Updates from Africa: Rwanda

As of 2010, there were estimated to be 800 mountain gorillas remaining worldwide. These charismatic heavyweight vegetarians are completely contained within the mountainous regions of three African nations: Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda. Rwanda, a country the size of the state of Maryland, houses one-third of the world's remaining mountain gorillas in its highly frequented, high-altitude, Parc National des Volcans. These 200 some gorillas are the poster child for Rwandan tourism and generate nearly 90% of the small country's revenue for that industry. There are seven habituated family groups available for public viewing and others that are strictly scientific study groups. Each day eight permits are available per group for a total of 56 possible permits with the potential to bring in $28,000 per day in permit fees alone.

We were assigned to the Amahura group and the day after Christmas we trekked up into the misty Virunga range to meet 16 of Rwanda's famous mountain dwelling apes. We ducked and dove through a bamboo forest, made our way up a muddy trail and traversed a nettle infested mountainside for four hours before finding our group at a rest spot. Before we knew it we were in the center of the group and there were gorillas in every direction. With mud stained clothing, nettle stung skin and racing heartbeats from the high elevation hike and excitement, we watched them. And they watched us back with little concern, intense brown eyes and dark black faces, all the while rolling through the nettles and chewing on wild celery stalks. A six month old baby bored with his food rolled on his back with his feet in the air. Perhaps on purpose, a silverback turned his back to us as we took pictures. A
juvenile reached out and touched one of the trackers. A blackback awoke from his nap in the sun and yawned in our faces. It was amazing and so surreal that I'm still not convinced it wasn't just a dream.

After our great ape encounter we headed southwest to Parc National de Nyungwe for a few days. Nyungwe is home to 13 species of primates, including another great ape, our closest living relative, the chimpanzee. Unfortunately, the forest is so dense and vast that we only encountered four: blue monkeys, L'Hoest's monkeys, vervets, and olive baboons. Nonetheless, it was great to get out and hike after days of sitting in safari vehicles, planes and buses. And hike we did. Nyungwe, one of the oldest remaining intact African forests, is a montane rainforest so there are no flat trails, only hills to climb. Walking sticks are a necessity for successfully descending and then ascending the steep slippery slopes.

Rwanda, like many other countries in the region, has a dark past. The genocide in 1994 touched everyone and every person has an incredible and horrifying story to tell. As a whole, Rwanda has healed amazingly well and the outlook for the future is very optimistic. We met the most genuine, helpful people everywhere we went and were very impressed by Rwanda in general. Our visit was too short and went by too fast. I cannot wait to return to the land of 1000 hills again and climb a few more.

Yesterday afternoon we were treated to an amazing view of Mount Kilimanjaro. As I watched it pass by my plane window in a matter of seconds I had flashbacks of the seven day excursion my mom and I made up it's slopes over two years ago.

Last night Jake and I arrived in Zanzibar and were greeted with a wave of hot muggy air followed by a salty breeze off the Indian Ocean. Here we will reconvene with 6 friends, all making their way from Rwanda on different flights at different times. Right off the coast of mainland Tanzania we will ring in the New Year with spices, Swahili culture, and snorkeling.

Happy New Year's from Zanzibar,
Corey & Jake

Updates from Africa: Kenya

It's amazing how after a period of time you easily forget the negative and only the positive remains. I was so excited to return that I forgot just how long and arduous the journey is to Kakamega. Unknown to us, Jake, Meaghan and myself arrived in Kenya just in time for a long holiday weekend and we weren't the only ones trying to spend it in Western Kenya. All of the direct buses were booked for days so our best option was to take a "direct matatu" to Kisumu and transfer from there. I told Jake and Meaghan they needed to experience a terrible mini-van matatu ride in order for their Kenyan adventure to be complete. We were able to check that off the list right away. A sleepy driver trying to keep herself awake by chatting on her cell phone, shoveling crisps into her face and chucking her trash out the window, a multitude of wrong turns, an off-roading adventure, and a river fording experience completed that requirement.

