Some thoughts on conservation

The last two days we had a visitor at the camp, the new assistant director for the research and monitoring, a young French guy, probably of my age, who was here doing the same job as m in 2008. Since then he has been living in Western andCentral Africa working in different projects mainly with primates. We had some interesting discussion, and now I feel depressed and useless, and I feel like I have done a shitty job. But the fact is that you can never do a good job here. I am every time inspired by people like him or Perrine, who are young and enthousiastic and think things can be changed. And it's true, causes need people like them, because the olds are just too disappointed. But the fact is that the olds probably have started as them, and they just bumped into reality. I mean Guillaume is really aware that his hands are tight and that his possibilities are exteremly limited, but even then, the fact is that he needs to do at least something, and what seems like something for us requires at least a year of preparation here. I mean just a simple thing like monitoring a clearing, which means coming here every day and taking notes of the animals coming here, is like a) too difficult for people b) you have to trust them that they will actually do the job. I mean there are more than 200 clearings here, even if you want to monitor only a few of them, you need to train enough people to be able to send them here continously and then you cannot supervise them all the time. So the first thing here is training, which already raises few questions. Do you want your workers to think, to understand and to be interested and involved in their job? Probably yes. Because then you have to explain what's the use of their job, what's the use of conservation, what's the use of taking notes, and all this is just not straightforward to them. For example they want me to dictate sentences about what research is for, what is ecology and ethology etc, like in school, but they don't understand the meaning behind it. They are not used to be thaght but what is worse they are not used to think and to question things. So what you say is words of god and if you ask that why do you think it is important, or why do you think we do it this way they just can't answer, even if you have explained it several times already. So at the end it feels like loosing your time and you prefer them just to do what you want them to do, like a robot, mechanically and then you saved your nerves. But whith this attitude obviously you get nowhere and what is more you lose their motivation, and to do such a boring and monotonous job, people really need to be motivated. So your other choice is to explain everything a million times, but then the question is to what level. I mean how do you explain why we are doing a genetic study of the gorilla population to people who have no idea if birds are animals or if the water is alive not to mention cells let alone DNA. So you have to start at the begining, Guillaume is actually giving them classes, like explaining them things like the earth is round, Congo is in Africa, how to read a map etc... And for some of them it's too difficult, so obviously you can give up very easily, but some are quite bright and you tell yourself if only this guy was given a chance to be born somewhere else. But some things you just can't change, right, so you satrt the work where you can.
But for some stuff it might be too late. For example how do you theach adults to care about the environment, to be sensitive to the nature, to think, to raise questions, to be emphatic about other beings, to take different perspectives. It is extremely difficult and we the western culture have a lifetime of this training ahead of us starting from early development (espetially if we think of Tomasello's cultural development theory where language learing is boosted by this perspective taking, well, here it just doesn't happen, because they just don't talk to their children, they just leave them to dwell on their own, don't pay attention to the children's attention etc). So what you want to use is reasonale arguments, but for this you need at least some basic knowledge so again you are trapped. You should start with the children obviously, but they come at last all the time becuse first usually you have to put off the fire.
And the fire here is poaching, obviously, masacre of elephants, which were already killed in Nigeria, Chad, and now they are coming here, Gabon, Congo, Central Africa, and because there is less and less animals the price of the tusk is going up and the pressure is even higher. And although the park adopted this brilliant idea of telling the poachers to bring their armes and in return they will get a job, these guys will never earn as much with this job as with poaching, so eventually they will go back doing the same. So that's the question of trust, which is extremly hard to determine. For example I am here now with two guys, who are actually realated, Constantin is the uncle of Davy (but is younger than him), and the first was a poacher untill recently and the latter works for the park for 7 years now and has been an ecogard all this time. Now you can think oh, how cool, Davy probably convinced him that it's better to protect the nature, but you can also think that all those years Constantin knew exactely what is happening in the park and where to go to hunt. But what can you do, you need workers in the park, you need a lot of money and a perspective for personal development to motivate them. So that brings us back to the question of education and in my opinion this is what conservation needs the most today: educators and animators to start at all different levels, from children to adults, from illitaretes to those who want but never had a chance to get some knowledge.
For example the two guys now here with me seem both quite motivated. My heart aches much more for Constantin, because he learns fast, he already has a great knowledge of the forest, and he is a good observer, he wants to discover more and more, and his perspective is coming here every day to this clearing and watch the nature's movie in most of the time nothing is going on. Meanwhile the only book he can read is the bird guidebook he knows already almost by heart. I mean how to stay motivated here? Davy on he other hand is not super bright, but really motivated, he is the kind of student, that will write down every word of a teacher and will bring flowers and will be the first to volunteer for everyhing, but you can be sure he doesn't undersand half of it...
So actually instead of planning out research programs and monitoring the population of he park these are the problems that you face when you want to be a research director of the park...
Obviously human factors are always important in whatever enterprise, but here it's not only your workers, but the whole village, and maybe more the whole country is what needs to be taken into consideration and that's where you loose track and you ask yourself whether it is getting you somewhere or you're running the same rounds every time and you start to feel old and tired and less enthiusisastic. But maybe it's something you should not think about...

