The good folks at Idea Wild have just notified me that they are funding my request to buy a VHF radio receiver and antenna for manatee tracking work in Gabon. This is a really nice small grant that will allow me to buy a vital piece of equipment, so that once I put satellite tags on manatees, I can follow them to document their travel patterns, behavior, habitat use, etc. I'll also use the receiver to train Gabonese biologists and students manatee field research techniques. Idea Wild is a non-profit organization that funds specific equipment that field biologists and conservationists need to do their job, often in remote parts of the world. So thanks to them I am one step closer to being able to tag and track the elusive West African manatee!

Survivor

For those of you in the USA, the reality TV show "Survivor" filmed in Gabon this past summer and will air in the USA starting this week. I won't be here to watch it (and I dislike "reality" TV anyway) but it may give some nice glimpses of my favorite African country for those of you who are interested. MSNBC also wrote an article on the show and the hope that it may translate into ecotourism dollars for Gabon.

Next

I'm back in Florida for 3 weeks, preparing to return to Africa for the next 6 months. Lots of exciting plans are on the horizon:

- On September 29 I'll fly to Lome, Togo to participate in the United Nations Environmental Programme / Convention of Migratory Species (CMS) meetings. This is the same conference that was in the Canary Islands last year and representatives from 21 African countries will be present. We're in the process of finishing an Action Plan for West African manatees across the range of the species. Hopefully the signing of this document at the upcoming meeting will lead to more research and funding across Africa.

- After Togo, I'll travel next door to Ghana to help teach an Earthwatch Capacity Building Workshop & Expedition for West African Manatee Conservation. Eight scientists from across Africa will be selected to participate in the 13 day training. My colleague Patrick Ofori-Dansen's research in Ghana is one of the longest running manatees research programs in Africa, particularly focused in the Lake Volta region (the Volta River was dammed in the 1960's trapping manatees in the large lake above the dam) so it will be great to see his research and study area firsthand.

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- Then in mid-October I'll return to Gabon to continue fieldwork there. I plan to survey the one last lagoon system I haven't been to yet (Fernan Vaz) and hopefully spend more time at the enormous N'dogo Lagoon, my first choice site for future manatee tagging and tracking. This year I will also focus more on training and public outreach in several parts of the country.

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- At some point in the next 6 months I will also return to Soyo, Angola to continue that work as well. So it will be a busy end of the year for me and I'll try to fill the blog with lots of good stories and photos along the way.

CAMPing in Mayumba

Flying into Mayumba on Monday. From the plane we also saw a humpback whale just offshore.

My online silence this week is due to being in coastal and marine planning (nicknamed CAMP) meetings all week in Mayumba, a national park on the southern border of Gabon. These meetings were conviened by WCS to unify species and habitat work and fundraising all along Gabon and Congo's coastline, including both protected and non-protected areas. It has been a very intense and productive few days, and I think we've made great strides towards a concrete strategy. I'm thrilled because it ties the goals of my manatee research and fundraising in with the other WCS researchers and managers working here. We now have a new working name for this landscape level effort: Congo Basin Coast.

The meeting room at Mayumba national park headquarters

We had really nice group dinners every evening which our hostess Aimee deserves a huge thanks for organizing. Everyone pitched in to help with cooking.

Matthew, John & James enjoying a cold beer on Rich & Aimee's back deck overlooking the beach at the end of a busy day. Below, our host and Mayumba National Park Director Rich, and Paul, the Congo country program director.

The team! Unfortunately Hilde, Ruth and Quevain are missing from this picture taken at the airport just before we left Mayumba.

Tonight I start the long series of flights back to FL, which will take 30 hours of continous travel from Gabon to S. Africa to USA. As you can imagine, not my idea of a great time! I'll be in FL for the next 3 weeks to attend meetings and gather/pack up equipment, and I'll return to Africa on Sept. 29 for my longer manatee field season. I can't wait!

Happy Returns

Last night I arrived in Libreville, Gabon after 4 days of travel from Angola. To get here I spent 2 nights in Luanda, the capital of Angola, followed by 2 nights in Johannesburg, S. Africa. It always takes awhile to get anywhere in Africa. Luanda was very loud because their elections are coming up, so people drive endlessly through the streets waving flags and honking horns; there was also a DJ across the street from the hotel blasting music at obnoxious levels 24 hours a day. Joburg was cold (it's winter south of the equator now) but I stayed at a nice game lodge, saw a few interesting birds and had time to catch up on work on my computer.

