Cap Esterias- Part II

After lunch we boated back to the mainland. Innocent talked a bit about manatees, then took us to meet an older fisherman named Timothe who knows a lot about manatees, turtles and cetaceans. Innocent and Timothe are both from the local Bange tribe and their cultural belief is that manatees are sacred, so they don’t hunt them. When asked why they don’t, Timothe replied that they are a long-lived species and only have 1 “young” every 2 years. Innocent related a story of his uncle, a fisherman who is no longer alive, who caught a manatee in his fishing net by accident 8 years ago and released it. Timothe also related that the same man caught a manatee about 20 years ago near Cocotier, and they tied it up for 2 weeks to look at it because they were curious, and then they released it. Timothe had a wealth of knowledge about manatees, and discussed seasonal use of rivers vs. the bay, mangrove seed pods as a preferred food in the rivers, sightings manatees year round both singly and in mating groups, etc. He also told us that 8-9 months ago there was a pair of manatees hanging around Cocotier Island for 3-4 months, and then they left, but they were not hunted. He said the Nigerians living in fishing villages in nearby Akanda National Park (I visited a couple of these villages last year) regularly kill manatees, but they know they are protected, so they eat them locally rather than trying to sell them illegally. He also spoke about manatees being caught in the Ogooue River and sold in Pt. Gentil (larger city down the coast at the mouth of the Ogooue), which I hear from everyone all over Gabon every time I ask about manatee bushmeat.

Timothe, Lucy and Angela talking about manatees and turtles.

Timothe was absolutely my best interview in Gabon so far and a very positive way to end the day! Many, many thanks to Angela who translated Timothe’s Spanish for me!

Cap Esterias- Part I

Last Saturday Angela, Andrea, Virginia (sea turtle reseachers) and I took a day trip to Cap Esterias, which is located north of Libreville on a peninsula where the Atlantic Ocean meets Corisco and Mondah Bays. The town sits near the border of Akanda National Park and there are several small islands in the bay.

We took a Taxi Brusse (bush taxi) which is basically the size of an ancient VW bus, crammed with 20 people and their market baskets, for the hour ride up to Cap Esterias. There aren’t many other options for getting there because the road is terrible (more pot holes than actual pavement, although they were repairing it in one area), and although bush taxis aren’t the most comfortable (think sardines), it cost us the equivalent of $1.25 each to get there. Once we arrived we met Innocent, one of Angela’s turtle assistants, who had arranged a boat to take us out on the bay. The day was grey but the water was calm and we went first to Mbanye Island, where there is a small military outpost (because this area is an ambiguous and disputed border with Equatorial Guinea). There is also a turtle hunter on this island. Unfortunately sea turtles other than leatherbacks are not a protected species here (they would be if the Gabon government would finally approve a decree that has been sitting waiting for two years…).

First some of the military guys took us out to a sand spit at one end of the island and showed us 3 Ridley nests and a false crawl (the turtle comes up on the beach but decides not to nest, this can be determined by looking at the tracks). They had taken eggs from one nest but had left the others to hatch. After that they took us to a corral where the hunter had a live adult green sea turtle. She was beautiful and Angela estimated her to be about 30 years old (and still not as large as they can get). I was completely overwhelmed by the fact that they were going to kill her and there was nothing I could do to stop it. They’ll sell her meat in Libreville for the equivalent of $50 US, which is a lot of money here, but seems so little for killing such a long-lived and slow-breeding species. They remarked that 5 other turtles had just gone in a boat to Libreville. I wanted to buy it, but Angela said these turtles are residents here, and it would just go back to the same reef and be re-caught by the same fisherman. It was so hopeless I had to walk away from it all. They allowed Angela to take measurements and a genetic sample, and as she did so she was telling the guys that the turtle was 30 years old and only 1 in 1000 hatchlings survive to adulthood. She later told me that the turtle fishermen are willing to give up hunting if there was another way to make money, but this is something that still needs to happen here.

Angela and Innocent take data on the doomed green sea turtle.

While we were there we also asked the military guys about manatees. They said they never saw them there, but their rotations on the island changed every few weeks. They knew what manatees were and said they were very rare.

