monkeybusiness: 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...