One Snare Trap at a Time

22 December 2008

Today starts out like any other day.

6:00 The alarm goes off, I get up, get ready, pack a lunch, make coffee, eat breakfast, quick check my email.

7:21 The assistants show up more or less on time. I show them the Christmas tree my mom left; they are quick to point out that Santa looks like he is wearing gumboots. Then they want their picture taken with it. We have a good laugh and the whole thing puts me in really high spirits.

I go back to my coffee and enter yesterday’s data for the next hour and a half. There is quite a lot considering we only had three people working. Erick did 8 follows, Charles had 9, and I did 11 – it was one of my best days data wise, I was with the group for 7 hours and collected 5.5 hours of actual data.

9:00 I leave the house, it’s my turn to go to Gs, the farthest and least favorite group of everyone. This is the group that split recently presumably due to pressure from poaching so there is double the searching. I have already decided to go straight to Gsb unless I pass Gsa on Farm Road. I don’t so I do.

9:58 I turn off Bis Road and enter the cypress and pine plantation that Gsb has claimed as their new home, ironically located closer to the village where the poachers come from.

10:01 I spot something, I stop, my heart starts beating faster. It is always unnerving to find evidence of other people in the forest, I know they are here, I run into them more than I would like. But this, this wasn’t left here, this was constructed, it has a purpose. It finally registers; this is a trap, a snare trap meant to catch a monkey. I have come across skeletons of other traps that sit forgotten in the forest undergrowth. But this one is new and baited. Someone put a lot of time, planning, and effort into its construction. And it is actually quite impressive.

In front of me are about 15 spears stuck into the ground so they form a teepee a meter high with an opening. There are a couple of maize cobs and many loose kernels inside. Around the teepee maize stalks with ears still attached are positioned more or less in a circle, drawing the victim to the center.

I know there is a wire and I pull one of the stalks out and apply pressure near the opening, the wire snaps and flies up so fast I can’t even react. Any chance of my heartbeat slowing down is lost at this point.

There is no doubt in my mind they would have caught a monkey if I hadn’t found this first. Now I am just angry and I happily set about the task of destroying everything. I collect all the maize cobs - later I will laugh when I open my bag and it is full of maize and then will give it to Charles for his chickens, but for now I don’t want the monkeys attracted to this area and I don’t want them to develop a taste for maize, because I assume they, unlike the other groups, have never actually encountered it, as their territory is nowhere near a field. I take down the wire and I go in search of the group.

10:37 I stop again. Something shiny and a sapling cut off at my knee catch my eye. A wire. Another trap, this one for something walking along the trail. A person? A monkey watcher? Me? I am suddenly frightened and feel like my every move is being watched. I disassemble it and take the wire.

11:08 Another wire on the trail. Now I am on the south side of the plantation, I made a circle and am returning to the southwest corner where I entered. I am starting to freak out, no monkeys, three traps.

11:26 I hear them before I see them, the snap snap snap of twigs being broken: young boys collecting firewood. I make sure they see me before I approach, I don’t want them to run off and I frequently have that effect on people I encounter in the forest. Through the oldest of the boys’ broken English and my minimal Swahili we manage to communicate. I show him the wires I have collected.

“Julie puts those for monkeys and gazelles,” he informs me.

I am confused because I have never seen nor heard of any gazelle in the forest.

“Wapi?” I ask.

He points northwest and tells me the name of a village I will forget five minutes after our conversation. I feel like I should lecture him about how wrong this is but he beats me to it and tells me how bad he thinks it is. I wonder if he is a regular at the environmental ed’s Saturday program. It doesn’t matter where he learned it, he gets it, and I start to feel better.

11:31 As I am walking away, it dawns on me what he means by gazelles. We are supposed to have duikers here; small solitary antelope that hide in dense brush. The wire traps are for them not me, now I just feel like an idiot, but if I had been running down the trail monkey gazing I probably would have gotten caught around the ankle and fallen flat on my face regardless of the trapper’s intentions.

12:09 Still no sign of the group, I give up. As I am about to take a step out of the protective cover of trees onto the hot dusty stretch of Bis Road I hear people on the road so I let them pass. And out of the corner of my eye I see movement and there is Pody. Then Buzz, Soft, Bilbo, and BB. I can’t believe it. BB is my highest priority for the midday so I start a follow on her. Then Milo shows his face.

