It could be in an unexpected poem, a playground of happy children, the smells of the holidays … or the crater at sunrise. This is when your testy, challenged human spirit inflates with joy despite every reason on earth it shouldn’t, and you know everything is just fine.

This isn’t the best time for game viewing in the crater, although few tourists who come now realize this. There’s probably fewer than 5-6,000 animals from the peak in March and April of more than 20,000.

But all that transitory wildlife is only a part of the crater’s story. The inorganic magnitude of its landscape is unmatched anywhere on earth.

Right now as the rough winds signal that rains won’t return for six months, the thick cloud cover of the season will clear for a few hours in the late morning. This morning we had one of the most crystal clear crater mornings I can remember.

It’s only 12 miles across but it seems like hundreds. You’re constantly recalibrating your depth perception. The crater’s rough edges are still lush green, still sucking the last of the fresh-water rivers sinking down from the highlands. But brown is sweeping the floor as it becomes drier and drier, producing this most marvelous contrast of color.

At first everything is pastel and then the morning explodes and there’s this quilt of primary color.

It was hard today with the wind so strong to hear all the bird song, but whenever the wind died the red-naped lark seemed to be singing from one side to the other. We saw nearly 30 crested crane honking then leaving their long necks outstretched as if still tied to the sound long gone.

When it finally warmed to 50 then 60 and finally 70 degrees, the couple thousand wilde that remained started to blart and a few began prancing around. The zebra started barking and the hippo started grunting and you knew that the ossified night of the cold season was at least for a while banished.

But only for a short while. Day time on the equator is the same twelve hours more or less year round. But the overcast of the dry season reforms by early afternoon, the strong winds that seemed to sweep away the morning chill die, and cold settles down from the thick grey cloud quite early, probably by 3 p.m., and the animals and birds slow down, stop talking.

Everything in the world has to rest. The drama of the crater in March and April is sometimes overwhelming. You can’t separate the screams of the hoops of the hyaena from the screams of the elephants, and cackles of the dozens of vultures on a kill.

The movement and tension among the animals is overstimulating. No one has time to appreciate the enormous canvas painted when the world’s largest volcano self-destructed three million years ago.

Mt. Makarot never moves (you’ll have to wait to see the Shifting Sands for that!) The great forests of the acacia lehai seem undaunted even by this wind. The deep curving crevices sliding down the crater’s sides hold their form, but the grandeur of all this is missed in the mayhem of the wet season animal free-for-all.

This is the time the crater’s sleeping. That’s what it seems like, sleeping and recovering, and as our rover descended around the curves and switchbacks of the trail down it was as if we were navigating into a dream with the privileged skill of shaman. And when we climbed out during the peace of the midday and looked back, the landscape pressed into our memories like the tune you’ll never forget but will never be able to fully recreate.

The wilde have migrated out. The tens of thousands of Abdim stork and thousands of white stork and myriads of other migrants are gone. For some reason today even the eland had disappeared…

Leaving an earth so huge with the tiny little you there twisting about somewhere maybe inconsequential but you think it’s in the middle, trying to comprehend it all. Endless, right? Something forever is rare in our world, but that’s what the crater was expressing today, its implacable eternity.

Hyaenas lurking near a braying, abandoned baby buffalo is simply a part of the absolute peace and beauty of the crater.

The crater we saw today probably has around 16- or 17,000 animals, about 80% of its optimum at this time of the year, as it recovers nicely from the earlier drought.

Such a compact wilderness with such a thick biomass is normally seriously stressed:

Lions encroach on each others’ territories setting up huge fights; many young are more successfully raised because of abundant food, which as we saw today in a golden jackal family creates internal fighting; normal behaviors break down as we saw in a dozen old male elephants all hanging out together … certainly not comfortably.

Buffalo will normally adopt abandoned young. If a mother dies in childbirth, for example, a sister or auntie buf will often take it on. Yet today we watched just such an abandoned baby, birth sack yet completely removed, walk weakly among its herd looking for help and getting nothing but a huge fling into the sky off the powerful rack of one female with another calve.

That’s unusual. It fell into a lump and we drove right up to it, and it brayed at us miserably. Hyaenas were gathering. The outcome was clear.

Yet overlaying all this explicit tension is one of the most peaceful feeling places in all of Africa.

