Archive for April, 2011

Team Finds Lots of Dung, Heads For Civilization

Wednesday, April 27th, 2011

We were recovering at our Obenge base camp when we heard the strange screams. “Pardon Papa! Pardon Papa!” over and over again, with a sound like bamboo being chopped down prompting each yell. Effrin, a local guide, pointed to the corner of camp and explained in half French, half English that Major Guy was whipping a 16-year-old boy for raping an 11-year-old girl earlier that day in the village. It was a wakeup call, just in case we needed one—we were still in Congo, where you should always expect anything.

Trip and I returned to camp the previous day empty handed after a week of bushwhacking through the jungle searching for elephants. The only trace of “lox”—the locals’ term for forest elephants—that we’d seen was a pile of bones left behind by poachers some years ago. Luckily one of the other teams had better luck, and had collected the first five elephant scat samples of the project. As we relaxed at camp after Major Guy flogged the rapist, news came in via satellite phone that five more samples had been collected near the village of Katopa in the northern part of the TL2 wilderness. With samples from the northern and central parts of the area, it was time for us to head south. In the meantime, a team would head much deeper into the central part of the wilderness and continue searching for elephants. Ultimately, we hope to end up with scat samples from as wide an area as possible to ensure a comprehensive representation of elephant genetics. We also hoped to actually do some scat collecting ourselves.

From Obenge, we piled into the pirogue and spent three days motoring 200 kilometers downstream with John Hart, Major Guy, his three heavily armed men, and the captured rapist to the village of Opala. There, the prisoner was escorted to jail while Trip and I jumped on motorbikes to head back into the forest in search of elephants. We’d been in Congo for four weeks, and the end of our expedition was quickly approaching. Every day for the rest of the trip was accounted for—the clock was ticking for us to round off our collections and start the long trip out of the wilderness.

With a local village chief, an incredible wildlife tracker, and a local guide, we gathered supplies in the village of Lelende Monene and set off on foot into the jungle. Elephants were definitely nearby—recently they had been caught coming to the villagers’ gardens to munch on their manioc greens and scare unsuspecting farmers. This type of human-elephant conflict is one of the greatest threats to the survival of the species, along with poaching and habitat loss. Fortunately, our crew of locals didn’t seem too upset with the resident “lox” yet, and excitedly led us on our trek to find scat.
It took us less than a day of searching to find the first elephant tracks—indentations in the forest floor the size of motorcycle rims amidst swaths of flattened vegetation. “Crot ici!” the chief yells in French. He finally perks up as he finds the first pile of elephant dung. Excitedly, Trip and I donned latex gloves, filled a vial with small pinches of dung, and labeled it with GPS coordinates. With the adventure nearly over, we’d finally gotten a chance to do some collecting ourselves.

For the next four days we navigated from elephant track to elephant track, looking for the freshest piles of dung we could find. Fortunately we found too much scat, and began passing over samples. Some was too old to contain genetic information, some too close together to be from different individual elephants or family groups. In all, our crew collected six viable samples during the 75 kilometer trek, some as fresh as the same day the elephants dropped them. Trip and I collected four samples ourselves, and our guide gloved-up to collect two. As close to elephants as we were, we never saw one. It seems that the 10 percent of elephants left unpoached in this area aren’t interested in human contact.
With our collections complete, the only thing standing between us and civilization was “The Prophet,” the cross-burning poacher/bandit that had been terrorizing the region for weeks. To get back to Kisingani we’d have to travel through his territory. Then hope that the cholera outbreak in Kisingani had gotten better instead of worse while we were in the bush.

We never did see The Prophet during the two-day, 250-kilometer motorbike ride back to civilization. And fortunately, the local government decided that quarantine was the best action for cholera and the outbreak was contained. 

There’s still one looming question though—how are we going to get all of these samples out of the country and back to Seattle? And even more than that, how are all of the samples being collected by teams still in the field going to get out? It sounds like our best bet may be a Wildlife Conservation Society agent in Goma named Deo. He’s gotten samples to Sam Wasser from Congo before, but the process is complicated and uncertain. All the paperwork is in order to get them into the U.S., but carrying them past the corrupt Congolese boarder guards into Rwanda for our flight is a risk we’re hoping that we don’t have to take. There’s no way that Trip and I can smuggle this many samples wrapped in stinky socks in our backpacks, so were hoping that Deo will be able to help us ship them to the U.S. instead. We’re flying to Goma tomorrow, so well know soon enough. We’ll be sure to check back in and let you know how it went. Stay tuned to @amaser on Twitter for all the latest news.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in africa, conservation, Project Updates | No Comments »

Poachers Caught

Wednesday, April 6th, 2011

There was a shootout. Andy and I weren’t there, but we learned through satellite text messages that Colonel Gui and his soldiers from the Congolese army ran into the bandits somewhere between Kisangani and Obenge. They were likely the brothers of Colonel Toms, a convicted war criminal and poacher,. A gunfight ensued. One poacher was injured and two others were apprehended. Colonel Gui, with his prisoners in tow, is still coming to Obenge to route out poachers in the region. We should see them tomorrow.

