Kenya-one year

The days around here seem to drag on but the weeks and months come and go quickly. More than twelve months have passed since I arrived in Kenya, I have been living in the forest for over a year. At one point my stint in Kenya seemed endless, never-ending. And now my time here is almost up, just three more weeks to go.

At the end of May I made the long journey to Nairobi to work out my visa renewal. I found a way to extend my trip a few days in order to visit the southern coast and timed it all out so I could meet up with my replacements, Barry and Cerian, as they arrived from the UK and escort them back to the forest.

The trip starts out smoothly as my friend Sabina and I leave Kakamega on the night bus at seven and finally arrive in downtown Nairobi around 4:30 the next morning. After sleeping as long as we can in the uncomfortable upright seats we finally hit the streets of Nairobi at 6:30 am in search of coffee and breakfast. Luckily, Sabina is quite familiar with downtown Nairobi as she spent a couple months volunteering there. I can bushwhack my way from the tea fields, through all the “M” trails, and up and down the “Pac” trails but I am completely lost in the city. Not to mention overwhelmed by the noise, smells, traffic, and people everywhere. After a shockingly expensive – by forest standards anyway – but delicious breakfast and the meeting about my visa we make our way by matatu over to the National Museum and meet up with a friend from the ornithology department. Onesmis was in Kakamega earlier this year working with a German graduate student and I came to know him over many visits and birthday parties – including my own – at their camp in the northern part of the forest. After a behind the scenes tour of the museum and a peek into the room that holds over 30,000 bird specimens we say goodbye and make our way towards the Nairobi railway station.

The train to Mombasa is scheduled to leave at 7 pm so we arrive early and expectant but end up waiting in the crowded station restaurant for hours and watch with jealousy as other passengers board the train heading in the opposite direction bound for Kisumu. It is nearly nine before our own train arrives and we are allowed to board the “Jambo Kenya Deluxe” with service to Mombasa. We settle in, eat dinner with the other second- and first-class passengers, and pass out with exhaustion from the previous 24 hours worth of travel.

In the morning we wake up somewhere in the middle of Tsavo East, one of the largest national parks in Kenya. As Sabina and I watch the sunrise over the arid landscape our train comes to a quick stop. Being the third car from last we have absolutely no idea what is happening at the front. The train is stopped for sometime before I finally decide to head up to the dining car and investigate. Five cars up from our sleeper, the trip through the narrow hallways was annoying to make when the train was in motion but a bit easier with the train at a standstill. As soon as I poke my head in the car I am greeted by one of the servers from the night before, “good morning Miss, our train hit an elephant.” Excuse me? That caught me completely off guard. I had read in the guidebook that the train is commonly delayed by elephants on the tracks and had kind of chuckled at the thought; I didn’t realize trains actually hit them!

Clearly, my speechlessness convinces him I am skeptical of the previous statement. “Go out and have a look for yourself,” and with that he gestures towards the open door beyond the kitchen and my eyes suspiciously follow. There appears to be tons of people milling around out there. So I step out. And sure enough, there is an elephant-sized object lodged between the embankment and one of the train cars. From afar is could be something as simple as a giant boulder but under closer inspection it is an elephant, tusks and all. I don’t know what to think. People are using the body as a stepping-stone to get in and out of the train car. The whole situation is too absurd and ridiculous to comprehend at 7 o’clock in the morning. It definitely helps that the animal is in an unrecognizable state; it is rolled up into a ball, thankfully with the head on the inside.

We spend the next few hours waiting around for Kenya Wildlife Service to arrive. In the meantime even more people manage to arrive by bike, on foot, or by lorry to our seemingly isolated location. And they are all armed with machetes and plastic bags: everyone wants to take home an elephant steak. When KWS finally shows they give the go ahead and the dismembering begins. It doesn’t take long and after much carnage, lots of arguing over who gets what cut, and a few unsuccessful attempts the train finally starts moving and we are on our way to the coast once again.