12:47 Done with BB and no sign of the other two. I finally see Gigi on the edge of the group, she is my next priority so I begin a follow on her and nine minutes into it NS appears. Roll call is complete, all the monkeys are accounted for, Gsb lives to see another day. To the people hunting them these are just monkeys but to me they are individuals, they have unique personalities, family ties, and friendships amongst themselves, not to mention we have collected countless hours of data on them. I am overcome with the urge to sweep them up in a protective embrace and hold them there forever.

14:10 My day is nearly over, I haven’t had time to eat my lunch and I still have yet to locate Gsa, the larger of the two groups. I leave Gsb farther north in the cypress than I have ever been with them and I head down Bis Road, meet up with Farm Road and start searching when I enter Gsa territory. Nothing in the Bis plantation, the Exotic Forest is empty, can’t see anything in the Grevilia plantation. Gsa should be easier to find simply because they are bigger but their territory is enormous. I go up Cow Highway to Trail 4 and Trail 1, still nothing so I loop around and come back down Farm Road to search the Pac trails.

15:53 I take a shortcut trail from Pac to Pac+1 and find the trail ends at a felled tree. I crash out to Rondo Road. Some graffiti on a stump catches my eye.

“I don’t write just anyhowly. Also, I’m not a racist.” I don’t know what to make of it.

Suddenly I am aware of a lorry slowing down as it nears me.

“Polepole,” the driver says through the rolled down window, him and his companion flash me a smile.

I just nod and wave. It occurs to me they are slowing down as they pass to prevent covering me with a cloud of dust. Nice, but utterly useless at this point, I am sweaty, smelly, and already covered from head to toe with a layer of filth. I manage to locate Pac+1 relatively quickly considering how overgrown the trailhead has become and continue my search.

15:36 A grunt on Cow Highway and Trail 4 causes me to look up and there is Andy. Where was she when I passed this intersection an hour ago? Since I didn’t take a lunch break my day should end at four and it is quickly approaching, I begin frantically searching for a priority and adding individuals to my roll call. The only females I can find are Jig and Angle and they are both on my not list for the pm.

16:04 I can’t leave yet, I have only seen a handful of the group and still have no follows. I see movement off the trail, then I spot Agnes so I promptly start a follow. She forces me to bushwhack and I quickly loose track of Trail 4, but I see Agro, Cider, and Chaos in the process.

16:40 I am not as far off the trail as I thought. My roll call is nowhere near complete but I am beat, physically and emotionally exhausted, it’s time to go home. As I walk down Station Road back towards the village I think about the events of this morning, it feels like it happened days ago. I am a mix of emotions over it, excited to show the assistants what I found, slightly embarrassed I was starting to think the poachers were out to get me, and ready to plead my case to the forester: we need guards patrolling that area more often than they do...which is never. Now I have evidence to prove it.

Kenya-month 6

Finally the day came, November 8^th. My mom, Mo and Jackie had arrived in Nairobi the night before and I left first thing in the morning to make the 10-hour trip by matatu.

My first matatu was so full I didn’t think they could fit me in, but they did - standing half bent over with a stranger’s rear end in my face, that’s how I rode for the first hour. After that my matatu rides were as comfortable as one can get in a matatu. And by early evening I was in Nairobi pounding on the gate at the guesthouse. I could hear my mom searching for someone to let me in and then Mo’s laughter. Those last five minutes waiting at the gate felt like they lasted forever, then finally familiar faces and I was smothered with hugs and it felt great.

Sunday we spent in Nairobi visiting the Giraffe Centre, David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust elephant and rhino orphanage, and the Karen Blixen Museum.

First thing Monday we left for our seven-day camping safari. The whole first day we bumped along on our way to Samburu and Buffalo Springs National Reserves. We arrived at dusk and were welcomed by an enormous bull elephant. We spent two nights in Samburu and saw many of the more rare and localized species including reticulated giraffes, Grevy’s zebras, gerenuks - gazelles that feed standing on their hind legs, and oryx.

Wednesday we spent another full day driving and by the time we made it to Lake Baringo, in the Rift Valley, the sun was already setting. We pitched our tents not far from the lakeshore, the same lakeshore the hippos use as nightly feeding grounds. As soon as we got into our tents for the night the hippos started conversing loudly. There were no actual hippo sightings on shore but they sounded close, really really close.

Then it was off to Lake Bogoria and Lake Nakuru. Both are famous for the tens to sometimes hundreds of thousands of flamingos that frequent their waters. Bogoria is a small, rarely visited, saline lake with erupting hot springs. Nakuru is a soda lake located just outside Kenya’s fourth largest city by the same name. Of all the places visited, Nakuru was my favorite. The assortment of animals congregating at the lake’s edge was spectacular: white rhino, zebra, waterbuck, pelicans, flamingos, marabou storks, spotted hyenas, and cape buffalo. Not to mention the baboons on the cliffs above the lake.

