Mountain Magic...

It’s a bit of a cliché to say that gazing into the eyes of a wild gorilla, at close range, is a wildlife experience like no other.  But a good cliché works for a reason..... I'm afraid you’re going to have to bear with me on this one and forgive me also, if I can’t help chucking in a few superlatives along the way.  These animals are impressive and awe-inspiring.

Part of their mystique, of course, is that they’re just so rare: there are only seven hundred or so Mountain Gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei ) left in the wild and they cling to a precarious existence on just two small patches of prime real estate a few kilometres apart - the Virunga Mountains and the Bwindi massif, along the borders of Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

It doesn’t help that this enormously fertile, well-watered corner of Africa supports a huge human population, all desperate for access to more farmland; nor that the volcano range that supports the rich forest is still active - the last erruption was only a handful of years ago, when the main street of Goma was submerged in meters of lava, covering cars, trucks, shop fronts and destroying livlihoods; nor that it lies at the epicentre of a region that has frequently been shaken by episodes of violence of an almost unimaginable savagery over the last few decades.  Think Idi Amin, the Rwanda genocide, the decades long ongoing conflict in the DRC… all in all, it’s a wonder that any gorillas have managed to survive at all.

But survive they miraculously have, and to spend a precious hour with these gentle giants, munching peacefully on wild celery and other forest delicacies, leaves you with a feeling that all is somehow well with the world.  Not forgetting the periodic reminders of the pitfalls of a high fibre diet, which affects the big apes as much as it does us.

Let’s go back to those eyes for a minute.  A gorilla’s eyes are a deep, warm brown, hinting at ancient knowledge and infinite patience.  They have no problem with staring straight back at you, as if curious about you and your place in their world.  That is the moment you experience the frisson of subliminal connection that makes your time with the gorillas so precious and unique.

They have an extraordinary presence.  It is something to do with their size, their impressive muscles together with an aura of serene gentleness.

Time spent with gorillas is utterly unlike chimp viewing.  Due to their social structure, omnivorous diet and a bunch of other factors, chimps are entertaining but unpredictable animals, capable of violent displays, intense play, tool-making techniques, cooperative hunting,  political intrigue worthy of a medieval court and an awful lot of noise. An hour with them can leave your ears ringing, your heat pumping and a crick in the neck. While gorillas feel … benign.  Don’t mess with their babies and be respectful of a silverback, obviously,  but as long as you don’t cross these boundaries, a gorilla encounter is a peaceable affair. If that makes it sound like a let-down in comaprison, let me assure you it is not.

I could go on gushing for ages in the same vein, but I should probably stop here.  Let me finish with a few scene-setters to give you a taste of what that day felt like.

The hike to the forest from the lodge – holy macaroni, is this a good idea??  A steep 2000 foot descent to the forest edge far below, with the knowledge that what goes down must, inevitably, and with much puffing and sweating, come up again.  (It turns out to be surprisingly easy – our guide does a great job of setting an easy pace).

An immature animal, playing in a tree: he considers us with such a serious, owlish expression, that it is difficult not to laugh.  I feel he would be offended though.  He plays just as seriously, turning a stately somersault and then looking around, to see who noticed, as if he is taking part in a scientific study of play.

A silverback, half-hidden among the leaves, his eyes in shadow – what is he thinking?  We can just make out his vast bulk through the foliage but the physical sense of his presence is overwhelming.

The family all bedded down for a late-morning snooze in a forest clearing.

The guide calls time, and we turn and start the homeward trudge.  Just then, a silverback comes out onto the trail (‘Everybody off the trail, let him pass!') and he pauses for a long moment, before knuckling his way off into the forest, allowing us a last unscripted look at the monarch of this magical forest.

*****

 A sad footnote to this post concerns the Batwa (singular: Mutwa) Pygmies.  The Batwa are the original inhabitants of the Central African forests and, for possibly half a million years before the coming of the Bantu peoples and then the white man, lived in relative harmony with their surrounds.  Over the last 70-80 years, however, they have become more and more marginalised in Uganda, as forests have been steadily cut down to make way for agriculture and human expansion.  In 1991, the Mgahinga and Bwindi National Parks were gazetted, as part of a trans-national effort to protect the remaining Mountain Gorillas.  One of the stipulations of international donors was that everyone living within the parks should be evicted, at a stroke reducing the Batwa to squatters on their ancestral land, their traditional hunter / gatherer way of life criminalised.  A classic example of how well-intentioned conservation can destroy as much as it can save, if the wider eco-picture is not always in the forefront of policy making.  The government has set aside a parcel of land for the community near Bwindi. Unbelieveably, this is a mere 35 acres all told.  Here, they are trying to integrate into modern Ugandan life; the Mutwa guide tells how they are growing crops, building modern huts with tin roofs and sending their kids to school.  They earn revenue from ‘cultural visits’ like ours. The women and children put on a dance and demonstrate skills like lighting a fire with fire sticks.  It all sounds rather wonderful and yet feels merely worthy and slightly dispiriting.  I can’t help wondering how long this community will continue in any real sense – their forest way of life was central to their existence and now they are cut off from that.  Like aboriginal peoples everywhere, the Batwa struggle to integrate: levels of alcoholism and drug abuse are rampant and they scrape a living working for a pittance on the farms of others.

Maybe this whole process is inevitable: the displacement of the world’s original inhabitants, our earliest common ancestors, by technologically-superior peoples.  But it grates - in this time of environmental hand-wringing, the people with the lightest ecological footprint are the ones who are most thoroughly disenfranchised.

Silale Swamp, Tarangire and the Northern Serengeti

Silale has been providing great elephant viewing of late. It's gorgeous - a vivid, emerald swathe in the monochrome world of the dry, sepia season. In the heat of the midday sun, herds of elephant head to the water to drink and cool off. If you time it right, you can get amazingly close views.

We managed it perfectly a couple of weeks ago, waiting patiently as a herd moved down. They stopped, indecisive when they saw us but then moved on, reassured - a swirl of huge, grey bodies around the car, almost touching us, enfolding our small group in their herd. A cathedral moment for all of us.

Yesterday, we were in the same situation but with a totally different outcome. As soon as the herd spotted us, the elephants milled around in agitation, heads and tails up and ears held out. The matriarch ran at us for a few paces, shook her great head and trumpeted her displeasure. Obviously, this herd has had bad experiences with people and cars. What a terrific display though!

Lots of action on the Mara River in the northern Serengeti as well, with many crossings going both ways. (Why some pundits still think of the Migration as a geographically precise, circular motion, only crossing into Kenya between Aug and Sept and crossing back in October and November, I do not know).

We watched with sick fascination as a large croc cruised up to the swimming animals, nuzzled a couple speculatively before grabbing one. It held tight for 20 minutes or so, until the struggling stopped.....and then just opened its fearsome jaws and let it go. The carcass drifted slowly down with the current - what a waste! I imagine the croc was full after weeks of fresh wildebeest served up on a watery platter at each crossing but could not resist the sight of all that easy meat. Someone will have reaped the benefits of this windfall further downstream.

Tanzanian Tit bits

Jules watched a fascinating spectacle recently - in the kitchen garden. While collecting some lunch salad, she noticed lots of unusual slugs balanced right on the ends of leaves and branches of the garden. Each large bunch of parsley and rocket had about 12 to 15 large, flat, brown slugs with a white stripe down their backs. We had never seen these slugs before, being much more used to the grey, slimy, unappetizing ones that haunt any vegetable patch. Then she realised that the whole garden was seething with literally hundreds of thousands of siafu - soldier ants. The slugs were making a desperate attempt to escape these voracious predators, but in vain. The ants swarmed all over them and pulled them down to the ground and killed them, feeding on the corpses. Jules was fortunately more successful at evading the little blighters.

The Siafu carried on their bonanza for about 24 hours and sure enough, we had no slug problem after that – nor termite problem, nor aphid problem. A somewhat violent, but effective, natural pest control.