After that depressing episode, we left Mbanye and went a short way across the bay to a tiny speck of an island called Cocotier. There are about 3 trees and 500 terns on Cocotier; it is surrounded by rocky ledges and Angela had seen turtles and seagrass there in the past. We snorkeled and I found several patches of Halodule wrightii, a favorite manatee food. Collected samples and photographed them. This is also the only seagrass species recorded for West Africa. I also saw some nice tropical fish, a big sea hare and signs of turtle grazing on algae growing on rocks, but no sign of manatees.

Coctier Island

Halodule from Cocotier. The individual plants were larger here than the ones I found at Iguela last year, but the grass beds were much smaller and patchier here.

Langoue Bai

Fair warning- if you're only interested in manatees, skip to the last paragraph of this posting. I occasionally write about other things I'm seeing to give another perspective of where I am, and this is one of those times!

For the past 4 days I took a much needed break from work and have been in the interior of Gabon at Ivindo National Park's Langoue Bai, which is a marshy clearing in the forest where elephants, gorillas, forest buffalo and other animals come to drink water. I went with 2 Italian friends, Andrea and Virginia, who have been working with sea turtles here in Gabon for the past month. It was something of an ordeal to get there... from Libreville we took a long taxi ride to an overnight train (which was as cold as a meat locker and as slow as a snail, impossible for me to sleep) to Ivindo. We were met there by my friend Ruth, who runs Langoue Bai. We had breakfast, then drove 2 hours into the forest on a dirt road (at one point we had to stop because an enormous tree had fallen across the road overnight, so an Ecoguide who was with us chainsawed through it so we could continue). We arrived at a trailhead and then backpacked 8km up a steep hill and deep into the forest to the Langoue Bai camp. The hiking was intense (ok, I admit I quickly realized I'm really out of shape!) because the trail was not only steep, but muddy and slippery. But the steep hill is apparently the reason this forest is still intact- the logging companies weren't able to get their equipment up the hill, so they never logged the forest here and then it became a national park. By the time we got there we'd been traveling for 19 hours straight, but it was so incredibly beautiful it was all worth it.

View of the kitchen and dining/living room buildings at Langoue Bai camp. All the buildings were built on top of a large open rock clearing, so no forest was cleared for the camp.

The camp is really well done- 5 platforms with large tents, a dining/living room building, an office, kitchen and shower buildings all built on a huge area of flat rock. The first afternoon we took a short walk to a nearby clearing and saw a pretty rare bird, the Picathartes, as well as some grey-cheeked mangebeys. The Bai (which is a Pygmy word for "clearing") is another hour hike from camp so that most human activities are far removed from where the animals aggregate. For the next 2 days we spent all day at a raised platform at the edge of the Bai. The first day we saw at least 14 forest elephants, 50 red river hogs, forest buffalo, Sitatunga (a type of forest antelope), 4 gorillas and some cool birds including a Great Blue Turaco. The next day there were more elephants and sitatunga, plus a family group of 11 gorillas came in, including several tiny babies riding on their mother's backs. It's surreal to be there, you feel almost like you've been dropped into Jurassic Park. A researcher from Cornell's Elephant Listening Project, Peter, is in Langoue for 6 weeks recording elephant vocalizations on Autonomous Recording Units (ARUs) which are the same type of units my colleagues will use to record whale calls in Angola. It would also be neat to see if these units can determine manatee presence in Gabon's lagoons someday. Elephant chasing Sitatunga out of the water hole.

Elephants and Red River Hogs enjoying the mud. I was told that these animals actually depend on this resource more for minerals than water.The silverback male on the left is "Padouk" with part of his large family group.Handsome male elephant. Modeste and Alain, the two Gabonese guys at Langoue studying the elephants, recognize individuals by ear notches, tusk length/condition and the "brush" on the tail. They have catalogged 1000 different individuals; this one is "Dan". A new female elephant came in to the Bai our first day, so we got to name it. We chose "Paradis" (French for paradise, because that's what the Bai is!).

The viewing platform at the Bai has 3 levels- researchers on the top, tourists in the middle, storage on the lower level. There were so many butterflies everywhere, it was unbelievable. We saw some amazing species.
A civet (rare dog-like African mammal) that we saw on 2 different nights! (Photo by Andrea Dondona)

Carnivorous flower (like a Venus fly-trap). It was about the size of my foot, and Ruth (who has worked in this forest for 4 years) had never seen it before. The biodiversity here is asounding.
Happy campers- Lucy, Viginia and Andrea by a big tree in the forest.