Our blood-spattered train finally pulls into the station at Mombassa around 6 pm, eight hours later than scheduled. Our short vacation to the beach is now even shorter than planned and we rush out of Mombasa towards Diani Beach via the ferry. After couple days on the white expansive beaches of Diani we head further south and spend a night on Wasini Island. Then back up to Mombasa in search of some good Swahili food, a view of the famous tusks, a visit to Fort Jesus and our trip to the coast is over.

Back in the forest, life is completely different. While I was away at the coast the field site was taken over by graduate students from New York. Then I came back with my two replacements in tow and now there are seven of us. It is nice to have company and even nicer that I don’t have to cook for myself every night but my space has been completely invaded. I got booted out of the bedroom and now sleep in the kitchen/office/communal living area. And next week my boss returns for the first time since last year. My final few weeks in the forest will be hectic ones training and turning things over to my replacements as well as going over a year’s worth of details and monkey gossip with my boss. When my time is up I will be sad to leave to this place I have called home for the last year and it will be hard to say goodbye to the monkeys I have spent so much time with but I will be ready. The other day we were out in the field and I said, more as a statement than an actual question, “why am I so exhausted?” And one of the students simply replied, “um, probably because you have been running the monkey project for a year.” 

Kenya-month 10 and 11

The rains are back now and in full force. The dry season drug on for so long I forgot how terribly miserable the rainy season can be: hoards of buzzing biting insects, perpetually wet vegetation, drenched unidentifiable monkeys, mold on things you never thought could mold, laundry that takes a week to dry, and spending an entire day in the forest with wet clothing and feet. But at the same time, the transition from dry to wet, scorching to cool, dusty to moist, was a welcome one. The chirps of crickets, calls of frogs, or drumming of rain on my tin roof lull me to sleep every night. Trees that were dormant through the drought are now fruiting and food is plentiful once again. The vegetation has grown thick and unruly in a few short weeks, and with the mist tumbling from the trees in the morning and the constant lightning flashes and thunder booms this place has the ambiance of a true rainforest again. 

Even with an abundant assortment of fruit and new vegetation in the forest to feast on, the monkeys still venture into the village looking for an easy meal from their human friends. I was in the village with Tws on such a day recently.

I had been missing the majority of my group all morning and didn’t think much of it until they started showing up. Every couple minutes a monkey with a powdery white face appeared and rejoined the group. First Fletcher, then Twin, and they just kept coming with their floured faces. I couldn’t figure out where they were getting it. At this point we were on the edge of the forest, next to the forester’s house, but far from the rest of the village where they do their thieving. I wasn’t thrilled with their activities but was definitely enjoying the effects of their binging; all my monkeys were now resting with bellies full on the lawn near the forester’s house. I have never eaten flour straight out of the bag but could imagine it might weigh you down and make you drowsy, not to mention give you a bellyache. Our snooze session was short lived and all the monkeys jumped up at the sound of a slamming door and a handful more came running out of a rusty old shed in the yard.

As it turns out, someone decided to store all their ugali flour out here, in a beat up, run down shack on the edge of the forest, with holes in the wall just big enough for a monkey to squeeze through. Not the best decision on his part and definitely not good for my relationship with the community. Some locals actually believe I control and communicate with the monkeys. That explains why they run from the villagers but tolerate me, so clearly, I am to blame for all their actions. After the man whose flour supplies they annihilated busted them, the group took off into the forest to seek refuge and I am not ashamed to admit, I was right behind.

I assumed there would be no more babies born this year, figured birthing season was long over. You can imagine my surprise then, when the assistants came back from the field on three separate occasions over the course of a single week this past month to report that Ratchet, Gigi, and Soft all had new infants.

Gigi and Soft are both in Gsb, the smallest of our study groups, consisting of five females, two juveniles, and a male. This is the group that split from the much larger Gsa and sought out new territory back in October. These two new arrivals join the two born back in early January, Ns’ and Pody’s. In a matter of months the population of this splinter group increased by 50%. These monkeys who I once thought were doomed to die at the hands of poachers have continued to amaze us and are doing better than anyone ever imagined. They now frequently utilize the nearby stream, a place where they are nearly inaccessible to all human company, monkey watchers included. We spend a lot more time bushwhacking up and down the steep banks and running back and forth to the few places where crossing from one side to the other is possible; it’s draining and stressful for us but exactly the opposite for them. I hope it continues.

