were about 4 feet long each.) Marieta kept saying, "Feel the water, Barbara. It's not as warm as you'd think. We need to remember this temperature."

Finally, to prove I wasn't a scared American woman (that I was) I leaned over the wall and reached down into a corner where there didn't seem to be as many bodies and touched the water. Just at that point, my sunglasses--which where hanging on my t-shirt--fell into the water. All the crocs moved at once, but these are prescription sunglasses, so without thinking, I reached down again and snatched the glasses, literally, from the jaws of death. All of them had moved in my direction--suddenly and quickly.

The guide just took the glasses (which were now covered in croc crap) and rinsed them off for me. Marieta was no help because she was doubled over, laughing her head off. I just stood there, waiting for the adrenalin to drain from my body so I could breathe again.

No more close brushes with being someone's dinner. We drove home today, me wearing proudly my sunglasses--that although they are leopard print--will always be known to me as my Croc Crap glasses.

Mr. Nielson

One of my favorite little creatures here on Harnas is Mr. Nielson, a black-capped squirrel monkey. He's tiny tiny tiny--if you measure from about where your wrist begins to the top of your middle finger, his body is about that long. His tail is that length again. He weighs less than two pounds.

Mr. N isn't from around here. He was being smuggled in to Namibia with some other of his buddies and was confiscated. Normally he lives in the rain forests of South America--mainly in Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia. He has vocal cords, so he can make cute little sounds.

Because Harnas is an animal sanctuary, he and his friends were allowed to come here (Namibia has a law that non-native species cannot come into the country). Fortunately, he wasn't put down--as many smuggled animals are. Unfortunately, all of his buddies died of tuberculosis.

But Mr. Nielson is a hearty little guy and has been here for years in his enclosure in the garden area. I just adore him. I like to go inside and put a peanut on my shoulder. He'll jump to my shoulder long enough to take the nut and then jump back somewhere else. "Spider" monkey is a good name--he likes hanging off the wall way up high.

It takes him forever to eat just one peanut because he's so small, so I have lots of time to observe him. He's extremely shy, so he'll try to hide away in the leaves and branches, but he's also very understanding if you move closer to get a better look.

He lives with Dixie the dassie--a strange little animal that I'll tell you about another time. Mr. N lives up high; she lives down low. It's a good combination.

Aren't his eyes wonderful? And I wish you could feel his soft little hair. A cutie-pie, for sure.

Lion Chess

Frikkie has been playing a bit of "lion chess" the last two days. He's moving individual lions around for various reasons. In addition, the vets need to put microchips into all the lions--there's a new law that large carnivores in Namibia need to be identified and chipped. It's to help with poaching, black market selling, and so on.

So yesterday morning, I went with Frikkie, the two vets, Desmond and Andrea, Gary, and some volunteers. The interesting thing is that the lions seem to sense when they're going to be darted--at least they figure out something is suspicious--and they disappear. And once one is darted, they start "talking" to each other from enclosure to enclosure, and all the others disappear, too.

So it took us some time to find Lerato hiding in the bush. Then we lured her out with a slab of ribs (extra rare, no sauce). Then Desmond darted her. It was just like Nat Geo channel. I'll include the video. (Actually, what we eventually learned is that we had darted the other female in the enclosure, Teri. But that was fine. Either was good for our purposes and both had to be done eventually. We probably all look alike to them as well as the other way around.)

Then we had to wait about 20 minutes for the drug to take complete effect (longer is better when you're talking about an angry darted lion). The dart must not have hit a muscle because she didn't sleep. Desmond had to dart her again. Finally she went to sleep.

It took six people to pick up the stretcher with the lioness on it and move it to the truck. Then we moved to Elsa's enclosure with our sleepy girl. Then we darted Elsa--who is so tame that she just stood there and let Desmond do it--what a sweetie.

A lot of you out there know that recently Elsa lost her enclosure pal, Sara, our oldest lion and the last of the South African lions that Marieta rescued from a bad zoo near Port Elizabeth. She was in her 20s--old by a lion's standards. (Those SA lions were the genetic base of nearly all the lions here at Harnas. ) Anyway, Elsa has been lonely since then, and she needed a friend. (She would stand at the fence when I'd go visit her and make this sad noise somewhere between a whine and moan.)

We put the two females (Teri is actually Elsa's daughter; Lerato is her granddaughter) under two trees close together so they could wake up slowly with each other and therefore wouldn't fight. (It's no fun to fight with a hangover, I guess.) They're up and around today--no problems.