After 3 fabulous days, we walked back out of the forest and got a ride back to Ivindo. Ruth mentioned that some of the guys who worked in the park might know if manatees were ever sighted in the Ivindo or Ogooue Rivers (which intersect near the town of Ivindo), so we went and talked to a few of them. I had previously been told (by others) that manatees were not found east of Lope on the Ogooue because of rocks and rapids in the river, but I had also heard one report that manatees have been sighted at Tsenge Tsenge, which is east of Lope on the Ivindo River. The Ivindo guys also said they knew of manatees at Tsenge Tsenge, and said an old fisherman at Ivindo had seen manatees there as well, but not for about 10 years. They had some other interesting info as well. Now that I've seen the rapids myself, I'm sure manatees could swim up them in periods of high water. Manatees in Florida swim equally strong currents going up power plant intake pipes!

It can't always be exciting

Starting last week I'm doing more office work in Libreville- analyzing data and preparing my presentation and scientific poster on the Gabon manatee work for the Society of Marine Mammalogy conference at the end of November, and trying to organize logistics for some fieldwork in Akanda National Park in northern Gabon and in Angola.

Last week the only excitement was the appearance of a Mustached Monkey in the garden at the Cas de Passage in Libreville. It was clearly an escaped pet, but we all delighted in having it visit.

The Best of Tenerife

I’m back in Libreville after my productive week in the Canary Islands. I had an extra day there after the meetings ended, because there were no flights to Libreville on weekends, so I rented a car and drove up to El Tiede National Park at the center of the island. Driving up from the ocean I passed through arid countryside full of cactuses, dotted by villages bursting with bougainvillea and palms. Higher up there’s a pine forest, and eventually the road gets above the tree line, as well as the clouds! It reminded me a bit of Haleakala in Hawaii. The park is a series of volcanoes with craters in between, lots of sagebrush and other endemic plants. I think the last volcanic eruption was in 1785. It is a gorgeous place- sheer rock spires shooting straight up and backdrops of clouds, ocean and neighboring islands. I hiked around the park and saw a few bird species, then drove back down and headed to a remote part of the coast.
I stopped by Los Gigantes, enormous sea cliffs, then drove to Masca, a town perched on a pinnacle inside the cliffs. The road to Masca is a single-track road of endless hairpin turns, with sports car drivers flying at you around blind corners. Halfway down I wondered what I’d gotten myself into, but the spectacular views kept pushing me on. Again I was reminded of Hawaii, but this time of the Na Pali coast. The villages definitely have a Mediterranean feeling though. After winding my way all the way back to the top and back down the other side, the sun was setting over the ocean. Definitely a great way to end the trip. The appropriately named Los Gigantes

The precarious road to Masca
Masca

The Manatee Working Group got the job done!

For the past two days, the Manatee Working Group that was convened here at the CMS meeting in the Canary Islands has been working on an Action Plan for the species in West Africa. As a framework we used the Conservation Strategy that has been worked on for the past several years by Wetlands International, so that the two documents and their recommendations will be compatible. There are four main Themes of the Action Plan: Policies and Legislation, Applied Research, Restoration and Safeguarding of Manatee Habitats, and Awareness and Education. Each section has Recommended Actions that were prioritized and leads identified. Leads include government bodies, partner countries, NGOs, etc. The group also discussed proposing a re-classification the species as a CMS Appendix I Species (this would raise it to a more endangered status than it's current position as an Appendix II species). Togo and Niger will take the lead on working on this proposal. The Action Plan outline was presented to the CMS delegates on the last afternoon of the meeting. It was a great experience for me to be involved in the working group discussions and hopefully I can continue to be involved.

Also, a very nice fellow named Remi from the Pew Environment Group and has posted a comment on his blog about these meetings and manatees: God is an Appendix II species.

The West African Manatee Working Group in session yesterday.Tim Dodman was the Reporter for English and Akoi Kouadio was elected as the Chairman of the group. Also in the photo is Mr. Bonassidi, who is the Conservator of Conkouati National Park in the Congo. Isidore Ayissi of Cameroon was elected as the French Reporter.

A Few Pictures of Tenerife

The Magma conference center where the first 2 days of presentations (all on small cetaceans) took place. View of Playa des Americas, Tenerife... unbelievable rampant development that has pretty much all happened in the past 40 years Short-finned Pilot Whales The Jardin Tropical Hotel where the rest of the meetings were held.