Hopefully Not Hungry, Hungry Hippos
This was some time ago, but I swear to you that a number of years ago, on the neighborhood listserv, a woman wanted to to locate someone who could bring a hippo to her child’s birthday party.
Hippos, she said, were her daughter’s favorite animal. Could a zookeeper or someone with wild animal experience bring a hippopotamus to her house — and by the way, I live in a neighborhood of tightly packed townhomes, think Sesame Street but with more trees and yards the size of postage stamps — so, could someone bring a hippo, maybe, on second thought, a baby hippo, to her narrow, 19th-century townhouse to give pony rides except, of course, with a 1.5 ton wild animal instead?*
Neighborhood listservs being what they are, you can rest assured that this woman was roasted, long and hard, for her post — probably longer than she deserved. Yes, hippos — big, fat, dopey-looking, herbivore hippos — are absolute killers. They can snap a canoe in half with their powerful jaws and are notoriously bad-tempered. They’re also the world’s deadliest large land animal, killing around 500 people a year in Africa.
This is what it looks like when a hippo wants you out of their space:
But to be fair to my neighbor and her daughter, most TV and film depictions of hippos portray something altogether sweeter, goofier, something along the lines of the 1940 Fantasia hippo dance:
By the time I was on my third (and most recent) safari to Kenya, I knew about hippos, what powerhouses they were. And yet, because I had brought along some camera trap technology, I ventured to ask: could I set them up on the banks of the nearby Mara River, to try to capture the hippos emerging and returning to the river overnight? That’s their pattern: they leave the river at dusk to graze, then return to the river at morning to avoid the heat of day. It’s at these transition times that they’re at their most dangerous but also, I thought, potentially quite interesting for a photo shoot.
(A camera trap uses some kind of motion sensor — a passive infrared (PIR) sensor or an active infrared (AIR) sensor using an infrared light beam — to trigger camera to snap a photograph of a scene. It’s particularly good for uses such as these, when you would not want to be present yourself. Many camera traps include the camera and the trigger inside the same package; I had purchased a gizmo that would attach to my camera and — in theory at least — cause it to snap a picture. Of course, for this to happen, I needed to leave my camera out in the wild for a night.)
Me testing my camera trap by having people walk by. I wasn’t totally an idiot just, you know, mostly an idiot.
Our guides agreed to help out with my photography project. Liram and Tiga went with me to scout scout the riverbank for a good spot. The path was rocky — barely a path at all, full of rocks cantilevered on top of one another and for which the best thing to do was to leap from one rock to another, barely pausing to balance on one before moving on to the next. I am not very good at this kind of leaping. Liram watched me for a minute as I paused on a rock, considering my next move (was this rock stable? Was that one? Where should I go next?) and observed, “You Americans, you don’t know how to walk.”
It wasn’t said with malice or sting — it was simply an observation — but it was the truth, and the more I argued with it in my head, the closer to truth it became.
I can walk miles, I thought to myself, wobbling as I landed heavily on the next rock. Well, I can walk miles, given a concrete pavement, I clarified. But watching Liram and Tiga, and later James, navigate across all kinds of terrain — this rocky path, next a field, next the banks of the river — I began to question what walking really was.
It wasn’t the first time in my adult life that I had had to think about walking. In 2013, I woke up with my left side paralyzed — from what, we never figured out. It had something to do with my autoimmune issues, that’s as much as I know. I know it responds to medications meant to stimulate nerve conduction. At the time, I ended up going to the Mayo Clinic — they couldn’t do a lot more for me, as it turned out, but they did give me a specialized form of physical therapy for neurological symptoms, and they got me walking again without a cane.
I knew, going into the Kenyan safari, that I needed to have a backup system, a magic weapon of a sort that I could pull out if necessary. To this end, I had purchased a safari vest from a company named Big Pockets that absolutely did not lie. That vest has pockets for two birding books, a camera with lenses, a water bottle, five live hamsters, some energy drinks, an artichoke or two, and a partridge in a pear tree. Oh, and also, in a very subtle pocket in the very back of the vest: there was room for a foldable cane. I hoped I wouldn’t have to pull it out and prove Liram right, that I didn’t know how to walk, but it was good knowing I had the backup in case I needed it.
After Liram, Tiga, and I agreed on a spot, we returned to camp, and the next day, another guide, James, and I headed back out to set up the camera. Our trip was star crossed-from the beginning: innumerable things delayed us back at the camp, and we needed to drop off some of the group who were staying at a treehouse for the night. (This is, perhaps, a story for another time, but suffice it to say that this group did not enjoy a meeting of the minds with the creatures that inhabit the Kenyan night, and did not get much sleep.)
The gist is, we were late. Very late. We never reached the spot Liram, Tiga, and I had so carefully and lovingly picked out the day before because, even as we speed-walked along the banks of the river, we heard, first one hippo boom out its low, sonorous call into the dusk, and then the next, and then the next.
The hippos, they stirred.
I thought of this story this week when I read that scientists have just discovered that hippos can distinguish familiar and unfamiliar voices, and that they may have complex vocal interactions.
