In 1920’s Paris, with trails of white smoke curving from dangling cigarettes, artists and writers discussed their work, speculations, and mental blocks. At the Mpala Research Centre in central Kenya, with trails of red dirt curving from the laboratories, biologists and chemists discussed their work, speculations, and experimental design.
A tourist, dressed in khaki adventure shorts and a wide-brimmed sun hat, would likely gasp dramatically at zebras munching on long, green grass and then drive on to more discoveries. As a tropical biologist-in-training, I dressed in quick-dry pants and a long sleeved rashguard, urgently pressing a stopwatch before staring at a Plains zebra (equus burchelli) through binoculars for five-minute trials.
Dominant behavior is most evident among harems with an alpha male and docile, hungry females. Along with eating, watching for predators is necessary for survival. The amount of time females devote to nutrition depends on the size of the group. A bigger herd size should indicate more vigilant animals, increasing the overall time spent feeding. After five minutes of constant staring, images of a glistening hide in brilliant black and white, wet nostrils, swiveling ears, and a tail flicking at flies no longer register awe. Written in the waterproof pages of a researcher’s notebook is Trial 7, with tallies marked in their allotted columns.
Plains zebras, prevalent when I had searched for honey badgers or aardvarks, seemed to have vanished into the thick acacia brush when I really needed them. Impala, Thomson’s gazelles, dik diks, hartebeests, Grant’s gazelles, orynxs, and other ungulates proudly stomped the red dust into billows but the—Oh, are those them? No, Grevy’s zebras. Keep driving.—locations of my research subject could not be found. All the animals in Mpala have their unique hangout spots, but they are not as certain as a zoo enclosement. The Plains zebras have no sign with arrows and exclamations, no address. So many questions to ask the landscape: the mountain ridges fading into increasingly paler shades of blue, the corpulent swollen acacia thorns, the lickerish baboons and dainty klipspringers. But I have chosen to ask the Plains zebras.
The red dirt clung to my sunblock and eyelashes as I gazed out into the lush fields. I envisioned stripes between tree branches or a whishing tail in a low flying drongo bird. I even tried to castrate bachelor male herds with my desperately determined mind so I could include them in my study: the relationship between herd size and the time females spent foraging or vigilant using focal and scan sampling.
Grazing female zebras chew with their heads down, focusing on the blades tickling their black snouts. Vigilant females stare up at me, the menacing intruder clutching a sharp pencil. “Down!” I whispered at the grazing ones. “Up!” at the vigilant ones. As they oscillated between nonchalance and terror at my behavior, I calculated time and begged them not to flee.
After a day of 140 trials, I returned to calculate what turned out to be inconclusive results and eat dinner—green lentils, white rice, and chapattis, a thick fried dough. As I tilted my head down to my plate so the rice wouldn’t fall off my fork and lifted up my head to chew and listen to fragmented conversation, I reasoned through possible error sources: habituation time too short, large variation amongst the trials, observer’s delirium. At that moment, a group of zebra may have been peering at me, balancing binoculars on their muddy hooves. In the cacophony of insect night life, I could almost hear them snorting “up” and “down”.
