monkeybusiness: March 2014

Sunday, March 16, 2014

Ludo

I spent 11 days in Romani with Celine, and we've seen gorillas once. Since Romani's clearing is the one that is more frequently visited by gorillas I am a bit worried about my upcoming one month in Loukoue. But actually I have a lot of catch up to do in my readings so maybe won't get so bored.

The problem is that it is not that easy to spot the gorillas, so u always have to be alert to some point. First of all it i not easy to observe concentrating all the tme,xo your mind starts to wander away. You should be focusing on movements, but the clearing is big, and the grass is high (eg. The sitatungas that are the size of a goat are easily hidden when they lay down, some of the mornngs we come and we are looking for a few minutes before we find them). Then the gorillas are not coming to the middle of the clearing, they often stay in the shade of the trees, which means they are very difficults to distinguish from the shadows... So altough it might sound wierd but I am really afraid to miss them. Luckily we are four at the mirador, and the ecomoniteurs if they do their job and don't sleep, can be of some help here.

Indeed the firs gorilla in Romani was spotted by Davy, but we didn't get much chance, because it decided to go back to the forest, so we didn't even manage to take a pic of him, nottomention identifying.

Then next day finally a big day, Ludo and his group decided to visit us. It is funny that he is the first one I've seen, because I was always saying Celine that he is the most beautiful,and actually he was the one I learned to recognize from the pics as first. He is a young silverback,Celine has known him as blackback already, and last year he managed to form a harem with two females. Celine spotted him alone at the far left end of the clearing, and was already worried that he's lost his group when we saw the fema,es with a baby (approx. 6 months old) on the right side of the clearing.

Obviously I panicked when I saw them, but still managed to get to do more or less what needs to be done. I noted the time of their arrival and I was able to follow them and take notes of the individuals I am taking photos of, but the quality of the pics was miserable, so I am not even showing them. To my defence I was using the worse camera and the smaller objective, but still forget to set correctly the ligthmeter, so I could only get good photos from the indiiduals on the sun and not the ones in the shadow.

Again the one hour 15 minutes they spent on the clrearing felt like a second,and I didn't even have time to really enjoy their presence and they were already gone.

To have a compele documentation Celine also does genetical analysis, so at the end of the day we set off poopsearching. Well normally Celine always had someone in the group who was good at tracking down animals, exept that this time our congoleese friends had no experiance in this, so I had an impression like looking for a needle in a stable or don't know how to translate this beatiful hungarian expression (igen tudom h szenakazal es nem istallo... de tudja valamelyikotok h van a szenakazal?). Ok I have to admit that we managed to find some foot/handprints and some traces of alimantation (pulled out roots) but we lost track of them after a few meters. Celine said she had pisteurs who could say by the scent of a leaf when did the gorilla pass but this was clearly not the case this time. Instead we were almost swallen by the forest, and literally speaking, beacause we were were trying to get our way through a very very wet swamp. I have fought for my boots twice (and won both battles digging them out full of mud) and Daniel and Celine have been both sunk till waist in the mud. In these cases you try to grab a tree and if there are no trees around then someone hase throw branches and once you manage to dig one leg out of the mud you can step on it and you will not sink again. It was quite an experiance but finally you can look at it as a free mudbath.

Waiting for Godot

First of all I don't want to take credit for the title, it was Daniel who suggested in one of the long hours spent at the mirador, to name any new gorilla we see Godot, thus we could make a reference of what we are doing now. But let's start at the begining.

Every morning we wake up around 6 in the morning, we have our little toasts (Gode, one of the camp helpers is a baker in Mbomo, so he is doing bread on site in a little earth oven he did under one of the hangars) and hot chocolate, some bananas and we leave punctually at 6:40 to arrive to the platform around 7:10. The piste leads through the forest, and is a nice half an hour walk that wakes you up in the morning. Especially when you get to the part with mud and water, because here again we get to practice our balance, since I guess about one third of our road leads through trunks. If it rained then it is even more interesting, because the trunks became wet and slippery and it's like ice-skateing through a very very narrow piste. And let's not forget that you're supposed to do all that super quiet not to disturb the animals...

Speaking of which I must express my disappointment. I thought the clearing will be full of animals, and I will have hard time to note and identify all of them. But instead of it there are a few resident individuals that you note in the morning and otherwise you sit the whole day waiting for something big to happen. Well I won't complain neither, the very first day we saw two elephants, five buffalos and... well that's all. I still can occupy myself with birdwatching (saw 3 different kinds of kingfishers, ibis are residents, 2 kinds of aigrettes, palmiste africains and pygargue vociferes, cigognes episcopals, souimangas and hirondelles) and from time to time you have other visitors too, like guereza monkeys, c. nictitans, albigena and finally if you wait long enough gorillas. But more on this in an other blog entry.