Ngoi

After recieving mom's text message that mindfull observation is like meditation I decided that I will give it a try, after all what wrong could it bring if I become a buddha? I don't know if mother nature decided to reinforce me with that, or it's rather simply the fact that the weather is changing, that some fruits are riping, that there is more rain etc, but lately observation has become more and more entertaining. I got to see new things (ie. species) almost every day.  Most exciting of all was the leopard, probably because it comes very scarsely to the clearing, it is a very fearfull animal and hides all the time. We have seen its footprints for a while, and then one morning we arrive to the clearing and started the morning scan, so same old species, and then suddendly Michel, one of the ecomoniteurs says that there is an animal with a long tail. Since usually his observational skills are crap I gave no credit to what he's said, and thought that it was probably a branch or dead leavs. Then Flory took the telescope and almost shouted "Ngoi", but I understood koyi, which means nictitans - also a rare observation - so I started to look at the trees, and then everyone grabbed the googles/telescope, and by the time I understood it was the leopard, they were like no, we don't see it anymore. Then we spent the next half an hour looking for it in the high grasses, and I was like it is not possible, the leopard comes like once in a year and everybody has seen it exept for me. And the guys kept saying how beautiful it was and I have already felt like I have wasted a once in a lifetime ocasion when Flory got to the telescope again, and then grabbed my armes and told me to look. And it was there, so beautiful, at the far end of the clearing hiding in the trees, sharpening his claws on a trunk. It wasn't easy to spot it in the yellow-green bushes. It came to try its chance but except for birds he didn't find much food in the clearing so he left after a while. It's a pity I didn't see it hunting, espetially that later that day there were buffalos, duikers and wildboars coming to the clearing (and by the way that was the only day that I've seen wildboars, and I am pretty sure that the two observations, ie. wildboars and leopard, are somehow connected).

Another excitement is a female elephant with her male offspring, couldn't stop taking pics of them, they were so sweet together, seeing them it's hard to imagine, that this is the most feared animal in this forest. And not only by humans, all the animals escape them.

But obviously we've seen also gorillas, albeit only three times, but there was a group of ten, a group of five and a solitary silverback. The first group stayed more than four hours and there was plenty of time to enjoy the scene. It was Achille's group, he is a beautiful SB with a harem of four females, from which one had an almost newborn baby. It was also interesting to see the different behaviours of the females, there were big differences in their child care and protection attitudes. The second group was Paps and his family, he had a bigger baby, that was already leaving his mom sometimes and coming down to play in the high grass, so sweet.

But for the rest of the days it's buffalos and birdwatching and colobes and other small monkeys. This is my last shift at Lokoue, the 3 of April we swap places with Celine so I go back to Romani. Although I will surely miss the nice walk in the forest I am quite excited by this change especially because they see regularly chimps coming to the clearig there and they've even obesrved them hunting for colobes! That was the first time Celine have seen it, and she's spent quite a lot of time here already so it is really a rare observation. But I still hope that I will have a chance to see that too. And anyways gorillas are also more frequent there than here, so I think this change comes right.