The peace comes first from beauty: the light in the crater, especially now during the rainy season with the skies so wondrously painted, is ever changing. The backlight, the sunbeams through the rain clouds, the blue reflections off the ponds, create a universe so visually inspiring there simply can’t be anything negative about it.

The sounds of so many wildebeest blarting, individually rhythmically but collectively pure comedy, is so utterly meaningless it’s nothing less than beautiful music.

The vibrancy of the veld adequately watered had everything in high gear: everything from the gazelle chomping the endless grasslands, to the pelican diving for fresh-water fish in beautifully clear running streams, to kori bustards and red-collared widow birds in the most hysterical courtship displays imaginable … life was intricately good.

Can we gather from this contradictory situation that, in fact, it isn’t really contradictory? Can we come out of the crater, today, understanding that if we don’t anthropomorphize birth and death in animals that instead we will begin to comprehend the most amazing puzzles of creation?

The baby buf would be eaten by the hyaena for goodness, because it was nature working, and the fact that it remains somewhat a mystery to us is simply our inability to fully comprehend the puzzle of life.

But experiencing the crater helps us comprehend the puzzle, to want to understand its pieces without projecting our own totally unique ids onto the dung beetle.

And that journey is unlikely to be completed, but it absolutely is down the yellow brick road with a certain end that is good and beautiful.

Hyaena, hippo and the remarkable northern wheatear framed below the brilliant stormy skies of the crater were our special attractions, today.

Ngorongoro Crater has got to be one of the handful of most amazing places anyone can visit. Once the highest structure on earth, this super volcano blew its stack geologically quickly, causing untold devastation and leaving for us today one of the most awesome and beautiful structures on our planet.

The crater rim is 1600-1800 feet above a 100 sq. mile caldera that is a wildlife and scenic paradise. Totally wild, this crucible of wilderness changes radically with the least change in weather and so is a precious barometer of what climate change means.

Forced into smaller and smaller ponds because of the exceptional dryness of this year, we found a pod of hippo mothers with young! Now to understand how unusual this is, note that the normal behavior of a female hippo that has just given birth is to sequester herself and her offspring far away from other hippos.

Normally this means several weeks to a month alone and out of sight. The weather in northern Tanzania has been seriously dry, though, and particularly in the crater hippo ponds are substantially shrunk.

So we saw a collection of around 20 adult hippos and at least 5 very small babies (all under a month), crowded together and seeming to do very well. Was this a nursery herd, so to speak?

Hyaena have a heyday when the veld is stressed. Many predators do, but the hyaena especially since it eats almost anything it steps on.

We must have seen at least 100 hyaena. They were eating ankle bones, dead meat, harassing buffalo (!) and even daring to come into our picnic area! Clearly they were juiced up, and every one of them was fat.

The giant lion pride we saw was also fat, so that meant no action. The 20 in the pride on the table mountain on the west side of the crater were totally sacked out. Only the cubs gave us any action.

My personal highlight was seeing the bird in the crater that I regularly see in Alaska in June! The northern wheatear undertakes one of the most unbelievable migrations of any creature on earth: nearly 10,000 miles one-way (of course twice annually).

For the last several years the climate in East Africa (as throughout the whole world, I suppose) has been unusual.

Currently throughout most of northern Tanzania and southern Kenya it’s seriously dry. In the last several days we may actually have seen the dry spell breaking. We witnessed magnificent storms as we left Tarangire and throughout the day in Manyara, and game viewing today in the crater was a dosey doe with very heavy rains.

But if this is the end of the dry spell, the past effects will obviously linger for a while. I reckon less than half the usual numbers of animals were waiting for us today in the crater. Those that were there, several thousand wildebeest and twice or more than of zebra, had very young babies and were probably very late births, constricting them from moving.

None of the animals appeared sick or weak, as would be the case in a real drought. I’m sure we’ll learn more as we head now into the Serengeti for our last five days.

Stay tuned!

On Safari: Crater Lions

Like everywhere, Ngorongoro lions are struggling. The 9-11 prides of 100-110 lion have probably shrunk to two-thirds to three-quarters that.

That’s my anecdotal guess and I’m not sure anyone’s done a real count recently. But as we game drove down the Sopa side road from our exclusive camp at Lemala, we immediately encountered a female from the Big Tree pride who was really beaten up.

She had blood on her face and haunches, and often that means nothing more than that she was just at the kill. But the right side of her face was horribly scratched and that meant much more, and her belly wasn’t very full. When she walked she limped.