Celine tought us to recognize quite a lot of animal sounds, but observing and listening carefully for the 10h that you spend in the mirador when most of the time nothing is happening is quite... well, how to put it... boring? At 10:30 you start to be hungry, but we take only one meal and a banana with us, and the day is long, so you want to wait at least till midday with the food, and anyways eating at noon is like celebrating that you have already half of the time behind you.

Celine is usually reading, Daniel has his painting to do, and me I decided to make use of the really good photo equipment we have while I'm at Romani (in Loukoue the camera is a less powerfull) and practice photography. And patience:

Like one morning we arrived to the mirador, and there was a beautiful subadult pygargue vocifere sitting gracefully in a branch right in front of the mirador. It was the same individual coming to the clearing already three days in a row, always coming for a few minutes, and leaving. But today he has been there since the morning, in a clearly visible spot, observing the clrearing and cleaning his feathers. I tought to myslef what a great opportunity, set the camera, took some pictures, and was already happy whith myslef thinking of the great photo I will have when I catch him flying away. And I stood there for two hours and the pygargue was still sitting there doing nothing than cleaning his feathers. In the meantime obviously you have to be alert not to miss the gorillas in case they decide to finally come, so you have the camera pointing to the pygargue and have one eye on him and with the other one you are scanning the clearing. And it has been already two and a half hours that I've been standing there waiting for the perfect photo, and still nothing, the pygargue shows no interest in flying. And then you have some wind and some branches moving and you look away and that is the moment when the pygargue is gone. But gone definately, you don't even see him circleing in the air.

So that was it for the perfect photo, but at least we saw gorillas later on that day...

Saturday, March 15, 2014

Alpha tango to Romani

In case you don't understand the title this is how you call our camp on the radio from the Mbomo base.

We left Mbomo about 10 am, with a huge truck carrining our stuff and the other dozen of ecoguards and ecomoniteurs with their tents and equipment. They have an 11 day rotation schedule and all the patrols and monitors leave to their sites by water from Mboko, a small port located an hour drive from the park gate. We got there first of the two rounds but left as lasts and while we were waiting for our pinassier we cleaned the pirogue which was otherwise half under water. It is a huge trunk about one meter wide that is cut in half and culved out and it is apparently more powerfull and carries more stuff than the metal boats the patrols were using. These pirogues are made in the Central African Republic, because in Congo they don't have such big trees next to the water. Once we dried our pirouge we started to load our equipment for the remaining three and a half month:
3 tents and their holders, five plastic barrels, our bags, food and photo equipment, 4 solar panels, 2 radios, 2 huge metal cases, 7 matreces and plenty of small bags and basins filled with watever you might need in a camp in the middle of an equatorial jungle. When this all was in place they prepared 3 chairs for us 3 white guys, the rest of the 6 congolese jumped on top of the luggages, and we took off. Another 4 hour jurney began through a river into the wild. It was sunny and calm and I soon fall asleep. The tsetse flies didn't eat me entirely on the way, got a little sunburnt but otherwise it was a really pleasent time. Since the boat was heavily loaded we were moving forward very slowly, so when the sun started to set down the pinassier, Marcelin decided to stop somewhere on the way and spend the night in the forest...

We left all the luggage in the boat, removed only our mosquito nets and the guys went out to find some wood to make a tent and fire. It is actually amazing how these people can live off the forest, they can make a piece of rope out of the the end part of the maranthacae leaves that is stronger than the ropes we have. Anyways we quickly installed a quasi tent and made fire and eat what we had left from the day. Next morning the congolese were up already by 4 (I actually don't know when do these guys sleep, they stay up at the fire quite long and they're up every day around 4), we woke up with the sunrise, we packed our stuff and came to Romani, one of the two camps that we will be staying at. We sat up the camp in 2 hours, there was actually not much things to do: install the solar panels and the batteries, set up the tents and arrange your stuff in the kitchen. The camp actually consists of 4 hangars: two to put tents under and two can be used as kitchen, there is a shower (from buckets and riverwater) and two toilets.

Once we were done we went to the platform, and carried all the equipment there. Celine was right, it was in much better shape than the Dzebe one, it fits easily 5 people, and you have a table and chairs there, so you can spend your days quite confortably... waiting.

First gorilla spotted

We woke up early this morning, prepared 2 vache qui rit sandwiches and a plate of spagetti with tomato sauce per capita and left our house. We went to the gathering point where at 6 o'clock we were supposed to meet our driver Frank who was supposed to take us to Dzebe. Dzebe is a clrearing which is relatively close to us, and Celine heard that gorillas are quite frequent there, so she decided that we sould check it out, to increase the chance to see gorillas together. Last year she had real bad luck, all the first month of her observation she didn't see any gorillas, and since we are going to stay together only 11 days, she wanted to make sure she has a chance to see me in action:).