I got the news during a four-day sampling hike through TL2 with Andy and the scientist John Hart. But let me back up. After Kisangani, which is where I last blogged, we flew to Kindu, a town on the border of the 25,000 square mile jungle known as TL2. It’s the region Elephant Ivory Project-lead Samuel Wasser wants elephant dung samples from most (read the previous posts to understand why). From Kindu, the three of us spent two days on the back of motorbikes, riding dirt paths notched into the jungle and savannah. These paths are arteries out of the bush. We saw locals pushing bicycles loaded with everything from pineapples to bush meat in the form of monkeys and okapi, a striped cousin of the giraffe. At the Lomami River, we loaded into motorized pirogues for a supposed two-day trip north to Obenge, the Hart‚Äôs research camp in the northern part of the proposed Lomami National Park. John stopped at every riverside village‚Äîabout a dozen–to explain what the national park meant for the locals.

“When the park is made official, you will only be able to hunt on the west side of the river,” he told them. Most people seemed okay with the news. But at one fishing camp, by a hippo pool John said would be one of the park’s main attractions, we were met with a different reaction.

In a cage made with saplings there were 80 parrots; a monkey head was grilling over a fire nearby. The birds, trapped in a wildlife reserve, were to be sold illegally on the exotic bird market. After hours of heated discussion with the lead trapper, a man with a CITES permit authorizing live collections in a different region of Congo (not the reserve), John called Congo’s wildlife management agency. They’re sending agents to the camp to shut down the operation.

The tragic news is the poachers had already spooked the hippos out of their pool, and the animals are unlikely to return anytime soon. And as we left the pool, we saw a lone hippo swimming in the middle of the river.

‚ÄúHe‚Äôs got to swim 50 miles upstream to find more suitable habitat,‚Äù John said. ‚ÄúThat’s a long shot.‚Äù

We made it to Obenge five days ago. It’s a 200-person village so remote the buildings are built entirely from bush materials. The walls are mud, the roofs thatch, and the stoves open fires. Most people hunt and fish for a living but 15 locals work for the Harts as scientific assistants and laborers. John dedicated all of them to helping the Elephant Ivory Project.

After an evening relaxing and eating fish and rice around smoky fires, we woke early to head into the bush in search of elephants. John split the crew. He sent six people to the west to sample elephant dung while Andy, John and I sampled along the river. For four days, we bushwhacked on paths that John’s team created two years ago. They had deteriorated into thorny tunnels through the bush and with 60 pound packs, even though the terrain is flat, it took us all day to hike just 10 kilometers. There are ungodly numbers of bees and ants in the Congolese jungle. One night, so many fire ants raided our camp we couldn‚Äôt leave our tents to pee‚Äîdon‚Äôt ask what we did. We saw a horned viper and heard the call of a new species of monkey, the Lesula, which the Hart‚Äôs identified two years ago. But we saw no elephants. John explained why at a clearing created by foraging elephants. It was beginning to grow back.

 

John, who hiked Andy and I into exhaustion.

 

 

“The amount of vegetation growing in around the edges tells me it has been at least a decade since elephants have passed through here,” John said. “Part of that’s because of poaching, but part of it’s because TL2 is the size of West Virginia. Elephants could be anywhere.”

We returned to Obenge last night, and though comforted by hot plate of rice and beans, we couldn’t help feeling a little defeated and a lot exhausted. We’d been in Congo for three weeks and didn’t have a single sample to show for it. There is some good news though. That night, the second team returned to camp with five vials of dung. They’d headed farther in the jungle and located elephants. It’s a relief. We’re taking tomorrow off to rest. The next stage of the expedition depends largely on the situation with Colonel Gui and his prisoners. We’ll fill you in on that story, and the story of Moses the cross-burner poacher, when John returns to Kisangani at the end of the week. Stay tuned by following us on twitter @EPFilmsTV and @amaser. Pictures from the expedition and an account from Andy coming early next week.

–Trip Jennings and Kyle Dickman

Thanks very much to Terese Hart and the Bonobo in Congo Project for the photos.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »