monkeybusiness

Sunday, May 25, 2014

Misunderstandings?

I wrote earlier that we are supposed to train the ecomonitors that are working with us. Celine even made an exhausting list with an evaluation sheet about what they should know by the end of our stay. Now some of them will do really fine on the evaluation but I don't feel like I had anything to do with it, it's their motivation and their will to progress that pushed them to learn and observe. But those who do poorly, well I feel like it's my personal failure. (So I should definately rethink my romanic dream of becoming a teacher and having long and fruitfull discussions with my students). Even with the items on the list like "to know how to walk silently in the forest" most of them would only score half: obviously they know how to walk quietly, they are hunters for god's sake, that's how they made their living not so long ago. But will they walk silently? Nope. Even if you explain why should they (1. don't want to scare off animals, 2. don't want the animals to get used to our presence) they will just laugh at your explanaition, and say that the animals don't mind. So why do they mind when you go hunting? But they just don't give a shit.
So it's quite difficult. But I've also realised that Guillaume and Celine have quite different objectives as to the training. Guillame says that already being with westerners and seeing their work ethic is quite a training for these guys, so actually I shouldn't worry too much. But then we spend 10 h together at the platform and it would be at least favorable if they knew what for they do their job and since they see my work too, it would be nice if they had at least a slightest idea why do we spend these hours at the camera... But well, again where to start. So ok you say that we're all here to collect data. But what is this data used for? Why do we need those information? (But wait a minute, it doesn't occur to them that the data is used for something, they look at me with blank eyes when I raise the question). So let's go back one step, why does this Park exist, why do we do conservation? And this is when it gets wild and out of control. And not because even after majoring in biology I still find it hard to explain to naive people why it is important to protect the equatorial rainforests and to find examples how is everything interconnected in the ecosystem (shame on you Marianna) but because I get answers like this: there is loads of money in conservation, and this: you will be rich when you go back...
Like the other day my discussion with Neige, my camp helper: (the context is the following: we use silicagel to dry the feces samples we collect and from time to time you need to change it when the stones are not able to absorb any more humidity, and when we do that we put on masks so that we don't contaminate the samples with human DNA) so I'm changing the silica and Neige comes up to me smiling and saying: you will be rich with all these feces in Europe. I look at him perplexed, don't really understand what he means. So I ask why does he think so, and then he says "ces crottes, c'est beaucoup d'argent" (these poops are worth a lot of money). I look at him with disbelief, but want to make sure I know what he means: DO YOU THINK WE ARE SELLING IT? And then he says "I don't know Marianna, all I know the white are coming here and are making a lot of money. Nobody comes here just like that." My first reaction is that I'm pissed, mad at the park, I mean how can you send off these people to the forest without explaining them what they are doing (to be fair: Neige is not a worker of the Park, he is paid by us, but he is workig with/for whites for a while; and the next day I asked the same question at the platform, and the answer was yes). But then I calm down, and realize that a) that would be also my job to explain to them b) I did it several times (eg. I even draw colorfull necklaces telling them that this is how the DNA look like) c) they were probably laughing at my explanation just like when I ask them not to make noise in the forest. When I ask the ecomonitors the same question Pavel tells me, that for example last year they were collecting the feces themselves, and allthough they got gloves and masks to protect them, they recieved no extra money for the risk of the contamination. Allthough somebody paid hard for those poops in Europe. (Well, all right using the word contaminate is confusing. This time however it's humans that can contaminate the samles by introducing human DNA which is indistinguishable from the gorillas'. Again did anyone explain it to them? I know this year I did, a zillion times, and we're still at this confusion.)
And then I start to justify them: all they see is white coming here mining gold, diamond, paying them to kill elephants for the ivory. Earlier when I asked them if they knew why would somebody want to buy the tusks they had no idea. They said they've heard that they are used for jewellery, but they've never seen anything made out of it. For them ivory is as useless as gorilla poop. Why are then white people coming for it? Obviously there must be money in it. (And here again some confusion. When I say "but now it's mostly the chineese who are buying it", they laugh at me: "so what, you say the chineese are not white?"... And speaking of them, another one, this time it's morbid: "is that true that every chineese woman will give birth to 6 children at the same time?") Same thing for the conservation, why would anyone put money in saving the nature without having any income from it. Obviously we are making tremendiusly loads of money here. Otherwise who would pay those expensive flight tickets. Same thing for the pictures, of course we are going to sell them in Europe and there is no way to convince them of the opposite. When I say these pictures are for documentation they are laughing, and when I say anyways who would want to buy it, they get agitated, we are so many in Europe, someone will buy them (I wonder what would a photographer say to that). Like all those tourists who come here and take pictures, they are obviously earning some money with them. Otherwise why would they come? Then I'm like "look, phothography is like music, right? Here everybody nows how to sing, loads of people do sing for themselves, but only a few make a living out of it. They are called professionals." But the reaction is like oh, Marianna, you are trying to decieve us. Then I start my tale like, look in the western world you work like this, you earn money, you save some money and when you saved enough you think about how to spend it. And some people chose to do tourism just for the experiance. Just from curiosity. Just for the pleasure to see new things. They smile at me with disbelief, nobody is travelling just like that. It's a lot of money, you don't spend it like that. Then I say in Europe people can put some money aside cause they don't make 10 kids, it's their choice...But I'm loosing them here, so I go back, that there are even some criminals, who have so much money, that they don't know what to do with it, so they came up wih the idea of buying ivory and diamond and gold and all that stuff. That they do it just to show off how rich they are and that they are bad bad people because they don't think of the consequences of their desires. And that the poor black people shouldn't be used like this so should say no to elephant hunting. And Romain, one of the former poachers is listening to me carefully and then says: "so if they have so much money, they should just send it to us directly, instead of sending us to kill elephants". I say brilliant, and I ask him if I can write about it and he says no because he still feels like he has no right to say anything to the white men.
So here is why conservation will never work in poor countries like Congo: I've been working 4 months day after day with these guys, living together in the middle of nowhere. Having meals together, walking in the forest together, helping out each other, taking care of each other. A real sense of community, just what you would expect how one should live together in an isolated camp. I ask them questions about their life, they ask about mine. They assist to my work, so I explain them things, like what is genetics and how is it used to determine parenthood, for example. Then I tell them that some men refuse to pay child allowance because they don't believe that they fathered the child, and with the help of genetics we can find out what's the truth. And they love the idea, because they have the same problems here. And I think: how cool they get it, we've connected. And all this time it just doesn't occur to me that at the back of their head they're thinking I will go back to Europe and make money out of gorilla poop. We have no idea of the degree of their ignorance. And on the other hand they have no sense of working for the good of the community. As for them nobody does that. If you do something it is for your own benefit, and with this logic it's not surprising, that the only and the main purpose of national parks is to make money. They even call it an enterprise.