So we left early, and waited an hour for Frank, and than we took the same road by which we came to Mbomo and this time it seemed quite big. After an hour we arrived to a village, where we took an ecomoniteur, Tibault with us, and when we left the village Frank turned left from the road and suddendly we found ourselves in a piste that was once a road but now it was overgrown by the dense forest vegetation. Dzebe actually was last visited 8 month ago, so what used to be the ecomoniteurs trail was overtaken by the nature. Well this didn't really move Frank who was forcing the car through the thick bushes. We stoped only once when the road was blocked by a huge trunk, and Frank and Tibault had to cut our way through with machetes. After more or less an hour we arrived to a savanna where we left our car and continued by foot. We started another hour long jurney through mud, river and dense forest. As it was raining yesterday evening the road was quite wet and slippery and sometimes disappeared under the water that sometimes reached almost our knees. Then sometimes our robber boots stuck in the mud under the water, and then not only we stepped out of them into the mud but they also got filled with water. And then we arrived to a river that was about 8 m wide with water reaching our waist. And no bridge. There was one under water trunk to the 2/3 of the river and then one like 20 cm above. The stream was almost non existent but having the camera in my backpack falling into the water was out of question. At this point I also had two tripods in my hand but arriving to the trunk above the water level I handed it to Daniel who was in front of me and told him to send it forward to the other side. Before he could do that he was already half in the water. Trying to save his painting devices I jumped after him and helped to pull him out of the water, so finally we both ended up soaking wet, but luckily no harm was done to our equipment. We were still only halfway to the platform, and cutting through the forest you should keep calm and try not to disturb the animals. Well u can imagine that it's not so easy to walk quietly when your robber boots are full of soaking socks and you have millions of dead branches underneath your feet. I am sure that with all the crunching, falling and the "plough" with evry step scared away all the animals within a range of 2kms. Never the less we arrived happily to the clearing. There was a tiny platform at the entrance to the clearing (so tiny that I missed it at first, and thought that we stopped only to get some rest). It was built from bamboo, looked quite unstable and some of the ledder steps were missing, but we climbed up there hoping it won't fall down. Since it was too small to fit all the tripods, we mounted only the camera with the 600 objective, and sat down to wait. You couldn't really move, because a) there was no really space b) when you moved the whole platformed moved with you. As I said, the clearing hasn't been obsereved for the last 8 months, and that is why the platform was in really poor state, but Celine assured us that the other platforms are well maintained.

I cannot really imagine a nicer job than to sit in the nature and just observe it. Obviously you have some insects flying around you, cause you smell like hell after the trecking and from the river, but you get used to it very quickly. And if you stay quiet and patient you might see quite a loot of things. And being there with Celine makes the game even more interesting because she spots animals fast and recognizes quite a lot of sounds. I'm happy I can learn from her. So at the begining we saw only an ombrette africain (sorry guys birds names will be in french since my guide books are french) and some giant touracos (check the pic, caught one in flight) and Celine made me identify everything in the naturalist guide books. Then we've heard a nictitans, and a few minutes later we spotted it behind the platform. Then nothing. To have the time go faster we started to eat and that's when we've heard chestbeat in the forest. We sat quietly witholding our breath and ten minutes later he was there. A blackback arrived quite tourmented at the far right and of the clearing and he passed it quiclky looking back behind his shoulders as if checking if nobody is following him. He sat down not far from as in the forest edge, hiding behind the trees. A few minutes later a young silverback and a female arrived at the same spot as the blackback before, and they sat down to try out the tasetfull roots of the clearing grasses. We started to make photos and I was concentrating onbeing able to follow and identify them, so the hour and a half they spent on the clearing felt like 15 minutes. Only at the end we noticed they had a juvenile with tnem. They werent actually so visible, because they stayed at the far edge of the clearing covered by really high grass, and came forward only to pull out some grasses from the water. And that was it, at one point they didn't came out again and sadly we had to note they time of exit.

Celine hypothesised that the young silverback and the blackback might have been in one bachelor group before, that's why the blackback was still foraging close to his old pal, but he couldn't really be with him, since the silverback got a female already. The juvenile on the other hand was quite unlikely to be the silverback's offspring, it was too biv and the silverback was too young.

We waited half an hour to give them time to move further away and make sure we won't bump into them on the way. The sun was high up the whole day and it dried off most of the water so we managed to get back with dry feet. The two hours bumping at the back of the car this time felt like an eternity, but getting back to our house we celebrated the day with the local N'gok beer and some chocholate Grzegorz got me back in France.

Please remember that you can send me free messages and feedback from the iridium messagng site!