At the beginning of April I hopped the border and spent a week in Uganda chasing chimps, hanging out with red colobus monkeys, and white-water rafting the Nile. The rafting trip was insane, thrilling and picturesque. We were caught in the middle of a rainstorm and there was nowhere to hide. Refuge from the chilling rains was only found by immersing ourselves in the warmer waters of the Nile. We marveled at flocks of cormorants and an island full of bats disturbed into flight as we tore through the adjoining rapids. Even though the majority of my vacation was spent in transit, a day to Kampala, another to Fort Portal, time spent traveling back east to Jinga, and finally one more day to cross the border and make the journey back to the forest, it was all worth it.

After my invigorating and exhilarating tour of Uganda I returned to my quiet empty cabin tucked away in the forest. I have grown accustomed to the solitude and loneliness that comes with being a field researcher, but that is about to change. I am currently preparing myself and the field site for the invasion of graduate students, fellow researchers, and my replacements that are all scheduled to arrive at the end of May. The field site will be a completely different place, it will be as it was when I arrived almost a year ago, crowded and busy, hectic and loud. But for right now, it’s still all mine, and of course the monkeys’ who visit on a daily basis. 

The Habituation Experience

9 April 2009

5:00 The alarm goes off, it’s still dark. There’s no electricity so I ready myself and pack my field bag by the light of my headlamp. As I prepare myself for a day in the forest I am full to the brim with excitement and overcome with giddiness.

Today is not an ordinary day in the field for me.

Today I woke up in Kibale National Park.

Today I will spend the day tracking chimpanzees.

Located in Western Uganda, Kibale National Park is said to have the highest diversity and density of primates in Africa and is home to 13 different species. It shouldn’t surprise anyone then that I made the two day trip, crossed a border, took a handful of overcrowded matatus, a bus full of roosters and obnoxious children, and one insane but immensely beautiful motorbike ride to get here from Kakamega. And if you know me well enough, it also shouldn’t come as a surprise that I am about to spend my vacation doing what I do everyday: following primates around the forest.

5:30 I clamber down the ladder, start to follow the path up to the main lodge and immediately wish I had paid more attention when they led us out here the previous evening.

Last night I slept in a tree house, a simple structure stuck out in the forest far from any surrounding buildings, raised up off the ground, over looking a place called the Elephant Wallow. “If you are lucky, the elephants might visit tonight,” we were informed by the man who escorted us the 800 some meters from the lodge down a narrow series of paths into the forest and our “room.” And lucky, I was. A herd of forest elephants visited the wallow in the middle of the night and I awoke to the sound of them noisily chewing on vegetation right outside my window.

Just stay to the right I keep telling myself. Eventually I pop out onto the road, not exactly where I want to be but I quickly get my bearings and head up the hill to the main lodge in search of coffee, overpriced bottled water, and an incredibly expensive packed lunch prepared by the kitchen staff.

6:00 I head down the hill to the forest guard’s headquarters and meet Ronald, my guide for the day. Back up the hill to the lodge for his packed lunch and off in search of chimps we go.

6:12 We come across elephant droppings on the trail. We are in a place that doesn’t look like it could accommodate something as massive as an elephant. How did it get in here? And more importantly, where is it now? 

6:24 We stop at a fruiting Ficus mucuso. Ronald informs me this is a favorite chimp food, but we find the tree overrun with redtail monkeys. He knows of another fig in fruit so we start off in that direction.

6:30 We stop. Ronald points. From the trail I can make out a large black figure at the top of the tree. My first wild chimpanzee. From this point on I am certain there is a permanent smile smeared across my face. We leave the trail and head up hill to the base of the tree. In front of me is an enormous fig and there are perhaps 20 chimps chowing down on the golf ball sized fruits that grow off its branches in clusters. Ronald points out a nest nearby; this is where they spent the night. Apparently, they didn’t want to waste any time searching for breakfast. We settle in, it’s evident they won’t be leaving this location for a very long time.

