In Search of the Giant Otter Shrew...: 10 months in Central Africa

It has been about 5 months since I left Gabon and came back to the US, and I've finally found some time to reflect back on my experiences there. Everything about living in Gabon from the moment I arrived to the moment that I left was extremely difficult. Living and working in a country like this where the language is not my own, consists of a series of struggles each and every day. Now don't get me wrong, I don't regret a minute I spent over there, but doesn't mean that it was easy.

By the time I left 10 months after first arriving in the country, a lot had been accomplished.

- We established about 28 or so transects in and around the National Park, and surrounding villages. They were each 2.5 km in length, and took 2-3 to cut open, with 3 guides cutting. Our job was to direct the guides in a straight line using a compass. This took about 4-5 months to get done!

- We began walking each of these transects 1-2 times a month to look for animals, and signs of animals (dung, nests, etc.)

- We also set up 6 or so tree phenology routes in and around the research station to look at when each trees grew news leaves, fruited, etc.

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But on to the fun stuff - anecdotes and pictures!!

A couple quick anecdotes of my favorite memories!

- Best animal sighting

We were out in the forest one day cutting a new transect. There were 3 guides cutting up in front, I was following directing with the compass, another research assistant was behind me with the GPS and flagging tape, and then the 4th guide was about the back with a hip chain. If you are not familiar with that a hip chain is essentially a box with thread in it, so you tie the thread to a tree at the beginning and then as you walk you leave thread behind, and then on the box there is a counter telling you how many meters you have walked. So it is how we measure the transects. Anyway the 4th guide was walking along pulling the hip chain and something pulls on the thread, he turns around and there is nothing there. He keeps going and it happens again, so he turns around and sees something moving. He quietly turns to me then and says gorilla (in my mind I'm thinking how can you calmly say gorilla!!!!!!) so I quickly run back up the hill behind me in the direction that he sees the gorilla and there in the distance down our transect is a gorilla just sitting there holding onto the thread. It sits there and just watches us for a couple seconds then runs away. BEST SIGHTING EVER!

- Scariest elephant encounter

One of my guides and I were in the forest working on a phenology route. I was directing him between trees, and then we were stop at each one and record how much fruit is on the tree, and how many leaves, etc. We are just wandering around following our route and we hear branches falling (aka an elephant). We quickly run the other direction back towards camp. After a couple hundred meters we stop and listen. It seems the elephant has moved away so we head back to our route to finish it up. We get close to the same tree again and we hear branches again so we run back towards camp a second time. At this point I'm thinking I'm not going back to that tree - its bad luck. So I persuade my guide that we can finish that route another day and we should just go work on the next one. So we head back towards camp to another route. This route was closer to camp but in a section of dense forest, without any paths nearby. So we head on it (my guide has a machete to cut our path) and start recording data, and then once again we heard branches breaking, but pretty close to us. We run away from the noise, but we get stopped by fallen trees since we are in a dense part of the forest. And unfortunately we can still hear the elephants, and it sounds like it is getting closer! We hide behind a tree and duck down, my guide protecting me and we sit there together shaking while we listen to the elephant moving around. We stayed there FOREVER (though prob less than a minute) and finally we hear silence the elephant has moved away. As soon as I hear silence I turn to my guide and I said cut us a path!! so he starts just cutting straight through the dense foliage towards the camp, so he is cutting while we are both running as quick as we can back to the research camp. We finally emerge frantically, and we get to the opening of the research camp out of breath and shaking and there is a group of entomologists just standing in the middle of the camp just staring at us like we are out of our mind. I'm sure we looked like crazy people how quickly we were running out of there! After that I told my guide I was done for the day and he could go home because I wasn't going back into the forest.

And some pictures!! (sorry the order makes no sense - but some animals, people, and random other things)