Rwanda's Gishwati Forest

Gishwati Rainforest - a beautiful old forest in northern Rwanda that was once 100,000 hectares, and now reduced to just 600 hectares as a result of subsistence farming and refugee resettlement after the 1994 genocide. My roommate Winnie and I dared the jarring 1.5 hour ride up a bumpy dirt road on the back of motorbikes this past weekend to check out Gishwati - and the 24 chimpanzees that call this rainforest home. The chimpanzees are not habituated so we were not able to get very close to them, but we could hear them calling to one another throughout the day.
I was really struck by the diverse plant species in Gishwati. For only being a few hours away, this forest was a world apart from the Virunga’s (where the mountain gorillas live). Gishwati was once the second largest indigenous forest in Rwanda, but is now just 1,500 acres.

Chimpanzee Trekking

8.12.09

Today was one of the most amazing days, not only of this expedition, but of my life. Looking back on it, I still can't believe how fantastic it was. I wish I had the time to thoroughly describe my experiences today.. but work is calling and I must be brief!
5 members of our team crawled out of our tents before the sun rose this morning and hiked out through the tea plantations to the UWA headquarters to begin trekking through the rainforest in search of the chimpanzees. We had all prepared ourselves for the hours of hiking ahead and for the possibility of not encountering any of these elusive creatures. Yesterday, the ranger told us that they hiked for 8 hours straight and saw them around 150 yards away at the end of the day. But I didn't care.. I was happy to be heading back into the rainforest. Amazingly enough though, around 7:30am, we had been hiking for 10 minutes or so and all of sudden the quiet of the rainforest morning was shattered by the sound of chimpanzees screaming all around us. We all froze on the trail, absolutely shocked by the powerful chorus of the community (and at our amazing luck!). When the vocalizations died down, we quietly ventured a little ways down the trail and rounded the corner to see a large adult male walking about 15 feet ahead of us. His huge black and silver muscular body was a sight to see so close, and he seemed to not even notice our presence, despite our awkward muzungu feet stumbling across branches and vines. We tried to be as silent as possible as we followed him and he led us directly into the center of the group. As chimps are feeding, they are fairly quiet, so it came as a surprise to all of us when we looked up and saw chimps of every age and sex all around us, staggered throughout the trees. One subadult male was about 10 feet from me, casually feeding on the palm tree seeds that they adore so much. Little infants were scampering through the tree tops just above him, their mothers feeding and lounging nearby. WIthin this particular community, there are 120 members, 20 of which are large adult males. Quite a few of those males were within the vicinity, and several times they broke into their display behavior, crashing through the trees and beating on anything nearby as we ran to get out of the line of fire. It was remarkable how swiftly an entire community can move through the forest.. after a relatively quiet feeding session, one by one they began to disappear and before we knew it we were running through the dense rainforest, leaping over fallen trees and crawling through the undergrowth, tripping over vines and scraping through sharp foliage, in a desperate attempt to keep up. The government limits the amount of time that humans are allowed to be with the chimps in the wild. We definitely overstayed our welcome, and after a couple hours, turned to hike back to headquarters. On our way back, one young female was lounging in a patch of sunlight right in the middle of the trail. We all stopped and studied her beautiful face before she nonchalantly and fluidly stood up and disappeared back into the forest. I feel so fortunate to have been able to be inside their world today. Its something that I will never ever forget.

After chimp trekking we spent our afternoon doing something almost equally as amazing... we met back up with our team, loaded up on Nox and drove to a primatologist named Julia Lloyd's "compound", nestled deep in the forest. Julia is a British woman who has been living in Uganda since the early 90s, researching ecotourism, chimpanzee habituation and conservation. It was fascinating to be able to see a primatologist working in the field who has so successfully melded her lifestyle to meet that of the locals. Her living/work space consists of 3 huts, one is her office, one is her home, and one is a guest house. Keeping her company are 4 rescue dogs, all just as quirky as you can imagine an African rescue dog to be. Julia is such a breath of fresh air in her objective perspective of conservation issues in Uganda.. After traveling around for the last 4 weeks, meeting various conservation organizations, all possessing unique and somewhat political agendas, it was great to meet an individual who is such a "heavy hitter" in the conservation world who has managed to have her research work successfully impact conservation without forming alliances. She's the real deal. What an inspiration..
More to come! Once I finish my web work! Love you all bunches!

Catching up.....