10:07 A female with a three-month-old infant leaves the tree and builds a day nest not far from where we are sitting. I am introduced to Kachweka (Half). She was named for a half finger on her left hand. Her and her infant settle into their nest, but clearly the little guy is more interested in what’s going on below than in resting, he keeps peaking his head over the edge to gawk at us.

11:14 Finally, they begin to leave the tree. Three meters from where I am seated, Ebilaya (Irish Potato), a 9-year-old male plops down on the hard soil. He scurries along to catch up with the others that have already descended and are moving away on all fours. Ebihimba (Beans), his mother carrying his 4-month-old sibling on her back, Ebitooke (Banana), his 13-year-old brother, and Bwana (Gentle), the highest-ranking male in this sub-group are amongst them.

They spend the next hour socializing and grooming on the ground in small parties. Ronald and I stay back on the trail to give them plenty of space, the females with young infants are visibly nervous and very aware of our presence.

12:17 Now you see them, now you don’t, the handful of individuals that were resting 25 meters in front of us have vanished. They are bulky creatures but they are also stealthy and agile and able to quietly disappear under the cover of dense undergrowth.

We circle around the immediate area and manage to locate a few feeding in a Celtis africana. The visibility is poor with shorter shrubbier trees blocking our view so Ronald and I take a seat on his spread out poncho and break into our packed lunches.

12:35 Totti, a 14-year-old male, named after the Italian footballer, is the first to come back down. A male chimpanzee can weigh 90-120 pounds, I’m not sure what Totti weighs in at but compared to the blue monkeys I’m accustomed to, he is absolutely enormous.  And here he is, sitting directly in front of me, no boundaries or barriers between us. I’m not sure what to do with myself, am I really face to face with a wild chimpanzee? I could reach out and touch him and he could do the same. For a few perfect seconds I completely lose track of myself, time stops, the forest falls away, and it’s just me and him, him and me. I am filled with awe, curiosity, exhilaration and twenty other emotions I don’t even know the words for. Seconds later, my moment with Totti is interrupted, and before we know what’s happening the females are on the ground and then everyone is gone.

12:48 This time we move straight toward the fig where we spent all morning. It looks empty, it sounds empty, and it feels empty. The place has a very different feeling than it did hours earlier, there’s no noise, no energy. A fig full of feeding primates is not a quiet place, with fruits and feces intermittently dropping from the treetop, and a variety of vocalizations radiating from the branches, it’s hard to hear anything else. But all is quiet here.

Just then and at the same time, Ronald and I see her, a lone female visibly in estrus feeding near the top. We settle in, Ronald is certain it’s only a matter of time before more arrive, they can’t stand to be away from this fig for long.

13:43 A chorus of pant hoots erupt. Pant hoots sound from every possible direction, front, back, up, down, side to side. It feels like we are completely surrounded by the vocalizations, enclosed in the middle of a chorus of calling chimpanzees. I have chills; it’s eerie and exhilarating at the same time.

The others are on their way back. Not long after and without further sound, three, four, five, ten come creeping out of the surrounding foliage and climb back up the twisted limbs of the fig where they will spend the afternoon.

16:46 Still in the fig and it’s evident many of them are about to burst. I am now sitting in a forest full of farting apes. All around us they are letting loose. Gone are the serious conversations of primate behavior Ronald and I began our day with, now we are doubled over in laughter at the sounds of primate flatulence.

18:01 They all move out of the fig at once but take off in opposite directions. We follow Kachweka with her 3-month-old in tow in the hopes that she will begin building her nest for the night. Kagasa (Enough) her 7-year-old daughter joins her and they continue feeding. Eventually, Kachweka with the infant riding ventrally moves away and Kagasa, apparently not wanting to be left behind, jumps on her mom’s back. The three of them disappear into the rapidly dimming light of the surrounding forest that way, with Kachweka carrying the two youngest of her offspring off to bed.