So although mindfull observation is only a practice for my conscienciousness I don't mind if I'm reinforced by seeing loads of interesting stuff:) Keep your fingers crossed that there won't be any ripe fruits in the forest around the clearing because then again the animals won't come to see me...

copyright ECOBIO/Université de Rennes

copyright ECOBIO/Université de Rennes

Mornings in paradise

copyright ECOBIO/Université de Rennes

It's been 20 days that we've arrived to Lokoue, the second of the research sites. I'm staying here alone with my 3 ecomoniteurs, my camp helper and the pinassier, who is based here and makes his trips from here to the sites located further up north the Lokoue river. I'm actually lucky that he stays with us, because it means that we get to eat fresh fish every day, which, considering that otherwise we only have canned food is a real blessing. Actually it's quite funny, I have a camp helper all to myself, who is supposed to prepare my food, do my laundry and manage the camp. So every morning I wake up and I have my little cup of coffe and my toased breads waiting for me, and next to it in the food container I have my lunch and my water. Neige has to wake up every day at 4:30 to prepare that, but the fact is that then he is doing not much for the rest of the day, so actually I feel more sorry for him for that than for the 4:30 alarm. Must be pretty boring to sit around the whole day alone in the middle of the forest without electricity and without books that you can read. I mean I could leave him my books, but actually I doubt he can read.
Anyways we leave at 6:10 from the camp and it's an hour 15 min walk to get to the platform. We go with a quite fast pace so by the time we get to the plaform I'm covered with sweat and I'm persuaded that that's why we see no animals, because they can feel our presence from kms. The walk otherwise would be nice, exept, that you don't really have time to look around, you have to watch your steps carefully in order to not fall in the million of fallen barnches and trunks or cut your head by a hanging lian. When we leave it's still dawn but the sun soon comes up, and you get to see some monkeys and birds on the way.  You cross dozens of animal trails while walking in the forest and I have a hard time to figure out which piste was made by us, and wchich one was already there. The first day we arrived we went to check the road with Didier. It was quite funny, we both took a matchette and suddenly I felt like being in that old computer game Prince of sg, when you have the assasins coming from all directions and you have to kill them all. Well it was like that exept, that instead of assasins we had the hanging branches and lians coming after us, and the ease with which Didier was turning his machette to exterminate them made me think that I am happy I'm on his side:) Anyways, if you think of the forest like a huge city with streets and boulvards and trees as skyscrapers then here it is like New York and if you're from a small town like Budapest you get lost very easily. I mean I can recognize some remarkably distinctive trunks like the ones you have to crawl over or beneath, but except for that let's face it for me a trunk is just a trunk and the maranthacae bush is just a bush, how am I supposed to remember after which one to turn right? And these guys, even when it's the first time they're going to the platform, they won't get lost on the way home, pretty amazing, isn't it? Anyways the most important is to watch out for the big boulvards, because they were built buy the elephants, and the elephants are dangerous. Actually they're THE MOST dangerous animals in the forest, and while walking in the forest the ecomoniteurs stop very often, they become all silent and frozen and you can feel they would love to disappear and then you know they've smelt the elephant... Apparently all encounters with elephants end with an attack, and after hearing all the stories and seeing how serious they are about it I start to get what's all this fuzz about. Actually there are a few bones on the clearing, that once belonged to a hippo, which was killed by an elephant last year and the guys have seen the holes left by the ivory and I can understand they don't feel like sharing the same faith...
We are supposed to arrive to the platform at 6:20 and usually we do, I mount the camera and... and... and we wait. It's been twenty days and no gorillas and the guys tell me to be patient, so I am, but how many days patient can one be?
In the mornings I give myself to the beatifull spectacle that nature prepared and is presented by the perroquets and the colombars (small green pigeons). When you arrive in the morning there are dozens of perroquets, mostly foraging on the clearing and sometimes they just fly off, all of them at the same time, and you can see hundreds of grey and red feather flying in the air. It is breathtaking. And their sounds too... They have several different vocalizations and they don't stop vocalizing and it sounds like a spaceship in films from the begining of the sci-fi genere. So sometimes it feels like you are  in one of the sci-fi movies like eg. elysium, and you're a scientist sitting in a spaceship and trying to find out what went wrong, and how can we get back to the stadium when you had still life on earth... Am I crazy... yeah I guess...
