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?