18:20 There is a commotion on the other side of the fig. More individuals have joined the group. The excitement is short lived and they quickly disperse to build nests and settle in for the night. Bwana is in front of us and he is bending, breaking, and weaving his nest out of twigs and foliage. He finishes and tucks right in. We leave them like that, curled up in their nests, prepared to spring up in the morning and spend another day gorging on ripe succulent figs.

Kenya-month 8 and 9

At the end of January we lost one of the older females from the TWN group. TWN is the smaller of the two groups that frequent the forest station and village, and they make almost daily stops at my house. I have been greeted many mornings by a yard full of monkeys. It’s pleasant to wake up to and one of the things I will miss most about living here.

Annie was 21 years old and she was a fixture around the village. Her and Kitty were like two little old lady monkeys, always seen meandering around together between the houses and along the road. She started acting strangely a couple weeks before her disappearance and spent more and more time away from the group, alone in the village, and occasionally with the company of Kitty. Suspicions flared, and rumors flew, this wouldn’t be the first time a monkey had been intentionally poisoned in the forest station, and by a forest guard of all people. Monkeys in the village are bothersome to people, I am sure I have mentioned before how they destroy food supplies that are left unattended. It is not so much of a challenge then to poison them; all you have to do is leave the affected food in an area both where a monkey will have access to and a place where they come searching for food, like your front stoop or the bushes beside your house. But we had nothing to go on other than the parallels between hers and the previous cases. The last time it happened one of the assistants heard the guilty guard boasting to a friend about using rat poison to off a monkey. He was quickly relocated.

Whereas a sick monkey in the forest would simply fall off our radar, hidden away by the dense vegetation, we were able to keep up with Annie and she was spotted around the village daily. Eventually, she did disappear. And then a few days later I found her body just off Mama Mutere, the main tourist trail that leads to the glade and lookout tower. I ran home for gloves, goggles, and a plastic bag and caused quite a stir in the village. Everyone knew she was sick and when they saw me they figured out very quickly what I had found. Erick assisted me and we did the best necropsy we could, but it wasn’t a pretty sight and I will just leave it at that. We buried her beneath the Ficus in front of my house. It is nice to have some closure for once, normally they just vanish and we are left to wonder.

A few weeks after that a younger female in the GN group began acting strangely similar. We would have never known Princess was sick if we hadn’t come across her stretched out, completely still one day just off the trail. We observed her for a couple hours but eventually had to move on. She fell behind the group, disappeared in the undergrowth and was never seen again. It doesn’t seem likely that she could have been poisoned, like we suspect Annie was, because this group doesn’t ransack the village, but we will never know the whole story. And I have to accept that.

Birthing season has finally come to a close. Bif gave birth to the last baby of the season a couple days ago (well, we suspect, there is the chance that someone is still pregnant and we just haven’t noticed). We had 25 births (but lost 3 so far), that’s half of the adult females in the five study groups. It seems like every other monkey is running around with a baby, and I guess every other adult female actually is.

I gave the assistants a survey for fun a while back and the worst mom award went to Pansy, hands down. She has no surviving offspring. The majority of her children never made it through infancy. She had one that lived for a few years but to no fault of her own, he was killed by a gaboon viper. Pansy gave birth this year and I finally saw her terrible parenting skills for myself. The first day she was seen with the infant I found her holding it away from her body, upside down by the tail, and looking at it like it was from outer space, while it was screaming at the top of its lungs. She did this multiple times. You can’t help but laugh at her. She seemed to get the hang of it after the first week, and her baby looked strong and healthy, but one day it was just gone. It amazes me what terrible moms they can be. Now Pansy is seen snatching up and suckling everyone else’s babies on a regular basis. And with nine infants in the group, many of whom are one month old now and frequently running around on their own, she has her pick.

Some of the monkeys are very good moms, if their baby makes one little peep, mom is there to comfort it in a snap. And they are growing quite fast, many are already wobbling around on their own legs, but for the most part they still stick with mom. I am not looking forward to the day that all of these infants are running together in a big baby gang, it will be impossible to keep track of who is who.