8.10.09

So it's been a few days (ok almost a week) since I've had a chance to sit down for longer than five minutes and write in.. my apologies family! It's been a really amazing week though, filled with rainforest treks, working with local school children, visiting remote villages, sleeping in a treehouse deep in the rainforest, going on safari, camping at 3 different amazing campsites and sleeping in a tent surrounded by hippos!

THE TREEHOUSE
On Wednesday, Leslie (primatologist), Gemma and Katie (video crew) and myself decided to book the treehouse at Chimp's Nest for the night. Although it was pretty rustic, it was absolutely glorious having a warm bed with clean sheets, blankets and a pillow. The treehouse was deeper into the rainforest than our team's campsite was, so we hiked in about 20 minutes before we rounded the corner of the trail and the circular treehouse, about 75 feet up in the canopy came into view. We climbed the near vertical staircase up and threw down our packs to explore the tiny living space up in the canopy. The staff had lit a fire to warm 50 liters of water for our showers (yay for hot showers!) and the water smelled strongly of wood smoke. There was a window looking out into the treetops in the shower and as I washed 3 days of dirt off, a monkey (I believe it was a L'hoest) scampered across the limb a few feet from the window! To my delight (and my teammates horror) there was a fluorescent orange snake on the front porch too. After our showers, we hiked back up to Nox to have dinner with the rest of our team, had a beer at the thatched hut bar at Chimp's Nest and hiked back (accompanied by a guide for "protection") to our treehouse. We all fell asleep under our mosquito nets on our soft comfortable, clean beds, listening to the sounds of the rainforest.

OLPC
The Primate Handshake is working with OLPC (One Laptop Per Child), an organization that is supplying laptops to schools in underdeveloped countries. An American guy named Ian Wrangham who is working at Kassisi Primary School, a couple hours from our campsite, won a grant for 100 of OLPC's "XO" laptops. We've had 2 of the little green laptops on our expedition for our team to fiddle around with.. so we went to Kassisi to work with the school children and receive feedback about their operating system and software for OLPC.. and our web team is working on developing some new software and games for the OLPC. Every time we've visited a school, interacting with the children has been such an amazing experience for all of us, but Thursday was particularly magical. Walking into a dark, cement school house room, packed with 90 students all huddled around their little glowing screens, grinning ear to ear, you can't help but be a bit taken aback. There isn't any electricity, they work by the little sunlight coming in from a few small windows, the 1400 children at the school are fed porridge for lunch every day.. the cards are certainly stacked against them, but their education is being enhanced so much by these little machines. The children were so excited to "show off" what they could do on their laptops. It was fascinating watching what they had already learned in the 3 weeks that they had had access to their computers.. A lot of the children at Kasiisi are orphans, but with the XOs, children in developing countries worldwide have been able to go home and teach their parents, grandparents or aunts & uncles how to read and write. How amazing is that?

To check out Ian Wrangham's blog and the Kasiisi children's progress go to:
http://olpckasiisi.blogspot.com/

Rainforest Trek

The handshakers dressed in the chilly darkness of the early morning, eager to make our way into the misty rainforest of Kibale National Park. As we ate our breakfast of porridge, assembled in a circle under the hut, everyone glanced up as the sounds of chimpanzee hoots rose up from the forest. Somewhere below us, a community of chimps were crawling groggily out of their night nests ready to begin foraging for fruits. It was exciting knowing that chimpanzee groups were so close.. and the prospect of seeing them in the wild today in Kibale! After a short hang up (Nox's battery died), we were on our way, passing through the tea plantations as the sun rose higher in the morning sky. We pulled into the rainforest and were again greeted by a troop of baboons lingering on the outskirts of the road. Nox pulled up under a few large avocado trees and we all filed out to begin our trek.

Our team was split up into groups of five and assigned a particular guide through the forest. Our guide, Harriet, was one of the few female rangers at Kibale and has been trekking the forest for 10 years. She was extremely knowledgeable about all the medicinal plants and trees (especially the aphrodisiacs!), the wide spectrum of wildlife and all the signs of their existence (animal tracks, dung, signs of feeding, traveling through etc....) within the rainforest.