Approximately 12 hours after leaving our hotel in Nairobi we arrived in the calm inviting shade of the Kakamega Forest. It didn't hit me until just then, when we drove down Station Road and I spotted Erick, one of the field assistants, that I was back. How I can feel so completely at home in the middle of a foreign country so different from my own, where clearly I am an outsider is hard to explain to anyone who hasn't experienced it for themselves. The sounds of tinkerbirds and hornbills, the smells of wet earth fresh from the rain and cooking fires used for preparing chapati, plus the sights of familiar blue monkeys crashing through the trees brought me right right back to where I left off in August of 2009. Even though I only spent 15 months of my life here, it seems I left a lasting impression. I may have physically left the forest but something of myself remained here; before leaving my neighbor and his wife welcomed a baby boy into their lives and named him after me. As we arrived I could hear my own name being shouted through the village as they called baby Corey home.

Between the two of us, Jake and I carried over 80 pounds of donations for the Little Prinz Orphanage. Sabina and staff were overwhelmed and so grateful for the shoes, clothing, and toothbrushes, plus the $700 we deposited into their account. Thank-you to everyone for your support and donations. They are off to a great start and will do amazing things to help the communities around them. I have many pictures to share.

One of the highlights of our time in Kakamega was the neighbor we had and the work he was doing. Hans is a professor of ornithology at a university in Germany working on a long term study of the bird species in the forest. While we were there he was mist netting, catching and banding birds. Six, sometimes eight times a day Hans and his field assistant, Evans, would return from the forest with small pillow cases stuffed with birds to process and band on their front porch. Jake said it was like Christmas every time they came back with presents of new and exotic birds for him to admire.

While Jake and Meaghan were getting their bird fix I was putting in my time with the monkeys. Many of the monkeys I once knew are gone but many more remain. I recognized the majority of them and was greeted by many of my favorites and old friends like Dude, Quack, Buai, and Desdemona. It was nice just to hang out, drink coffee on the porch with monkeys in the yard, take a tour with Wilberforce, undoubtably the best guide in the forest, and hike the trails around the forest station at my leisure. I never had the free time when I was there last time.

We spent nine fantastic refreshing days in Kakamega visiting with old friends, both human and non-human primates, and making new ones. It was hard to leave Kakamega a second time but I can almost hear my name radiating through the village right now as someone calls Baby Corey home for Christmas dinner. 

Post Kakamega we met up with four friends from Tucson in Kisumu. They had spent the previous week exploring Uganda. We left the following morning to meet 30 other familiar faces in the Masai Mara for what would be the most beautiful and memorable wedding any of us may ever experience. Our dear friends from Tucson, Mich and Kate, were married amongst family, friends, lions and elephants overlooking the Mara River. The first to pronounce them husband and wife was in fact a hippo as he let out a loud grunt during the service. 

And the wedding activities aren't over yet. Last night a group of 20 wedding attendees arrived in Kigali, Rwanda. We awoke this Christmas morning in the land of 1000 hills and will travel to Parc des Volcans this afternoon. Tomorrow morning we will embark on an adventure I have dreamed about my entire life, as many of you likely have as well. We will come face to face with the mighty mystical mountain gorilla on the anniversary of Dian Fossey's death, the women who died trying to ensure their existence.

Merry Christmas from Rwanda,
Corey and Jake

Travels in Borneo

July 17, 2011

According to the rain gauge, there has been more than a meter and a half of rain in the last 12 hours. It rained off and on all night. When the deafening sounds of the rainstorm on the tile roof quieted they were replaced by frogs bleating like sheep in surround sound. It sounded like they were tucked away in every corner of the house. We were supposed to be on the boat by 5:30 this morning but the rain has kept us indoors. It’s been raining off and on for the past four days and this is supposed to be the dry season!