Sunday, May 11, 2014

Heaven

The last few blog entries I was writing about how I should train my patience and wether this all waitng will pay off. Well good news: it did. 100%. Actually to have my recompensation I had to change my location, so it's not the waiting itself, but I'm wondering if I could appreciate all the last week as I am now, if I had the same experience from the begining. Cause now I feel like I'm in paradise. I mean I am in paradise. The last rotation we've seen 55 gorillas, 10 elephants and 5 chimps, and this count is for individuals, which means some of them we've seen 2 or 3 times the week. They all come for the same: their favourite italian dish, long grasses dumped in the water rich in salt and minerals, which we simply call spagetti. They come solitary, they come in groups and stay at least half an hour on the clearing pulling out the long grass and washing it in the swampy water. This is how you can imagine it: at the close wing of the clearing you see a group of three elephants digging huge holes to get to the roots, and then you see gorillas arriving and falling into these holes and their babies clinging onto their mothers in order to not get drown in these "huge lakes" and next to them you see the sitatungas lying and refreshing themselves in the water, and then you get another group of elephants coming at the far wing of the clearing, this time it's a group of five with a male baby and a female juvenile and their mothers and sisters, and you have the buffalos moving away from their way and you're hearing the birds around you, the pygmy calao, souimangas, bulbuls singing and you just say to yourself that yez, this is heaven. If anyone asked me how heaven looks like I would paint exactly this picture, or well, maybe I miss the chimps, but then just at the momentI think of it I take a look in the telescope, and at first I don't even realize what I see, I just recognize that I know this face, but something is wrong... wait a minute, it should be gorillas here, so I double check, but I was right... there... at the far wing of the clearing I see chimps coming, in a line, they are five, an adult male, a female with the baby and two juveniles. They are on the ground, foraging, picking up seeds, drinking water, chilling out in peace... Just like heaven...

Sunday, April 20, 2014

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...

Mornings in paradise

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?

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...