And when the perroquets take off the colombars enter the scene. They take off at the exact same moment from the trees, and it gives a powerful sound, it's like there is a 10 storey building torn down somewhere behind you. I'm sure if you could capture the energy from their wings at that exact moment it's like providing electricity for whole Albania. And they fly in huge groups, and it's like, you know, the big fish flocks(?) in the sea, when they all swim together and suddenly they change directions and it's like a huge cloud of fish floating in the big blue. Well it's the same, exept that in the sky, and it's incredibly fascinating.
All this ends around 9:30 and suddenly there's silence. It's getting too warm and even the birds try to hide themselves in the shadows of the forest edge. The clearing becomes empty, only the buffalos can stand the heat, and only because they lay down in the small stream that crosses the clearing. And that's the picure you get for the rest of the day... Lately there must be some ripe fruits around, because we see more and more monkeys coming to the clearing, like yesterday we even had a group of guerezas and a group of agilis at the same time, but they don't stay longer than half an hour and it takes what, 5% of your day? And the rest is... well...
I read books (High fidelity from Nick Hornby, gosh I can't believe I've forgot that I've seen the movie before, but still enjoyed the writing and looking forward to How to be good) and articles, so let's say it's another 25% of the time spent at the platform, and it still leaves you with 70% of waiting and boredom... Oh I forgot, I am supposed to teach the guys how to do these observations, which is quite funny cause I learnt it myself 20 days ago, but considering that to some of them you have to explain how does page numbering work, there is still room for training. It is indeed taking, depending on my patience, another 10 to 20 percent of the time, and although I understand that some of them have difficulties with reading, but come on, we see exactely the same species every day and they still don't know the names of half of the birds. And these people are the chosen ones... the motivated ones. So I don't know where's the problem, probably in my French, or in theirs, but eg. I exlplain them every single day that sometimes you can tell the sex of an animal, sometimes the age class, somtimes both, and other times neither. Like for the eagle the juveniles have different feather colors than the adults, but males and females are the same. But no, they don't get it and still keep asking me how to note the observation.
In the remaining let's say 50% of time if I'm really bored I try to teach Didier English, but it's a bit complicated because he wants to know birdnames, and most of the time I don't even know them in Hungarian or Polish. And then you have the "in your country" type of questions that the guys ask me (ok I ask them too) and then finally if there's really not much to do they teach me lingala. Which again is pretty difficult because these guys have no knowledge of the grammar whatsoever, and when I ask them how is a single verb, let's say "to see" they will give you whole expressions like "you see the bird" and when I ask tem to tell me how is "I don't know" they will translate it as "you don't know" because they don't get that it's the conjugation you're intrested about. So my strategy is to ask them how is "i see the elephant" and "i see the bird" and then to extract the verb see. It's actually nice because that's the only part of the day when I get to use my brain...
And for the rest of it you pray that somebody invents the super time condensing machine, so that you can fastforward to the end of the day but not to miss out on interesting animals like elephants, and gorillas and leopards (Tivadar maybe you should take care of it instead of the hererotator).
And then at 4:30 we pack our stuff and leave. This is one of the nicest parts of the day, because we're not in such a hurry as in the morning and espectially if Didier is the one in front we stop all the time we see interesting things (like birds, monkeys, antelops, footprints).
We arrive to the camp between 5:30 and 6. We wash ourselves (the guys in the river, I get a bucket of water and go to the shower) and then we all have dinner together. I tried to explain to Neige that I'm not necessarly keen on eating dinners, but he's quite stubborn and keeps preparing me food, and I'm quite stubborn and I keep on leaving the half of it, so hopefully soon we'll arrive to a consensus, because this food has to last 2 more months and his not the best in rationing it out. In the evenings sometimes the guys tell me stories about the park, but sometimes I'm too tired of the human interactions and just go to my tent and read.
And that's pretty much it, this is my life for the next month, so I guess there's no point in writing anymore blog entries, right?