monkeybusiness: First gorilla spotted

We woke up early this morning, prepared 2 vache qui rit sandwiches and a plate of spagetti with tomato sauce per capita and left our house. We went to the gathering point where at 6 o'clock we were supposed to meet our driver Frank who was supposed to take us to Dzebe. Dzebe is a clrearing which is relatively close to us, and Celine heard that gorillas are quite frequent there, so she decided that we sould check it out, to increase the chance to see gorillas together. Last year she had real bad luck, all the first month of her observation she didn't see any gorillas, and since we are going to stay together only 11 days, she wanted to make sure she has a chance to see me in action:).

So we left early, and waited an hour for Frank, and than we took the same road by which we came to Mbomo and this time it seemed quite big. After an hour we arrived to a village, where we took an ecomoniteur, Tibault with us, and when we left the village Frank turned left from the road and suddendly we found ourselves in a piste that was once a road but now it was overgrown by the dense forest vegetation. Dzebe actually was last visited 8 month ago, so what used to be the ecomoniteurs trail was overtaken by the nature. Well this didn't really move Frank who was forcing the car through the thick bushes. We stoped only once when the road was blocked by a huge trunk, and Frank and Tibault had to cut our way through with machetes. After more or less an hour we arrived to a savanna where we left our car and continued by foot. We started another hour long jurney through mud, river and dense forest. As it was raining yesterday evening the road was quite wet and slippery and sometimes disappeared under the water that sometimes reached almost our knees. Then sometimes our robber boots stuck in the mud under the water, and then not only we stepped out of them into the mud but they also got filled with water. And then we arrived to a river that was about 8 m wide with water reaching our waist. And no bridge. There was one under water trunk to the 2/3 of the river and then one like 20 cm above. The stream was almost non existent but having the camera in my backpack falling into the water was out of question. At this point I also had two tripods in my hand but arriving to the trunk above the water level I handed it to Daniel who was in front of me and told him to send it forward to the other side. Before he could do that he was already half in the water. Trying to save his painting devices I jumped after him and helped to pull him out of the water, so finally we both ended up soaking wet, but luckily no harm was done to our equipment. We were still only halfway to the platform, and cutting through the forest you should keep calm and try not to disturb the animals. Well u can imagine that it's not so easy to walk quietly when your robber boots are full of soaking socks and you have millions of dead branches underneath your feet. I am sure that with all the crunching, falling and the "plough" with evry step scared away all the animals within a range of 2kms. Never the less we arrived happily to the clearing. There was a tiny platform at the entrance to the clearing (so tiny that I missed it at first, and thought that we stopped only to get some rest). It was built from bamboo, looked quite unstable and some of the ledder steps were missing, but we climbed up there hoping it won't fall down. Since it was too small to fit all the tripods, we mounted only the camera with the 600 objective, and sat down to wait. You couldn't really move, because a) there was no really space b) when you moved the whole platformed moved with you. As I said, the clearing hasn't been obsereved for the last 8 months, and that is why the platform was in really poor state, but Celine assured us that the other platforms are well maintained.

I cannot really imagine a nicer job than to sit in the nature and just observe it. Obviously you have some insects flying around you, cause you smell like hell after the trecking and from the river, but you get used to it very quickly. And if you stay quiet and patient you might see quite a loot of things. And being there with Celine makes the game even more interesting because she spots animals fast and recognizes quite a lot of sounds. I'm happy I can learn from her. So at the begining we saw only an ombrette africain (sorry guys birds names will be in french since my guide books are french) and some giant touracos (check the pic, caught one in flight) and Celine made me identify everything in the naturalist guide books. Then we've heard a nictitans, and a few minutes later we spotted it behind the platform. Then nothing. To have the time go faster we started to eat and that's when we've heard chestbeat in the forest. We sat quietly witholding our breath and ten minutes later he was there. A blackback arrived quite tourmented at the far right and of the clearing and he passed it quiclky looking back behind his shoulders as if checking if nobody is following him. He sat down not far from as in the forest edge, hiding behind the trees. A few minutes later a young silverback and a female arrived at the same spot as the blackback before, and they sat down to try out the tasetfull roots of the clearing grasses. We started to make photos and I was concentrating onbeing able to follow and identify them, so the hour and a half they spent on the clearing felt like 15 minutes. Only at the end we noticed they had a juvenile with tnem. They werent actually so visible, because they stayed at the far edge of the clearing covered by really high grass, and came forward only to pull out some grasses from the water. And that was it, at one point they didn't came out again and sadly we had to note they time of exit.

Celine hypothesised that the young silverback and the blackback might have been in one bachelor group before, that's why the blackback was still foraging close to his old pal, but he couldn't really be with him, since the silverback got a female already. The juvenile on the other hand was quite unlikely to be the silverback's offspring, it was too biv and the silverback was too young.

We waited half an hour to give them time to move further away and make sure we won't bump into them on the way. The sun was high up the whole day and it dried off most of the water so we managed to get back with dry feet. The two hours bumping at the back of the car this time felt like an eternity, but getting back to our house we celebrated the day with the local N'gok beer and some chocholate Grzegorz got me back in France.

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