The month of February flew by. I met up with some German researchers and American and German volunteers in the forest and we made a few excursions to explore more of Western Kenya. The first trip was to Kitale and Saiwa Swamp National Park. Saiwa is the smallest park in Kenya and rarely visited. Unlike the majority of the parks here, vehicles are prohibited and one has to explore the park’s three-square kilometers on foot. It was created as a sanctuary for the sitatunga, a most unusual antelope with splayed and elongated hooves designed to help it successfully live in the swamp. And I think we managed to see one, but we are still not really sure.

Mount Elgon National Park followed. Elgon is termed the “loneliest park in Kenya,” and the only other group of trekkers we encountered consisted of three Germans we had met in the Kakamega Forest two days before. The mountain is an extinct volcano that straddles the Kenyan-Ugandan border and is famous for its caves and salt-mining elephants. One such cave, Kitum, is rumored to have been the location where two victims of Marburg Hemorrhagic Fever, a virus closely related to Ebola, contracted the deadly virus. We explored Kitum, Mackingeny, and Chepnyalil caves. We saw thousands of bats, avoided deadly viruses, but weren’t lucky enough to catch a glimpse of any illusive salt-mining elephants. Then we spent a day climbing to the top of Koitoboss peak at 4187 meters. We were required to hire an armed guard to accompany us through the park and ended up getting two for the price of one. On the hike one walked in front while the other brought up the back, and both carried enormous weapons. We must have resembled a procession of prisoners.

I also made a trip to visit one of the assistant’s compounds. Ernest lives 45 min by bike from the forest station. He makes that trip every single day to work and then has to follow the monkeys for 8 hours, I was exhausted after the bike trip there and it was mostly downhill! At his place I sampled matoke for the first time. Matoke is boiled green bananas, also known as plantains. For those of you who spent any time with me in Costa Rica you know how I like my plantains. Matoke was alright, but I will stick with patacones!  

15 Jan 2009

855 I leave the house after data entry; today is my Gs day again. Has it really been four days already?

910 I walk down Station Road and past Wilberforce’s house before I stop and grab my chest. Something is missing. Crap. My binocs, I can’t watch monkeys without those. I turn back and walk to the house. In the process I pass everyone I just said good morning to, they give me strange looks as I rush by, but that’s nothing new, people are always looking at me strangely. 

937 Finally out in the forest and equipped with all the necessary tools for a day of monkey chasing. The search for Gsa begins. Lately they have been impossibly hard to find. I usually end up spending the better part of my day aimlessly wandering around the forest. I search for a bit then decide I might as well head out to Gsb. 

1032 I find Gsb very quickly. The group has thankfully been free of drama for a while and I have run into forest guards patrolling the area twice since I spoke with the forester. Even so I still get a tight feeling in my chest when I someone isn’t seen, I don’t think that will ever go away. They will never be completely safe. 

NS1116 I begin a follow on Gigi and the whole group starts coming down to the ground. As the monkeys descend they nervously scan the terrain for danger but their eyes pass right over me, I pose no threat. I have never enjoyed feeling invisible more than at moments like these. I am standing amongst them but they don’t pay me any attention. Even when I get stabbed in the thigh by a thorny vine, then stung in the hand by the giant hairy caterpillar that was sitting on the vine, and start swearing loudly they continue to go about their business feeding insects and leaves near my feet. This group has been harassed so much that they fall silent and hide anytime a human being is present but here and now they are completely at ease. I can’t even begin to describe how it feels. 

1153 As I leave the group to continue my search for Gsa, I get a good look at Pody. She is huge. There will most certainly be another monkey in this group soon. 

1155 Walking down Bis Road towards Farm Road I come upon more random forest graffiti, I stop to examine it: “I guide my fellow Europeans who have settled in Kenya or those or were born in Kenya.”

1354 I have been everywhere. Well, everywhere the group isn’t anyway. Finally I hear Sawa pyow from the Cow Highway area. I run as fast as I can down Farm Road with the hopes of arriving before he is done vocalizing. No such luck so I start bushwhacking. 

