With her truck stuck in the mud in the Serengeti, Aerin Jacob learns three important lessons.

Aerin Jacob is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Victoria and a Wilburforce Fellow in Conservation Science Fellow. Trained as an ecologist, she works to develop management strategies that incorporate local, Indigenous, and scientific knowledge to achieve conservation objectives while maintaining human well-being. She works with First Nations communities in British Columbia to study the environmental and socioeconomic outcomes of marine management in the Great Bear Rainforest. Aerin is also a member of the Sustainable Canada Dialogues, a network of scholars developing viable, science-based policy options to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and guide sustainable development in Canada. Her previous work includes studies of land-use change, restoration ecology, and animal behaviour in East Africa and western North America. Aerin earned her PhD at McGill University and her BSc at the University of British Columbia.

This story originally aired on October 23, 2015.

Story Transcript

Well, I never expected that three of the most important lessons I would learn about conservation science would come from a man with a machine gun. 

It’s summer 2003.  I’m twenty-two years old and I have the best internship in the whole world.  I’m studying cheetahs in Serengeti National Park.  Serengeti is incredible.  You can see more animals in one day than in the rest of your life combined.  I’m particularly excited to be here because I lived in East Africa when I was a kid.  My mom was a game warden, my dad was a biologist so I grew up surrounded by stories about wildlife and research and life in the bush. 

I've been studying conservation biology at university and I’m thrilled to start working as a real scientist.  So after a few weeks of learning the cheetah ropes, this is one of the first days I can go out on my own, and I've got butterflies.  I pack the Land Rover up with extra food, water, fuel, spare tires, data sheets, and I leave the field station at the crack of dawn. 

A Serengeti sunrise is like nothing else.  It’s just like that scene from The Lion King.  The huge sun rises over the savannah.  Everything glows orange and yellow.  The animals wake up, start moving.  You breathe in the rich scent of two million wildebeests, and there's me, driving along looking for cheetahs. 

So I drive for a couple of hours.  I stop every once in a while, look through my binoculars and finally, in the distance, I see something.  Is it a cheetah?  With all the dry season dust and the heat haze, it can be hard to tell the difference between a cheetah and what’s actually a termite mound, a bird, or a stump.  I can’t quite tell so I drive forward, slowly, looking through my binos and I’m certain it’s looking more and more cheetah-like.  I just know deep down inside that this is my cheetah, the first cheetah that I'll find and study all by myself. 

So this goes on for quite a while.  It keeps disappearing and reappearing.  Finally, I come to the edge of a small river.  It’s maybe thirty feet across.  This time of year it’s called Kiangazi, it’s the middle of the long dry season and many rivers are bone dry.  This one has hard, sun-baked mud, and my cheetah is on the other side. 

But even if the river is dry, I’m not going to just drive across without checking it out first.  So I get out, I scramble down the bank, I walk out into the riverbed and I stomp around for awhile, checking out the mud.  It’s like concrete.  So feeling pretty satisfied with my bush skills, I get back in the side, put the Land Rover in low range, I ease it gently down the steep bank and I start to cross. 

About a third of the way across, the Land Rover starts to sink.  It was like trying to drive on crème brûlée.  There was a thick crust on top but a few inches down was this oozing, wet mud.  My tires are spinning in this rancid, gross sludge.  Mud’s flying everywhere and I’m freaking out.  It stinks like rotten eggs and I don't know what to do.  I panic and I hit the brakes, and that was a big mistake. 

My face flushes as I remember my mom’s advice for driving in the mud.  Don’t gear down and don’t brake or you're going to get stuck.  I feel irritated.  I do not come from people who get stuck in mud. 

My family has all these crazy stories about adventures with vehicles from before I was born.  Like the time my mom was three days from the nearest road and the fan belt broke on her Land Rover.  She improvised using a wildebeest intestine, and drove out.  Or the time that the propeller fell off my dad’s airplane in midair, and he landed it anyways.  Suffice to say I am definitely not going to get stuck my first day being a real scientist. 

So I put the Land Rover in reverse.  I try backing up.  Nothing.  I saw the steering wheel from left to right trying to clear the mud from my tires.  Nothing.  I lock the differential, which usually let’s you power through anything.  Nothing.  The truck is not budging.  So I get out. 

The front end is sunk about two feet in the mud, and the back end is not much better.  But that’s okay because I packed a shovel and I’m going to dig my way out. 

So I dig and I dig and I dig.  The sun’s beating down, I’m sweating buckets, I’m getting filthy.  I’m getting pretty mad at myself too.  This isn’t exactly glamorous cheetah science. 

So finally I spent about an hour.  I've dug out most of the back tires.  I hop back in.  I try again.  Nothing.  So I spend another hour digging out most of the front tires.  I hop back in.  I try again.  Nothing. 

The radio crackles.  My boss calls in.  “Cheetah, cheetah from Aerin.”  I try to collect myself. 

“Go ahead, cheetah.” 

She goes, “Hey, Aerin.  How’s it going out there?”

And I am super chipper.  “Oh, things are great.  It’s a beautiful day.  I think I've seen a cheetah.”

She goes, “Oh, fantastic.  Well, get some good data.  And you're out on the short grass plains, right?”

And I say, “Yup, yup.  I sure am.  Okay, gotta go.  Bye.”  I hang up and it makes me wonder.  Where exactly am I? 

So I pull out the map and the old-school GPS.  Okay, that’s where I first saw the cheetah.  That’s where I pulled off the main road.  Then I drove around and around and around for a while.  So where is this river that I’m stuck in?  