That was our first lion in the crater. We’d see another 14 before the day was over, including the magnificently maned lion of the Muinge River pride.

All that we saw looked fabulously healthy, with big bellies suggesting we’d arrived one day late to see some action. In fact, one of the Big Tree males lumbered across in front of us into the veld and took our viewing right with him to an earlier kill, as he scattered the hyaena and jackal.

But something was wrong, or perhaps better said, different than before. Traditionally there are many, many more females than males, because of the male’s violent competition with one another and the fact that they’re often kicked out of the pride before they know how to hunt.

But during our Kisiel Family Safari, and consistent with what I’ve been slowly seeing over the last few years, the ratio of males to females is increasing.

Males are 50% bigger and stronger than females, so the obvious conclusion is that something is stressing the environment and the bigger and stronger are out surviving the weaker. Is this somehow related to global warming, or is it as some researchers have suggested more mankind meanness.

There have been more and more documented cases of lion poisoning at the fringes of national parks as the peripheral human populations increase and develop. But while that might explain East African declines, it doesn’t well explain southern African declines where human populations have achieved a more or less balance with the remaining wilderness years ago.

Other researchers like Craig Packard have documented a disease carried by buffalo that weakens the buffalo but doesn’t kill it. But when lions hunt the weakened buffalo and then eat the diseased meat, they die.

We talked a lot about this during our game drives in the crater, because lions really dominated the game viewing. This is pretty natural in the dry season, but even so, I think we had an unusual number of sightings and events.

The crater was cold! My little thermometer said the temperature just outside our tents on the down road from Sopa reached 46F for a low and never got above 60F. In part this was because it was so overcast. Down on the crater floor the sun broke through often and it was much warmer, probably ten degrees warmer.

Despite the cold, though, my family loved their exclusive Lemala camp. Every spacious tent had a propane heater, we had hot water on demand for showers and shaving, and a lovely hot water bottle was stuck into everyone’s wonderful beds!

Maasai blankets were everywhere, and everyone used them!

The dry season in the crater begins this way, with very cold temperatures, the coldest of the year. But with sufficient hot chocolate personally delivered to their tent each morning, 8-year old Nick and 11-year old Camden couldn’t have been more pleased!

“It can’t get better than this!” Grandpa Mark exclaimed.

We’ll see.

Our fantastic morning in the crater demonstrated what crazy and simplistic ideas are propagated by entertainment media about wild animals.

Many of you probably think that every time a lion wakes up and takes a stroll he comes back with a wildebeest in his mouth.

Wrong. His success ratio of course varies from place to place but essentially is around 1/6, and often worse in stressed environments. Lions die of starvation as much as disease.

Hyaena was our demonstration animal, today, and what an experience!

There’s no question in my mind that the hyaena is the most dangerous predator. I believe this because of their maddening persistence and herding instincts which transform them from a scavenger into a vicious hunter.

Predators are mostly opportunistic, but even so it’s possible to dissuade a lion from bothering your abandoned calve by screams and stones. Not so for the hyaena committed to the chase. It will kill or be killed before abandoning its prey.

Only the prey itself can stop it: by running, by fighting or outwitting it, which is so much easier than a television special normally suggests.

We were looking at a line of buffalo in the far distance early this morning in the crater. It was our first great sight of the morning after getting to the floor shortly after dawn.

Then I saw more than just the line of about 50 buffalo, one of the Big Five and usually considered the most dangerous prey by man, the hunter. About two dozen hyaena were racing back and forth along the line, tails buffed and held high, their whooping becoming laughing. This was incredibly puzzling and surprising.

The hyaena were clearly in kill mode, but buffalo as their prey? One buffalo can weigh 4,000 pounds and it’s almost all muscle and meanness. I’ve seen a 350-pound wildebeest thrown to the sky by the powerful rack of a male buff.

So what was going on?

More and more hyaena came racing to the “battle” if that’s what it was, and the buffalo lagered. The big males came to the front and stood side by side swinging their racks as if clearing the land.

But the hyaena continued and soon we could see some of the crazed and furry beasts racing around the end of the line to the other side of the buffalo. Although we couldn’t see exactly what was happening on the backside, we could tell by the buff’s agitation that the battle was truly engaged.

Then the buff family began to run with dozens of hyaena in pursuit on all sides of the herd.