Siafu live in colonies of millions. They are so efficient at what they do that they often have to move the colony, having eaten or displaced all suitable prey in the vicinity.

On a different scale, the ellies have been very much around of late. The locals say its because the forest up higher is full of siafu on the move, and elephant hate being bitten in the trunk by them, so they move down to the drier areas. I suspect the reason is actually more prosaic - the maize crops are ripe in the fields. Too much temptation. One of our bigger acacias is now in permanent horizontal mode as a direct result.
However, it is true that elephant do not like getting the ants on the delicate end of their trunk. Research just published recently suggested that the ants set off in agressive self defense and  focus in on the mucus at the end of the trunk.....and then bite.

Safari time!

July is a great time to be in the Selous.  After the rains, the landscape is still pleasantly green and the wildlife is looking fat and happy.  And, amazingly, it is cool!  I slept under a blanket and almost needed another.

This is walking weather and we were rewarded with fascinating sightings: a freshly-disembowelled monitor lizard, stashed under a bush; and we watched as a young bull elephant shook a Desert Date, the tasty fruit raining down around him, bouncing off his back.  He then collected the bounty, sweeping up the pickings with deft strokes of his trunk.  A great tool, the trunk – you can tear down a tree, pick up an acacia pod, squirt water into your mouth, detect faint scents or reassure a baby.  Everyone should have one.

Over at Tagalala, we found a pride of lion on the hunt.  They were led by a rangy, battle-scarred old female who was absolutely intent on finding breakfast.  The others were looking sleeker and less committed.  They stalked a sounder of warthogs who got wind of them and fled and then startled some impala rams, with similar results, before settling on a bluff overlooking a well-trodden game trail leading to the lake.  There we left them – bon appétit.

***

Tarangire:  this is the time of year when migrants make their way back into the park from the calving grounds.   We have had decent rains this year so Silale Swamp was still wet and green, criss-crossed by herds of peacefully munching elephant & buffalo.  Many of the seasonal pans still hold water so there’s little pressure, as yet, for game to congregate along the river and at Minyonyo.  Plenty of elephant as usual, entertaining us with their antics, playing in the water.

We had a beautiful sighting of honeymooning leopards in a sausage tree.  The female was very relaxed, but the male glared balefully, despite the distance (we must have been 100 m away) and soon flowed down from his perch.  She followed and we soon heard the snarling and yowling of big cats mating.

Further on, we found a juvenile Martial Eagle, feeding on what appeared to be a steenbok, his crop full to bursting.  An adult bird (presumably a parent?) sat in a tree nearby.

***

The Serengeti is in flames.

It’s always like this in the early dry season – fires set by TANAPA to burn off the dry, fibrous grass and promote sweet new growth.  Swirling flames and smoke, flocks of birds patrolling the leading edge to cash in on insects fleeing the holocaust.  Antelope feed nonchalantly nearby, then pick their way through the flames, apparently to eat fresh ash – a source of minerals in concentrated form maybe?

The subject of controlled burning always causes heated debate (excuse the pun).  There is a whole spectrum of opinion, from ‘if you see grass – burn it’ through to ‘burning is always wrong.’   I feel that fire is an vital feature of natural systems in Africa but a little goes a long way.

We are in north Serengeti, and it is interesting that across the border, in the Maasai Mara, KWS (the Kenyan version of TANAPA) has a no-burn policy.  The Kenyans watch in bewilderment each year as the fires start on our side.

You hear all kinds of claims: the loss of grazing bulk hastens the departure of the migrant herds; lack of grass cover reduces the soil’s ability to retain water; frequent burning actually changes the character of the vegetation, reducing bushland to more open grassland; small creatures are incinerated (rodents, ground nesting birds, reptiles and non-flying insects); and other larger animals that depend on these are compromised – think of a serval hunting mice in tall grass.  I would love to see a comparative study looking at 2 similar areas: one in Serengeti and one in a neighbouring (unburnt) part of the Mara, to see if there are differences in biodiversity.