I've come to Gabon to participate in strategy and planning meetings hosted by WCS for coastal ecosystems here. Hopefully these meetings will produce a unified strategy for research, training and fundraising so that researchers and managers can all work more effectively and cooperatively together. That's not to say that folks here aren't working effectively now, just that now that the national parks are 6 years old, it's time to assess how things are going and see what can be done to improve. For example, up to now fundraising for each national park has been done independently and much research done independently as well... I'm hopeful that collaborations can be strengthened to fundraise together and build upon the fieldwork collaboration for multiple species and their habitat.

The meetings will be held in Mayumba, a beautiful national park on the southern border of Gabon. This is the first place I surveyed for manatees in 2006 and I'm looking forward to getting back there.

Angola Trip #2 Wrap-up

Yesterday I left Soyo and flew to Luanda, Angola’s capital. Tomorrow I’ll fly to Gabon via Johannesburg, S. Africa (there are no direct connections between Angola & Gabon, so it’ll take a few days to get there, par for the course in Africa). Tim & Sal are in Soyo for a few more days to deploy 2 more MARUs.

Although we didn’t sight any manatees this trip, I continue to get valuable information from interviews at villages, and as I return to the same villages each time, people remember me and have information on new sightings. I also meet new people every time depending upon who is at the village rather than out fishing when I show up, which increases my pool of responses.

Collecting 101 manatee bones was definitely the work highlight of this trip for me. Joao will contact one of the deceased manatee hunter’s sons to see if we can acquire the harpoons for a cultural display at an Angolan museum. I’m thrilled that the sons are not interested in manatee hunting as a career, but I’m also worried that if the harpoons stay at N’Tutu, someone else will decide to take up the hunt. Manatee meat fetches a much higher price at market than fish. Because Mr. Domingos was the only hunter for such a large area, it would have a big impact on manatee conservation here to get these harpoons “off the street” and into a museum, where they belong.

Manatee harpoons at rest in N'Tutu... hopefully for good.
One last pic: I love this photo because it sums up my joy at finding so many manatee bones at N'Tutu (with Tim & Warren's help of course!). The man on the left was the only person around when we arrived at the village, so he showed us around and was amused at our interest in old trash bones.
I’ll probably be back to Soyo in November…

Outrageous Whale Day!

Another component of the whale work here is the deployment and recovery of acoustic recording devices (called Marine Autonomous Recording Units or MARUs, developed by Cornell University Ornithology Lab, Bioacoustics Research Program) to record whale song. Actually they continuously record everything 24/7 while they’re deployed, but the goal is to record whales. The devices are really cool (I wrote about the same devices being used for elephants in Gabon, see my posting from 11/2/07) but very expensive ($20,000 each, which makes $6000 manatee GPS tags seem cheap by comparison!), so Sal is understandably always a bit nervous about getting the deployments and recoveries to go off smoothly. I think this trip is the third recovery/re-deployment for this project, but it’s the first time I’ve been here to see it.

While Warren and I were busy sampling manatee bones on 8/20, Sal and Tim recovered 3 MARUs offshore where they had been deployed in the submarine canyon at the Congo River mouth. On 8/21 they spent the day downloading data that was recorded over the past couple months, then refurbishing them with new batteries and other parts to be re-deployed on 8/22.

Here's Sal working on one of the MARUs. The equipment is housed in a very thick glass sphere to withstand pressure at over 100m depth. When deployed, the entire unit is also covered with a heavy yellow plastic housing.

On the morning of 8/22 we headed back offshore for the re-deployment. The ocean was almost as calm as a lake which made for a perfect day (those of you who know my susceptibility to seasickness will understand why a calm day is critical for my ability to function at sea!). Two MARUs were deployed without a hitch, and then we used the rest of our time to look for whales.

Tim and Warren get ready to help deploy. Each MARU is tethered to an anchor which keeps it on the sea floor for the duration of the deployment. The tether contains a burn cable and the unit is programmed to burn through the cable at a pre-determined time, so the MARU can pop back up to the surface for data recovery.

Sal can also communicate with the MARUs by sending a specific series of acoustic signals sent out from an underwater speaker he brings onboard the ship.

We hit the jackpot when we saw a humpback repeatedly breaching a couple kilometers away. Shortly after we boated near to it, it was joined by a second whale and for the next couple hours they put on a display that was the cetacean equivalent of the finale of Fourth of July fireworks! Time after time they breached, barrel-rolled and tail-slapped right in front of the boat. There was also some mating activity, but this happens mostly underwater, so we didn’t witness any whale porn. Needless to say, between Tim, Sal and I, we have well over 1000 photos. Here’s a sampling of a couple of my favs:

Rocketing skyward out of the water

This whale must've tail-slapped at least 20 times in a row, while the other one barrel-rolled next to it.

This is what it looks like when 40 tons of whale goes airborne...
And this is what it looks like when that same 40 tons hits the deck!

What a great way to spend my last day at Kwanda base!