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.