What I find odd is that the grass doesn’t last long anyway, once the voracious herds arrive.   Look at the Mara in September – the grass has been flattened or eaten, so the result is pretty much the same but one involves quite a lot of human interferance and trauma.

You will probably have gathered that I am not a huge fan of ‘controlled burning’…

We saw excellent game up here: wildebeest crossing the Mara River, which is still running high; huge crocs, mouths agape as they basked on a sandbank; a pride of lion on the river bank, watching in fascination as a swollen wildebeest carcass turned slowly in the current while a croc nuzzled lovingly at it, clearly too full to eat but nonetheless reluctant to let it go.

And there's a certain young lady who knows a whole lot of stuff about a whole lot of stuff.  She knows what a praying mantis egg mass looks like; what governs the sex of crocodile hatchlings; what 'cuckoo spit' is; and how to catch lizards, without their losing their tails.

And she is only 6.  I’m going to have to watch out – it looks like we have a guide in the making and I’m not sure I need the competition!

On Jungles...

I live in Usa; I recently visited the USA.  I love the fact that these places, spelt pretty much the same way, are so utterly different.

On my first day in the States, I wandered, dazed, around a Mall. I tried a couple of times to buy stuff that I knew I needed – 60% OFF! 3 FOR 2! - Seemingly irresistible consumer pressure but I ended up returning them to their shelves, overwhelmed by the sheer scale of it all.  Talk about culture shock.  Hick alert…

Kind friends took me to all sorts of cool places and showed me great wildlife.  The beautiful coast of Maine, where I tried (unsuccessfully) to catch striped bass, and saw sharp-tailed sparrows and a piping plover on her nest; Massachusetts, where I watched a colourful civil war-era military parade, complete with 15-gun salute and stayed on the oldest continuously-worked farm in the US; Idaho – the glorious Sawtooth Mountains, moose (super-model legs, scruffy in its partial moult but still awe-inspiring), beaver, elk and mule deer; Washington, with its vistas of beautiful snowy peaks, impossibly hovering humming birds and a delightful riot of kids;  LA – brushed shoulders (literally) with the elusive Mr. Spielberg, had a succession of fabulous meals and my first spin in a vintage Porsche; and finally New York, where I became an instant culture vulture, taking in the American Ballet Theatre performing Sleeping Beauty, and a fabulous Picasso exhibition on the same day.

I had a strange love/hate relationship with the SatNav GPS units, all christened Mabel, in my hire cars.  Mabel has a wonderfully soothing way of talking, which is enormously reassuring as you try to negotiate    the complexities of driving an unfamiliar car (automatic!) on the wrong side of the road, in far too much traffic driving far too fast, in a place where you are actually expected to obey traffic signs & speed limits - of which there are a great deal too many, in this hick’s humble opinion.

I just wish Mabel wouldn’t sigh that weary mother-in-law sigh as she intones ‘recalculating…’ as you take the wrong turn….yet again. And anyway, what exactly does ‘bear left’ mean, when you are faced with no less than 3 left-ish turns?  And couldn’t she have given me a wee bit more warning that I would have to turn hard right immediately after leaving the highway travelling at 80 mph?  And WHAT was she thinking of, directing me through downtown LA, eerily empty and dark, with nothing but a torn plastic bag tumbling across the street under the yellow glare of the flickering street lights – on the very night that rioting exploded in celebration of the Lakers’ win over the Celtics?

It is great to be home - but I did enjoy your jungle.

Controversy over the new road across the Serengeti

By Jules Knocker


Economic livelihood or conservation - which should win out or can both co-exist in relative harmony? Right now, the impassioned debate is focussed around a new, proposed road that crosses the north of the Serengeti National Park and which has received the go-ahead from the government, despite strong protests from environmentalists and reported opposition from TANAPA.

First, what is at stake?

