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.