Agnes' infantAgnes and her infant


1357 I nearly miss the group because they are so low and quiet. The first monkey I see is Agnes, and then I spot her newborn. He was born over a week ago but this is the first time I have had the chance to meet him; on my last Gs day this group was nowhere to be found. He is very active and adorably ugly. He has an incredibly large black unibrow; I have never seen anything like it. 

1411 I notice a commotion in a nearby vine tangle. There has to be at least six monkeys in there. I watch and wait for them to trickle out: Cybil, Ci, Andy, Chaos, Darwin, and finally Mushroom with the cause for all the excitement, another new baby. This is her first; she is now welcomed into adulthood and becomes a focal animal beginning immediately. Before I can even think about reaching in my backpack for my clipboard she runs off, trailed by a procession of juveniles all interested in the newest member of their group. 

1432 I start a follow on Puzzle. Puzzle is the one monkey in the group that isn’t at ease with my presence. If we make eye contact she runs off and disappears into the undergrowth. It is hard to follow a monkey’s every move without actually looking at them. Some days it takes four tries before I finally succeed. Today I manage it in one.Ficus sur fruits

1538 Mushroom and the baby show up again so I start a follow. It is going relatively well, everyone is feeding Ficus sur fruits, there are ten monkeys hanging onto the side of the tree feasting on clumps of ripe colorful figs...until Angel and Darwin start pestering her for a look at the baby. Mushroom clearly isn’t having it; I spend the last ten minutes of the follow chasing after her as she runs through the canopy pursued by those two. At least she is fairly easy to spot with that little guy riding along, clinging to her belly. Gsa feeding on Ficus sur

1604 Still bushwhacking and chasing after Mushroom when I finally come out onto Pac trail. At the same time a tourist comes walking down the trail. I never see tourists out here, much less without a guide; this is quite a surprise. I can only imagine how I appear, dirty, sweaty, standing in the middle of the forest with a clipboard, binocs and a watch that is beeping, directing all my attention up into the trees at nothing – nothing that he can see anyway, the monkeys are way up there, the majority of them hidden from view behind clumps of leaves. 
He approaches and stops near me. 
I begin by offering the best explanation I can, “I am following a monkey.”
He looks up into the canopy, looks back at me quizzically, and says, “there’s monkeys down there, you know,” and points down the trail. 
“Yeah, but I only study certain monkeys,” I inform him. 
He gives it one more chance and follows my gaze up to the tops of the trees, clearly doesn’t see anything and as my watch beeps again he heads off and continues walking down the trail. He is not the first and will definitely not be the last person to look at me strangely today. 

1625 It’s time to go home. As I leave the forest and hit Rondo Road there are quite a few people commuting on their bicycles. Every time I crash out of the forest onto the road I get the same reaction: they all turn and nearly fall off their bikes. It must be a quite thing to witness, the forest spitting out a young female mzungu in the middle of nowhere. I scurry across the road and can feel their eyes burning into me until I disappear on the other side and am swallowed up by the vegetation. From here I follow a small footpath to the Pump House trail that leads to the village and my house. 

Kenya-month 7

This month was marked by me declaring dead any monkey that disappeared for more than a couple days. Luckily, I was mostly wrong.

Kool wasn’t seen for 10 days. She’s a juvenile in Tws, the largest of the groups with 48 individuals, if the group stays in the forest it is hard to see them all, but after ten days of not being seen I declared her dead. The next day she showed up and of course, has been seen everyday since.

Half of Gsb went missing, three for only one day and Milo for two, but I don’t have the highest of hopes when it comes to this group. Once again, I am very happy to report that I was wrong. They have managed to hold on against the odds. I talked to the forester and showed him the evidence of poaching I found, he acted concerned but I am afraid nothing will actually be done and the monkeys and us are on our own still. He did seem really concerned when I told him pine and cypress were being illegally cut down nearly everyday, maybe that will force him to take some action – trees equal money.