Now, there's something you need to know about Serengeti.  For field work, researchers can go many places.  There's only a few areas that are truly off limits.  Maybe the most important one is called Moru.  And Moru is where the rhinos live. 

Rhino poaching is so bad that there are only a few rhinos left in all of Serengeti and they're heavily guarded by armed rangers, so no one can go to Moru. 

So where do I see the nearest river?  Slowly it dawns on me.  Oh, my God.  I’m in Moru.  I’m in the Serengeti’s number one Do-Not-Go zone with the rhinos and the rhino rangers and the rhino poachers.  And no one knows I’m here because I drove in early in the morning and now I’m stuck down in the riverbed.  And that kind of sneaking around, that’s exactly what poachers do.  So if anyone sees me, they're going to think I’m a poacher. 

How serious this was started to sink in.  This is bad.  Before, I was just mad at myself and potentially embarrassed about getting stuck so soon.   But now, if anyone finds out, I could get the research project in a lot of trouble. 

My heart is beating wildly.  I’m getting pretty stressed out and I think, “Okay, calm down.  Problem solve.  I need traction.  There's some logs on the riverbank.  If get some of those branches and I stuff them around and underneath the tires, I'll be able to get enough friction to get out of here.”  So I spend an hour.  I dig these elaborate trenches all around the tires, I fill them full of branches, I hop back in, I try again.  Nothing. 

My boss calls back, asks how things are going with my cheetah.  I make up this happy story about how it’s hunting. 

So now I've actually lied, which is really bad for a scientist.  Scientists are supposed to be objective and honest, in search of truth and higher knowledge.  I’m not doing that. 

So I think, “Okay, well, if traction didn’t help, maybe something is stuck underneath the truck.”  I get out, I crouch down and I see that the front differential, this big hunk of metal on the axle, is buried in the mud.  Okay, well that must be it. 

So I wriggle underneath on my belly.  There's barely any room.  I’m face down in this rancid mud, I keep banging my head on the undercarriage, and if it’s possible, I’m even dirtier than I was before.  My hair, my clothes, my shoes are caked in mud. 

So I’m lying there scooping out the mud by hand and I hear this weird noise.  It’s from the other side of the truck.  It’s kind of a breathy snuffling.  The hair on the back of my neck stands up.  I kind of crane my head around and I see a young hyena staring back at me.  And I flip out.  I mean, it’s a hyena.  They're a major predator.  They bring down buffalo.  Their jaws can crack through giraffe femurs, and I’m lying there on the ground. 

I scream.  I scramble out from underneath the truck.  As I go to leap back inside, one of my shoes falls off.  The hyena is a little bit startled so it backs off, but then dammed if it doesn’t come around the truck and pick up my shoe. 

Have you ever been so frustrated that you just snap?  Well, I snapped.  I don't know what possessed me but I take off my other shoe, I open the door and I burst out wielding it like a rolled up newspaper.  The hyena drops my shoe, tucks his tail between his legs and takes off.  I grab my shoe, leap back inside and slam the door. 

The adrenaline is amazing.  My heart’s pounding, my eyes are open wide, my nostrils are flared and my skin is on fire.  And I burst into tears.  I have to accept that although I got myself into this mess, I cannot get myself out of it.  What am I doing?  The truck’s not moving, I’m not collecting data, I’m lying to my boss, and if I don’t get back to the research station by dark, everyone is going to be really worried. 

So I take a deep breath, I swallow my pride, I pick up the radio.  “Cheetah, cheetah from Aerin.  Hi.  So I’m actually stuck.  Yeah, for a while.  Pretty much the whole day.” 

My boss is pretty understanding.  I give her my GPS coordinate.  I neglect to tell her that I’m probably in Moru.  She says that she and a few of the other researchers will leave immediately and come pull me out. 

So I’m sitting up on top of the roof of the Land Rover.  I can just see above the river bank.  Eventually, in the distance, I see this big cloud of dust rising.  That’s the research convoy coming to drag me out.  But from the other direction, from deep in the heart of Moru there's an even bigger cloud of dust rising.  And it’s coming my way even faster. 

Although the rangers couldn’t see me down in the riverbed, they could surely see that big cloud of dust, that research convoy coming.  They probably thought it was the world’s most brazen poachers. 

These two clouds of dust converge on the river at the same time.  The researchers are on one side, the rangers are on the other, I’m in the middle covered head to toe in mud.  There's yelling.  There's machine guns.  I’m trying to explain myself to everybody at once.  It’s chaos. 

Finally, things kind of calm down.  The rangers believe that I’m not a poacher but then they want to know what am I doing there.  And if I was so stuck, why didn’t I just ask for help?  I show them my trenches and branches, I tell them about the hyena.  Soon everybody is laughing, even me.  In the end, it only takes a couple of minutes to hook up the winch and pull me out. 

Just before we go to leave, I go to say goodbye to the rangers.  (Speaks in Kiswahili.) That’s Kiswahili for, “My friends, thank you so much.  I’m so sorry for all of this trouble.” 

One of the rangers leans on his machine gun and smiles.  He says, “Little Cheetah Woman, working on conservation is very hard. Today, you learned three important things.  First, education is life, not books.  Second, the medicine for fire is fire.  Third, unity is strength. 

As I walk back to my Land Rover I think about what he said, and I've thought about it many times since.  He's right.  First, you learn the most about conservation from being on the ground.  Second, you've got to be tough.  When the path gets muddy, don’t stop.  Keep going.  And third, you can’t do it all alone.  If you get stuck, don’t be afraid to ask for help. 

Nearly 15 years later, these Swahili proverbs are still three of the most important lessons I've ever learned about conservation.