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.