After that we headed for our final destination, the Masai Mara National Reserve. And another full day of driving, this time on slightly better roads. The Masai Mara is considered the best animal reserve in all of Kenya. Before entering the reserve we were presented with an amazing sight, a group of more than 40 Maasai giraffes migrating in a seemingly endless line of legs and necks.

Here we saw our first lions - although we heard some in Samburu - adding to our list the fourth and final of the “Big Five” we would see. The “Big Five” is a phrase that was coined by big-game hunters and refers to the most dangerous and hardest of the African animals to hunt: lion, elephant, cape buffalo, rhinoceros, and leopard. The leopard was the only specimen lacking from our own “big-game hunt.”

My roommate had gone on a safari with the same company a couple months earlier and she complained they never stopped for the baboons. I know that the primates are not what draw people to Kenya, and compared with the larger more impressive animals out there I really can’t argue, but primates are what brought me here. We did stop for the baboons as often as we saw them, probably because of me - making people appreciate monkeys, that’s what I do best.

Next on our tour of Kenya was the Lamu Archipelago. Famous for its Swahili culture, laid-back atmosphere, and donkeys, the islands are located off the coast near the Somalian border. Jackie and I went to witness a sea turtle hatching on Manda Island; between two nests we saw 208 hatchlings. It was incredible. Also included on our list of things to do while there was nothing, and I think we accomplished that quite successfully, along with a lot of shopping.

Then it was back to Western Kenya. In Kisumu we rented a car and I drove the sixty some kilometers back to Kakamega, dodging potholes and avoiding crazy matatu drivers along the way.

It didn’t take long for word to spread in the Isecheno forest station that I was back in the forest with my guests. Ernest got word of our arrival while out on Gn group and had to run over and tell Alicia on Tws. Children I have never seen before showed up at our house for prizes and continued to congregate in the yard throughout the week.

We had a huge party for my mom’s birthday and Alicia’s going away; it was so big we needed to use both houses. The entire table was covered with our feast and I thought they would never eat it all, but I was wrong. We had mandazi, chapati, githeri, baghia, pumpkin leaves, and of course birthday cake. At the end of it all we took lots of photos and many thanks were said. As I drove the assistants home in the rental car that night they all commented on my driving skills (they were easily impressed as none of them have ever driven before), what they didn’t seem to notice was with the absence of other cars on the road I had reverted to driving on the right side.

Over the course of the trip Mo and Jackie became my other moms. And it was hard to say goodbye to my three moms when I left them in Kisumu, but I had a forest full of monkeys to return to. And things around here have changed a bit with their visit, the kids now show up every other day to play with the matchbox cars they left or ask for balloons or to just hang out. With my roommate Alicia gone now I am alone in the house, but it has been very hard to feel lonely with all of the kids running around.

Besides their visit, the big excitement in the forest lately has been the arrest of a local man for poaching snakes. He has been catching venomous snakes and sending them to the coast where presumably the venom is being extracted and used in witchcraft or exported illegally. This man is nothing but trouble and we celebrated when he was taken away. The snake that did him in was a monstrous gaboon viper. This snake was thicker than my leg, it is hard to imagine that these creatures exist in the forest and make the act of bushwhacking suddenly seem terrifying. This snake met an untimely end when it escaped from the poacher’s compound and wound up near the feet of an unsuspecting woman on her way to the latrine. The villagers said it was so big they couldn’t beat it to death so they torched it. The charred snake was haphazardly thrown into the forest near the tea field. Charles escorted me to see this beast and we met a large procession of people coming from the village to do the very same thing. I later heard Kenyan Wildlife Service went out and picked it up to use as evidence. It is a shame that such a great component of the forest here was lost, but hopefully because of it this man will be put away for a long time.

The dry season is in full swing around here, it is hot, and the monkeys are thirsty. Today I caught some drinking from unusual sources around my house. I heard a pitter patter on the roof and then a drip drip drip. I looked out the window and saw a hand on the gutter. Abe found some water in the gutter left over from the last rain. Some unidentified individuals were seen dipping their hands into a small opening on one of the tanks at the house next door, one more reason to boil water before drinking it! And Pop, a lone male, took a long drink out of my dirty laundry water. I tried to stop him but in the end he scared me more than I could scare him so I left him to enjoy his soapy water in peace.