As we followed the (surprisingly narrow) path that the elephants had taken, we discovered that the elephants found in Kibale are actually savannah elephants (as opposed to forest elephants). Prior to the 1970's, the elephants traveled freely through Kibale up to Sudan. However, due to human encroachment, around 600 elephants have become trapped within the forest. Savannah elephants are larger in size than forest elephants, but they clearly have adapted to the more dense surroundings of the rainforest. Farmers who have cultivated the land surrounding the rainforest, along with the Ugandan Wildlife Authority, have dug huge trenches to deter the elephants from wandering onto their property and destroying their crops. Elephants began to push the earth back to form bridges out of the forest, so now the farmers have turned to using guns to protect their livelihood.

We hiked alongside their enormous footprints embedded in the soggy earth and spotted an array of primates including black and white colobus, grey cheeked mangabey and red tailed and l'houest monkeys. (No chimpanzee sightings, but we did see a lot of their seed-filled dung!) All around us were trees with enormous buttresses that the chimps beat on to communicate with one another. A rainbow of butterflies fluttered through the shafts of light that slanted through the canopy. Dung beetles sat perched on their prizes and colorful birds called their distinct vocalizations as they streaked through the trees. Lying on the side of the trail were two large African snails in the process of mating. At first glance, their beautiful oblong twisting shells seemed oddly out of place in the middle of the rainforest, better suited for a beach somewhere. But all around us were other-worldly creatures, their lives intricately intertwined in this complex ecosystem.

A few days before I left for the Primate Handshake expedition, Oteil asked me if I knew what made a rainforest a rainforest (besides the obvious answer). I stumbled through my answer, vaguely recalling my Zoology courses in college and immediately went inside to look it up. Today, I was able to see firsthand that damp, verdant, magical place that so many exotic species call home. I am certain that no definitions or descriptions can do the Ugandan rainforest justice. I felt so privileged to have a peek inside such a mystical place on this planet.

A few pics from the rainforest today...

12 hours to Kibale

August 1st

Yesterday was our first official travel day and we rolled out of camp at 5:45 am, before the sun had risen to warm and brighten the day. Everyone was excited about our 12 hour journey across southern Uganda to Kibale National Park. We passed the hours chatting with one another, taking turns sampling each other's music on Nox's sound system, reading our various primate books and sprawling out on top of each other for a good snooze. At noon, we stopped for lunch on the side of the road and everyone worked quickly to chop up avocado, tomato, onion and cucumber for our sandwiches and some fresh pineapple for dessert. Conor plugged his Ipod up and we grooved to some Thievery Corporation and munched on our veggie sandwiches in the shade of our huge truck.Soon we were back on the road and thanks to Steve, making great time. We pulled into Kibale National Park around 6pm, the windy drive having passed quickly. As Nox navigated down the little dirt roads curving and cutting through the rainforest, the local children came running towards the truck waving and smiling, eager to catch a glimpse of the mazungus inside. On the outskirts of the forest, we passed large expanses of land that had been cultivated for tea plantations. We all turned in our seats, balancing on our knees to check out the amazing view across the rolling hills of row after row of tea leaves, the misty rainforest in the distance.
Nox rolled deeper and deeper into Kibale and the damp, earthy scent of the rainforest enveloped our truck, a striking contrast to the arrid climate at UWEC... we had made it to chimpanzee stomping grounds, a place many of us had only read about in books. Kibale National Park is the primate hotpot in Africa. There are 13 different primate species that call Kibale home, as well as forest elephants, lion, leopard, buffalo, hippo, warthog, sitatunga, bushbuck and over 335 bird species.We spotted baboon troops immediately, they sat huddled in pairs at the edge of the red dirt road, studying our enormous yellow truck with their dark beady eyes. The sun rays were slanting through the canopy and our eyes were scanning the tree tops for any trace of chimpanzees. We drove past a sign for "Chimps Nest", where we would be camping, and Leslie and I looked at each other and grinned, we couldn't help ourselves. For many of us, we have been reading and studying about the African rainforest for years. It is a dream coming true.

Our campsite is fantastic.We pitched our tents in a clearing surrounded by 8 ft. + grasses. After getting camp set up and cooking dinner, we broke out the box wine and split up into teams for a little trivia party, hosted by Kirsty and Fiona. Everyone seemed to have had a good nights sleep, soothed by the sound of the rain pattering on our tents. When we woke this morning, the sun was emerging from behind the storm clouds, warming the day quickly.There is a trail cut through the grasses up to a thatched roof bar and restaurant that looks out over the rainforest. This is where we will be set up working in the coming days. More to come soon!