Jake and I are visiting my friend Katie in Indonesian Borneo(or Kalimantan Barat) for a few weeks.  Katie has been here since last October and has learned the local language, Bahasa Indonesian, quite quickly, which is necessary because not many people speak English. (We made sure to bring gifts of cheese and chocolate to pay for her translator fees…) She’s here studying the proboscis monkeys – orange pot-bellied monkeys with protruding noses that are endemic to Borneo’s riverine systems. Not much is known about the species in general, much less about the population here in Kalimantan Barat. Katie lives with a local family in the small coastal town of Tolak. It’s not the easiest of places to reach from the Southwestern US. We took four flights spread out over a day and a half to reach Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital located on the island of Java. From there we flew to the island of Borneo, spent the night Pontianak (Kalimantan Barat’s largest city), took an hour long flight to Ketapang, and finally jumped on a bus for an hour before arriving at the house three days after we left our own back in Tucson. From here camp is still another 18 km up the Sungai Tolak (Sungai means river in Bahasa) by long boat.

“Camp Katie” is not much more than a small cleared area on the river that Katie and her two local assistants claimed for themselves. There are no permanent structures other than a wooden table, bench and a swing. There is a lot of logging traffic on the river and multiple small encampments perched along its banks. It has been disheartening and hard to escape the constant sounds of chainsaws creating destruction in the surrounding forest. We spent our first four days up at “Camp Katie” and were treated to some of Borneo’s many treasures as well as hot and dry weather. We had some great views of many of the river’s primate species, including an acrobatic water show starring a rather large group of proboscis monkeys. We stopped to watch a group along the river and quickly realized there were monkeys on both sides of the water. Not before long a few daring monkeys started diving out of trees into the river below and swimming to the other side. The most timid of the group slunk in at the shore and soon there was a steady stream of monkeys with their long noses above the water, swimming in a line to the other side. It was amazing!

We’ve been looking forward to a glimpse of Asia’s only great ape, the orangutan. Appropriately enough, orangutan means man of the forest in Bahasa. Katie doesn’t see them on a regular basis but she has, and they are here so we have been continuously scanning the trees for a large orange man of the forest. Our third day on the river we parked the boat and went for a walk on a logging trail in the forest. We lost track of Jake early on because he was busily snapping photos of every bird he came across. Katie and I decided to stop and wait for him to catch up. Not far from where we were standing something fell from the tree tops. Then something else fell in the same place. It wasn’t a group of monkeys; they make more noise and shake the foliage when they jump around. This thing wasn’t moving much but there was definitely something up there. We looked at each other without saying anything, I’m sure we were both thinking the same thing, and scrambled around the undergrowth for a better vantage point. And there he was, a giant flanged male orangutan high in a tree feeding on stinky durian fruit. Jake caught up with us and we all watched the orangutan feed for quite some time. Orangutans have no natural predators so it wasn’t surprising that he didn’t seem bothered by our presence in the least.

Jake has been hard at work identifying and recording every species of bird he can and has come up with a sizeable list for Katie’s site. I’ve been busy pointing out and counting monkeys as we cruise down the river in the long boat. We are hoping Katie hires us in the future as assistants…

 Katie took a break from work and we went north to Gunung Palung National Park for a three day expedition. We saw three more orangutans from our camp, a bunch of singing gibbons, radiant red-leaf monkeys, huge hornbills, glowing mushrooms, pygmy squirrels you could put in a coin purse, blood loving leaches, and monstrous insects. Camp was not what we were lead to believe it would be, Jake ended up sleeping on the floor by the French tourists, Katie and I shared a plywood platform, and the hike in and out was a little crazy with our packs. We are still kicking ourselves for not bringing the sleeping pads but really glad we had mosquito nets. Regardless, for what we saw, it was worth it. We spent our last night of Katie’s vacation down in Ketapang running errands, most importantly finding some cash as we nearly ran out of money and couldn’t find a working ATM near the park. Plus we wanted to eat extravagant foods like ice cream and burgers washed down with beer, a welcome break from the rice, veggies, and tempe we’ve been eating three times a day for the past couple weeks.

We are going to spend four more days in the field with Katie…if it ever stops raining. Then we are headed to Lombok and Bali to experience a very different side of Indonesia.

All the best from Borneo,

Corey and Jake

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!