Increasingly, I find I have mixed feelings about these kinds of studies, and about the scientists’ surprise that other species also have complex social interactions.
On the one hand, avoiding bias is so key to scientific discovery, so I do have sympathy with statements like these:
In animal behavior studies, it can be difficult to maintain objectivity, Dr. Mathevon said. “There’s always a danger to imagine things that do not exist,” he said. “So you have to take some precautions,” in both the techniques for gathering data and the methods used to interpret it.
On the other hand, having once stood on a riverbank at dusk with a Kenyan safari guide, it seemed to me that he was very much aware of and listening for different hippo vocalizations. When I read phrases like, “the hippo social system appears to rely on communication signals — hippos are very vocal — whose role and meaning remain almost unexplored,” I wonder how many Kenyans — or Setswana or South Africans or anyone who grew up around hippos and depend on knowing their calls for survival — were consulted for the study.
Whatever James heard in the calls of the hippos, he didn’t like it. We hastily strapped the camera to a tree, strung a camera trap to it, flung the trap into a nearby branch and then — run!
If there had been only time to text the camera trap just once, I would have seen … but there was no time. I ditched my pride, took out my magic weapon — the folded cane — from out of the back of my big pockets vest, and now, finally, using my third leg for stability, I was leaping from rock to rock, I could really walk.
James speed-walked behind me. Walking quickly by itself was no problem for him, of course, but I could feel his anxiety radiating like heat. When you’re so close to the equator, the sun sets in an instant: one minute, you’re in light, and the next, the light has almost totally gone, everything’s shaded in deep shadow. James lit a lantern; I had my hands full with the cane and the leaping. All around us, the river was coming to life with the deep rumbles and roars of hippos awakening and calling out their greetings.
As soon as we hit the treehouse, James shouted to some men who had brought over supplies from the main camp — they would have to run back with me to the main camp, and then double back again to the Treehouse. There was some discussion of the plan, but it was our only option. We started running. I got the sense from these men that they were less concerned than James had been — why, I don’t know. Maybe because they weren’t nature guides, and didn’t know as much about hippos. Maybe because if I got hurt, James would be blamed, not them. Maybe they had resigned themselves to their fate of dying with this stupid tourist at the jaws of a hippo. Who knows.
I do know that I keep a sort of informal tally of all the worst things I’ve done in my life, and this has got to rank up there. Threatening the life of (at least) three strangers, all for some stupid hippo pic, is far worse, in my opinion, than hoping to give hippo/pony rides to a class of seven-year olds. Plus, I knew exactly how deadly hippos were going in.
We were now close to the main camp, as far as the workers would take me. I had to do the last part on my own: I had to cross the rope bridge that ran across the Mara River, in the dark, with the hippos now bellowing below me. More: until I did this, the workers could not run back to the treehouse. And finally, my left side had given out. I now needed the cane.
(Something like this except no metal sides just … some rope and open space in between. And a river below. With noisy hippos. Source: Burst on Pexels.)
I inched forward. I could feel the bridge sway below my weight. Along with the hippos, there were crocodiles down there. There was god-knows-what down there. The workers shouted out encouragement. I took another step. The bridge swung agin.
I couldn’t see a thing. I could only move forward by feeling the rope in my right hand, and trying to balance, hold the cane, and also hold the rope in my left.
I wanted a cheese sandwich, I decided. I didn’t want a full dinner, when I got to the other side. I just wanted a cheese sandwich and bed.
On the strength of that cheese sandwich, I took a few more steps. I thought about the Fantasia hippo. I thought about the cheese sandwich some more. I moved more confidently. I was at the end, and the hippos hadn’t gotten me. I called back to the workers; they turned around and began their run back to the treehouse.
I walked back slowly, along the short trail to the main camp, and upon getting there, I asked for a cheese sandwich. I’d like to say I collapsed before eating it but of course I didn’t; I ate it, took a shower, and went to bed.
The next day, James brought back the camera and camera trap when he came back from the treehouse. Everyone was fine, everyone had gotten back OK.
I looked at the photos and — nothing. The trap had been facing the wrong way, the camera had been facing a different wrong way. The camera mainly took photos of the darkness. There’s just these few photos, taken well after sunrise, out-of-focus, of a few last stragglers. They can clearly hear the click of the camera, and they look at the camera guiltily, like they’ve got a hangover, like they’ve done something almost unforgivable.
*She didn’t say that part about the 1.5 ton animal, I ad-libbed that.
My friend and wildlife photographer extraordinaire Angela invited me along to take some (possibly final?) pics of Duchess. Duchess made a successful hunt while we were there (of a rat!), which was thrilling, though I wasn’t quick enough to get photos of it. I’ll try to post some of the pics I did get sometime this week.
Also, Jennifer M. wrote with this fascinating initiative from Sweden: crows are getting paid (in food) to pick up cigarette butts.
Wishing you all a warm & wanderful week.
Another great read! Hippos are scary.
The rope bridge was terrifying! Glad you are ok. What adventure.