The initial moves to establishing a quick commercial connection between Arusha and Lake Victoria were included in the election manifesto but the issue only really came to public notice two or three years ago. The plan is a road which will run from Mto wa Mbu, via Lake Natron, up to Wasso and west to Klein’s Gate on the park border. From there, it will cross the narrowest part of the Serengeti to Tabora B Gate and onto Mugumu and the Lake region.

The road would increase trade and services to an area of North Tanzania that has seen minimal benefits from the general development and infrastructure improvements happening in other parts of the country. It will provide a quick link between Lake Victoria and Arusha, enabling both regions to benefit. The road would bring improved access to hospitals and schools; enable small business to set up, and already established ones to flourish, by reducing the cost of operating and transporting goods; offer employment opportunities where there were few before. It will, no doubt, eventually bring the advantages of the national grid and access to reliable and cheap internet down the line. The quality of the daily life of many of the inhabitants of the region would improve. Regions of Tanzania that have been somewhat isolated, in one way or another, from the more prosperous eastern side of the country will be more accessible. The appeal of the project is clear, especially in an election year.

The current access to the Lake is a murram road, caught in a continual degrading cycle of erosion and repair, that goes between Karatu, around the Ngorongoro Crater rim, down to Naabi at the boundary of the Serengeti, Seronera, Ikoma and off to the Lake. The route is longer, crosses two major wildlife sanctuaries and is more expensive for the transit traveller than the proposed route.

On the conservation side, either road is a devastating and nett loss to the ecosystems and the effective husbanding of world- renowned natural resources. I suspect the extent of the impact of the new road is not easily predictable in advance and many of the changes or losses may not become apparent for several years, when the damage is done and it is too late to reverse. Let us not also forget the threat to tourism revenues, which play such a crucial role in government income and the health of the economy as a whole. A degrading of the tourism experience will lead to a drop in visitor numbers, as they look for other still-pristine environments.

On the current road, tourists, game, rickety buses and overloaded trucks fight it out along the dusty, bumpy length to the detriment of all. Accidents are quite common, as are road kills and the visitors’ experience of driving along such a busy highway is seriously poor. The road is not designed to cope with such heavy traffic and its very existence is anathema to a quality tourism product.

The new route goes through the fragile eco-system of the volcanic plains west of Mtu wa Mbu, the green season pastures of the Tarangire/Manyara migration route and Lake Natron, a crucial nesting place for flamingos and subject of a recent battle over a proposed soda factory by TATA, supported by the government, which was opposed successfully by environmentalists. It then comes up onto the Loliondo plains, currently a Game Controlled Area and hunting block and into the Serengeti. Here, it crosses one of the lesser developed but very rich areas of the National Park: an area which is host to the spectacular draw of the wildebeest migration driving across the Mara River in the dry season and sustains the herds when the rich grass of the southern Serengeti plains have been exhausted with the end of the rains. The lyrical scenery hosts a multitude of wildlife all year round, not least rhino and oribi. It is a quiet and relatively undisturbed paradise, both for animals and for tourists. The new road will put all this at risk.

The concerns are numerous: the increased human development that will come along the length of the road in the areas outside the National Park, which are currently lightly populated, allowing a large number of game to live relatively freely will slowly push out the game; the disturbance to the wildlife patterns which many fear will have a negative impact on wildlife numbers in genreal throughout the eco-systems. (The Tarangire/Manyara/Gelai Migration route is already under serious threat from agricultural development and the restriction of wildlife corridors around the Tarangire and Manyara National Parks). How will the flamingos react at their nesting sites on Lake Natron? Will the Migration be placed under damaging stress and will it reduce their numbers and reduce their ability to find adequate pasture and water that takes them thousands of kilometers each year? The increased pollution; the increasingly easy access for poachers; the degrading of the tourism experience, which will put the current attraction of the Serengeti as a must-see destination under question; the road kills (as everyone appreciates it is unrealistic to either build effective wildlife tunnels or put the road on raised pylons). And perhaps something that is often overlooked – it is unlikely that all transit, commercial traffic will be forcibly diverted to the new road as for some, the trip will be much longer. We will then end up with not one, but two, busy, commercial and destructive highways crossing the Serengeti at different points.