We raced our cars around some roads to try to get a better view, but the buffalo had been dispersed by the hyaena and we couldn’t see the outcome. Then about 20 hyaena came running over a ridge to the side of us quite near the car, and we raced with them down the veld wondering what was going on.

Then their whooping slowed and their tails unbuffed and they start to walk and wander like hyaena normally do.

We followed them best we could on roads and with our binocs and from time to time they reorganized and molested herds of zebra and wildebeest and soon it seemed like the whole western side of the crater was in turmoil with animals running everywhere.

And just when we thought everything had calmed down, nearly 90 minutes after it all started, we saw a single lone buff running from a line of hyaena.

His chest was bloodied. His left leg was seriously injured, but he managed to outrun or outwit or both the hyaena and after disappearing behind a ridge, the pack stopped their attack.

I’m not sure how many “packs” we probably saw, but the whole crater was churning with hyaena kill.

Yet we couldn’t see one successful take-down.

Hawana mipango is the Swahili expression we attached to these seemingly failing killers: “no plans” and that exactly describes what we saw: incredible killers having organized their power but unable to effect success because their attacks are so reactive, unplanned.

The crater calmed down and we headed to lunch. In a dip near the only spring-fed lake in the crater, a beautiful location with a few hippo and high lustrous elephant grass, we saw the old buff that had been attacked.

Alone and dying. He was bleeding to death and so weak that his left leg was gnarled under his body in a horrible position. He would die. And there were no hyaena anywhere near him to claim the prize.

That’s truly the wild: heartless to be sure, but almost amateurish; random possibly and nothing but opportunistic. From time to time the coincidences in the wild converge and there is a kill.

But more likely, there isn’t. Just another day, another hour, for another opportunity. Survival, after all, is what keeps us all going, and that’s been much more successful in our legendary history than defeat.

Why did the rufous-tailed weaver perch on Max’s head? Why did we see 14 black rhinos together? Why were we pinned in the crater’s only forest by over 100 elephant?

The crater has always been outside the wild. This unbelievable natural structure, the remnants of what was once the world’s highest structure ended by what must have been the most catastrophic volcanic event in the history of the planet, has always defied natural balance.

Here was where the British authorities first placed restrictions on how you could hunt. The animals were just too tame, it seemed in he 1950s. It was just too easy to shoot them.

Several times yesterday I had to contain myself from slapping the behind of a zebra, and that ridiculous opportunity has presented itself every one of the hundred times I’ve been to the crater over the last forty years.

Yet when that same zebra walks over the Senego trail out of the crater onto the Olduvai plains, it won’t let us get anywhere near him.

Wild animal behavior, like the mystical micro-climate that dances around the 1800-foot high 37-mile crater rim, defies logic in the crater. Researchers have stopped studying animals in the crater; they just don’t act normally.

But I think that’s presumptive, frankly. What I see from the crater is the more profound fact that nature is no longer in balance and hasn’t been for a long time.

When the Gibb’s guide Pascali took the kids on a forest walk a few days ago, they asked him about the elephants and school houses. He was discreet. He said yes we love the elephants, but we also have to go to school.

It’s pretty easy to explain that won’t work. Then, like the rest of the world’s scientists, politicians and lovers of animals, even these American school kids and lovers of animals throw up their hands and ask me, “So what do you do?”

Hybridization of the golden and black-backed jackal probably began here. The last of the world’s greatest elephant with tusks like they’re supposed to be, stretching from a 12-foot high eye down to the ground, will die with the last of the giant tembo in the crater.

The crater is like a wormhole into the future of wilderness. While many casual visitors see the field scientist’s Elysian Fields, it is in fact one of the most stressful places of any wilderness on earth. It’s a moment by moment documentary of the ending of wilderness.

What should we do? Do we shoo the weaver off Max’s head or give it a piece of breakfast muffin? Do we cull the elephants or let them plow down the very last of the beautiful acacia lehai, a tree like none other doomed to extinction?

Do we separate the golden and black-backed jackal the way the Bronx Zoo separates its unintended bird hybrids in the zoo?

Do we add more ranger cars to protect the “wild” black rhino, that would never have dared to stand next to another rhino except to breed but today clusters in “packs” of more than a dozen?

Do we consider, as grandpa Mort suggested in an email he sent around today, that we get rid of all the zoos?

What is to become of the wild?

I really, really don’t know. But I know in this dynamic, stressful and indescribably beautiful crater, there’s a clue. I just don’t get it, yet.