Lindy unfortunately is gone. This I was expecting and it was really only a matter of time. Her mother, Lily, went missing back in September. Lindy was the smallest of the 2007 infants. Amani and Darwin, her age mates in the group, are still suckling occasionally and have grown quite a lot. Lindy was just half their size.

But with death comes new life: On Christmas day I was on baby patrol and checked on as many of the groups as I could. The assistants all had the day off so I was the only one out. By mid-morning I was on my second group and found the first infant of the season. Splash is now a second time mother. Her first born, Speedo, is two and was very interested in her new sibling. We don’t name the infants until they have reached one year of age but the assistants have already come up with a great one, Shikuku. It means ‘a great day’ in Luo and is typically used in reference to Christmas. I was leaning more towards Snorkel to go with the theme but under the circumstances...

In the last week there have been two more births. And more still to come.

Unfortunately the survival rate for infants is quite low. Last year there were 18 births but only 11 have lived to see their first birthday and receive names: Aqua, Chaos, Kwanza, Quest, Sema, Dragon, Demo, Mali, Pizza, Shimo, and Rein. I submitted the names Aqua and Chaos, but personally I think the best name of all is Shimo. It means latrine in Swahili. Shimo fell down a latrine hole during his first months of life while his mother was feeding on soil around the outhouse. The assistants acted fast with a plastic bag on a stick and brought the infant up safely where Spike, the careless mother, snatched up her poop covered baby and ran away.

Blue monkeys can be terrible mothers. I see them slapping and hitting their babies, we even saw Kamile open mouth threat her own child, and they drop the newborns to the ground quite often. Tux did just the other day. When the infants are first off on their own, trying out their new feet, they are still tiny and look identical. When they scream one would expect their mother to come running to comfort them or save them from danger, but I have stood below a wailing infant waiting for the mother to come with the hopes of identifying the tot and many times she just doesn’t show. As they become more independent, the poor infants run a marathon to catch up to mom with the hopes of nursing and she just casually walks away, an hour later the little guy has finally caught up again but mom runs off without giving them even the slightest bit of recognition. It is a miracle that any of them reach adulthood.

I have been hearing drumming in the forest behind my house lately. Drumming all the time. I wasn’t sure what to make of it, at first it coincided with the New Year and I figured people were just celebrating but then it carried on into the next week and still continues.

There is a large glade surrounded by forest on all sides and on one of the edges there is a lookout tower, it is unfinished but construction has ceased and I don’t think it will ever get any higher than it is now. Sometimes on my off days I go up there.

January 6^th I walk down Mama Mutere trail and as I am approaching the glade I began to hear the drumming, and as I leave the forest cover the drumming gets louder. From the lookout tower I see birds flying and swooping down on the north side of the glade but not much else – the one time I am out in the forest without my binoculars and I really want them. From my current position I can hear people singing along with the drumming, I can’t actually see them but can tell they aren’t far, probably just inside the trees on the edge of the glade. About an hour later, Winstone, one of the guides, with two visitors on a tour of the forest climbs up to the top of the lookout tower. He tells me they are drumming for termites. That’s it? Here I thought they were performing some important ritual. He inquires if his companions care to go out there to see the termites coming out and I ask to join.

Five young boys are seated on what used to be a termite mound; they have completely flattened it and have directed tunnels that were once underground into buckets to collect the termites. The vibrations from drumming are supposed to draw them out; the singing I gather is simply to entertain the boys as they drum. And it works, there are winged termites everywhere, all of the buckets are full, and the few that have managed to escape and fly away are becoming any easy meal for the numerous black kites swooping overhead. Winstone takes a handful from one of the buckets and shoves them in his mouth. Then all the boys do it and there are wings stuck to their checks. Next one of the tourists tries it. Then they all turn and look at me. How could I say no? Winstone had just told the tourists that I was one of them now, a Kenyan, after they asked how long I was here for, and all the Kenyans had just enjoyed a tasty termite snack. So I pick up one squirming termite and eat it. After I got over the fact that it was still alive it really wasn’t so bad, it tasted kind of nutty.