The government has deemed the negative impact on the environment to be outweighed by the economic benefits, but there is a concern that the decision makers have a greater understanding of, and interest in, the commercial sector than they do in the environment. Perhaps they believe that the tourism revenue will continue to flow, regardless of the quality of the experience and the impact of the road. Perhaps they are less interested in the potential knock-on effects of putting several ecosystems at risk as these cannot be clearly quantified in advance. TANAPA have stated that the decision is no longer in their hands. Frankfurt Zoological Society opposes the plan, as does the Africa Wildlife Foundation (follow this link for the AWF position - http://www.awf.org/documents/Serengeti_Road_Position_Statement.pdf). Environmentalists are up in arms and have taken their fight global. Articles have appeared in the New York Times, The Sunday Times, The East African as well as the local papers.

So, people or wildlife? Who gets to make the choice and who gets to live with the consequences?

Or is there another alternative?

For many years, the proposed route for a commercial link to The Lake was very different from the current one.

South.

Skirting Ngorongoro and Maswa Game Reserve to the south of the Serengeti, through Shinyanga and joining up to the lake. It is longer, and therefore more expensive to build, but it does not cross protected areas, it does not put eco-systems at risk, it does not threaten unique wildlife events and it does cross miles and miles of deprived areas where the local populations have long missed out on the benefits given to others. Same economic arguments but just a different group of people and greater numbers of people that would benefit. They are in the same situation as those in the north but perhaps they have even fewer opportunities available to them. At least there are noticeable rewards to be had from tourism already operating in the northern Serengeti and Natron area for some of the local residents. Looks like a win-win situation to me.

Why has this alternative been ignored? Why are the voices so insistent on a compromised and compromising plan that puts much at risk?

GUIDE TRAINING

Guide Training – as ever, a double-edged sword.  On the one hand, with so much to do, finding the time to take two weeks out of my schedule is always a problem.  But then again, once out there I am caught up once more in the camaraderie of it all; the one time in the year when we all get together out in the bush, sharing ideas and learning lots of new stuff. Guide training is really fun.

This year, we headed out to Ndarakwai, a lovely private game ranch at the foot of Kilimanjaro, a couple of hours from Arusha.

My particular task was to head up the firearms training.  Quite a hefty responsibility, given the need to make sure that the guides and scouts who are carrying a rifle, can actually do so safely and responsibly and that they are comfortable and good enough to take control in the bush.  But we usually manage to have some fun along the way.

So off we tramped into the bush one day, with our rifles – and an old truck tyre.  I wasn’t quite sure whether this was going to work but I needed a decent hill to find out.  We found the perfect place in a remote corner of the ranch.  I explained what we were trying to achieve, and then we rolled the tyre up the slope and… let it roll back down again towards where we stood in a small clearing at the bottom.  There were some disbelieving glances and a lot of nervous laughter, for this was about as close as we could get to facing up to a charging buffalo without actually, err… facing up to a charging buffalo.

We had two hectic days of this: a couple of our number would toil up the slope, dragging the cursed thing into position, where it would be held in place by a Heath Robinson stick-and-a-piece-of-string trigger mechanism.  Tug the string, and our ‘buffalo’ would come bounding down the hill.  The trick was to try and get 2 good shots off – and then dodge it.  Please trust me, this last bit is important: you would not want to be in the way of a 30kg tyre doing 40kph!

Like I say, we managed to test our abilities and have some serious fun while we were about it.  

With the shooting bit out of the way, we devoted the rest of our time to practicing approaches on big game.  There are usually some ellies to be found on Ndarakwai and luckily there were two or three herds around this year.  Things were spiced up a bit by the presence of an oestrous cow with some big musth bulls vying for her attentions... I’m glad to report that nobody was trying to get too close to them on foot, as things were just too unpredictable.

Oh, did I forget to mention the ticks?  The place was swarming with them – every day, I had to pick off many tens of them as they tried to find a convenient patch of skin to burrow into.  Honestly, the things I put up with for my art…