It sounds easy, but there was a lot of driving through the bush, looking for lions who don't want to be found, and waiting. We tried again today for some different ones to move around, but word was definitely out, and nobody was getting darted today. If a lion doesn't want to be found, it's a good chance it won't--unless it's really hungry. Maybe tomorrow.

All in all it was amazing. When I was a kid I dreamed of doing this kind of thing--I used to love National Geographic specials, Jacques Cousteau shows, and Wild Kingdom. I don't know how I ended up teaching literature to college kids, but our roads often take turns we don't understand. At least I'm getting to take part in this right now--and for that, I'm immensely grateful and humbled.

Babies that aren't so small

Yesterday afternoon I went on a walk with the "Babies" but don't get the wrong idea. They're anything but babies. They're four lions that are called that to differentiate them from the "Brothers"--3 male lions that were born first. Then less than a year later came these four--2 males and 2 females. Right now I figure they're about 75-80 kg each--approximately165-175 pounds--not exactly infants.

They're better behaved than they used to be, but for some reason, they thought my camera was a toy and "tested" me by attacking me over and over. (Maybe it was because it's red?) No claws or teeth (okay, one time--in the video with the lion in the tree--my pants got torn in the back and I got a scratch on the back of my leg, but I'm still not sure if it was a lion claw or a big thorn.)

Anyway, the whole hour and a half we were walking, they tried to tackle me. When I got home and loaded the videos into my computer, I had to laugh and laugh. It looks like one of those Animal Attacks programs you see on cheesy television--especially when you view them over and over.

So I'm going to include three of them so you can get the idea. Let it be known that I never let them get the best of me. Never screamed. Never ran. But I did protest a lot.

Don't Try This At Home

A few mornings ago on my walk, I went to the cheetah enclosure with the five tame beauties--Nikita, Afram, and the rest. I found two volunteers there with Luiki, a large male. He was drooling incredibly and I asked them if they'd noticed anything. They said he seemed to have something in his mouth that he kept working around.

I waited a minute and he yawned. Sure enough, there was something grayish in the top of his mouth, stuck. It looked sort of like a slab of chewing gum.

I don't recommend doing this with your neighborhood cheetah, but I felt these cheetahs--four of them, at least--trusted me because I spent enough time petting, grooming, and discussing politics with them. (Besides, the volunteers were watching me and I had to look like I was an authority or something.) So I put my hand in Luiki's mouth and worked a space between the roof of his mouth and the "thing" and tried to pull it out. It wouldn't budge.

The space was still there, though, so I took a short, flat stick and opened his mouth again. It was amazing: he seemed to understand that I was trying to help him. He could have bit off my fingers or hand, but he just made a sort of "mrrroowww."

I put the stick in between the thing and the top of his mouth. I yanked. Nothing. I tried it again. Nothing. On the third time (we were both getting annoyed), it popped out.

It was a flat piece of bone that had apparently gotten stuck when he was eating. He worked his jaw around a little, swallowed, and started to purr. I put my arms around his head and thanked him for not killing me.

It felt like that fairy tale, you know? The one with the guy who pulls the thorn out of the lion's paw and then the lion doesn't eat him later in life? I figure I get a free pass if I'm in the bush and a cheetah decides I'm dinner.

It made me feel good. Let alone how it made Luiki feel!

Meerkat Mania

Anybody who has ever watched Animal Planet has probably seen at least ads for their popular show Meerkat Manor.

And yes, they really ARE that cute in person.

One of ours here (a small male shown sitting on me in the lower picture) had a broken arm. You can see his cast on his left arm. He still managed to do what he needed to do, carrying that heavy thing around. The vet took it off finally and the arm is as good as new. He lives in an enclosure with two females.

Meerkats are related to the mongooses that run around on Harnas (more on them another day). They spend most of their time either sunning themselves to warm their bellies (like the picture on the top) or digging tunnels to burrow in. (Although they often just use and expand the burrows of ground squirrels that have been abandoned.)

Meerkats are great to have around the house because they eat all kinds of insects. In fact, when I was here before, I used to invite them into my bungalow so they would clean out all the corners of spiders, scorpions, and other insects. They're good guests, leaving the place better than when they found it.

They do have long sharp claws and razor teeth, though, so they can bite and scratch if you get them upset, but they're pretty sweet most of the time. I like to go into the meerkat enclosure, sit on the ground, and let them crawl up on me. After checking to make sure that I'm bug-free, they usually fall asleep--while making their little "brr, brr" chirping noises (kind of like the Tribbles on the old Star Trek show).

Watch out when they dig, though. They mean business--as in this video.