Down the tributaries of the Tshuapa, the Lomami and the Lualaba
Category: Places, Threats, people | Date: Nov 29 2007 | By: admin
I got a fuzzy Thuraya (satellite) call from Maurice this morning. His team is out of the forest and waiting for dugout pickup way up the Lomami. I hope I got the location right. I relayed the message to Ashley via email, that he picked up on his satellite connected Bgan.
Maurice’s team taking off to start their reconnaissance circuit three weeks ago. They are in the small dugout, the large one is in the foreground.
Exploration groups are spread over all three major Rivers and their tributaries during this second mission. Along with Ashley and John the field leaders are Bernard , Maurice, Dino and Kahindo.
I got an even fuzzier Thuraya call from John yesterday. He had been walking for the last three days through swamp and has another five days to go under thick swamp canopy (no satellite connection). Tomorrow I will post the news and photos John sent by Bgan. He is in the northeast sector of the landscape, an area turning out to be quite different from the rest of TL2 and not what we expected.
More fresh killed bushmeat in Obenge. The new agricultural project will make bushmeat less essential. This is a water chevrotain, a beautiful doe-eyed, water loving ungulate.
Ashley spent more than a week in the village of Obenge before heading further up river. Obenge is getting organized to be our base camp . Here are his thoughts:
“The more I learn about this village the more I realize that this is the wildwest !
The village is full of bandits. Apparently for a lot of these people, if they left and
went to Ubundu or somewhere they would be arrested. Half of them seem to be
bloody murderers or some such. Very odd. A village in the middle of nowhere,
that no one takes any notice of, A perfect hide out.”
Major Ranger shows off his ivory. He is in the middle with the army belt around his neck and arm slung around his woman. Our Crispan is looking a bit uncomfortable at his side.
“I’m now getting info that there are 35 guns hidden in various houses here. These are army guns- AK 47s – elephant guns. People are quite nervous. These are the guns Colonel Thomps left behind and that his second in command, Major Ranger is still using. We got to get the military down here to take them. The sooner the better. However, not so quickly that we do it wrong: we don’t want the military getting all these guns and going on a hunting spree themselves!”
After he wrote this, Ashley took off further up river, It is from there that he will pick up Maurice before heading back downstream.
Obenge women bringing in thatch from the forest for our base camp
Soon we will all meet up in Kisangani, all of us except the “permanent” team that has taken up long term residence at Obenge to establish our base camp.
Our Obenge Long Drop : essential first bit of construction in any camp.
One Down for the Lomami
Category: About the project, Places, Threats | Date: Nov 22 2007 | By: admin
BUT SO MUCH FARTHER TO GO!
Does someone in this photo look familiar?
He has his head tipped to the side and is NOT looking at us (Ashley corrected me).
He is also in the photo below. Big time elephant poacher, Colonel Tom (or Thomps) has a new – temporary? – persona. A small group of military were sent up the Lomami to bring the Colonel out of the forest. They did…in probably the only way possible : very civilly (He walked across the forest with an escort, but of his own “free will”). We are told he will soon be sent to military retraining camp many miles away. Hope so.
May he never reign in his forest camps again
Does this mean that the remaining Lomami elephants are safe now that the principal elephant poacher is out of the forest.
Safer, that is for sure , BUT the threats have not evaporated:
Ashley who is now in Obenge, a village well up the Lomami, says this:
“Colonel Thomps took 300 kgs of ivory out of Obenge just before he left the forest”
And Ashley adds that Colonel Thomps left his Major (maimai) and his Major is now in Obenge and has guns:
“…he is planning on going back into the forest in about 3 days to hunt more elephant…”
BUT WE HAVE MADE A DIFFERENCE. Colonel Thomps is out and the Major “knows his time is coming to an end…”
Village meeting to discuss increased agriculture, decreased hunting. pros and cons.
Being on the ground and in the forest makes a difference. John is now west of Ubundu, Ashley at Obenge, Bernard on the upper Tshuapa, Dino and Faustin east of Opala, and Maurice north of Katopa. Each of these is a team leader and working at the head of a group. There are also two full time community conservationists, Lambert and Crispan, on the ground based out of Obenge.
This is the TL2 project. We work from the ground up.
One of the new agricultural plots TL2 is helping to establish in Obenge — there will be 150
Ashley is done in but the Obenge women carry on with the garden work
It is possible to start from the top and work down as well. With only token field work ahead of time, it is still possible to have a Protected Area Proclaimed. Has it protected the right area? will the village populations really accept it? does it have the international support it needs? will the government really follow through with Reserve infrastructure?
This is the situation of Sankuru Nature Reserve, a neighbor and overlapping the TL2 landscape. We make an interesting comparison of conservation approaches. May we both succeed.
Learning the Lomami
Category: About the project, Places, people, wildlife | Date: Nov 09 2007 | By: admin
The first exploration of the TL2 landscape (Tshuapa – Lomami – Lualaba) was June-July-August. Now the teams are re-gathering in Kisangani and about to launch the second exploratory mission. What have they already learned? What big unknowns remain?
Dino and Maurice sharing tips with diagrams in the sand before splitting into two teams to explore the remaining unknown areas. Behind them their tents are pitched at the temporary Kisangani base.
Exploration involves walking long reconnaissance routes (“recce” ) through the forest,
each about 150km through pathless forest. The routes are traced ahead of time to GPS points. One recce, moving from point to point, generally takes a team anywhere from twelve to fifteen days. During the three months down the Lomami two teams did six large recces (map below) and a third smaller team carried out shorter recces close to the river.
The first map on the top-left shows the outline of the TL2 landscape that we plan to explore (see map below for rivers and relief) and the colored squares show where the teams, so far, have actually reached and the amount of time spent in each GPS-defined square. The other maps show the distribution of elephants (!) and other large mammals.
So, what did Ashley and teams find out?
There are still good populations of duikers, small forest antelope, including the blue duiker, the bay duiker, the yellow-back duiker and several species of yet to be identified red duiker. These are all most abundant in the South.
The blue duiker is the smallest and most resilient to hunting of all the forest duikers. The only forest antelope that is smaller is the Pygmy Antelope that hunts in natural openings and around the edges of agricultural clearings.
There are still good populations of the larger ungulates (including okapi as well as forest buffalo and pig) and of primates. These too are all most important in the Southern forests.
The forest buffalo is different from the savanna buffalo. ©Reto Kuster. It moves in smaller groups, is often more reddish, and has smaller horns. The Mbuti (Pygmies) consider it the most dangerous forest animal to happen on accidentally in the forest!
What is alarming is the disappearance of elephants (see map above). They are essentially gone from the South after being hunting out by rebels skirting the forest in the mid-1990s. Forest elephants are now reduced to a single group of populations around Obenge. And here they are under intense hunting pressure by groups using military arms.
General hunting pressure with traps and shotguns is much more widespread
The map on the left shows where permanent villages of more than 100 inhabitants occur along the Lomami. Only the very north has frequent villages and the middle sector is close to empty. The map on the right shows where the teams found hunting sign along their transects…and it was everywhere.
What is remarkable is how widespread the hunting pressure can be despite the scarcity of permanent villages with 100 or more inhabitants.
This hunting camp is on the west side of the Lomami River and south of Obenge
And the Bonobo? Congo’s own species of ape – chimpanzee like – but long limbed and matriarchal. It too follows the pattern of most of the other large mammals and is most abundant in the south.
Bonobo’s were more abundant in the south of the TL2 landscape — Why??
How much are these distributions due to hunting to feed the market of Kisangani or how much are they a matter of preference of the slighter higher and more broken “edge” forests of the south. How much are they a result of avoidance of swamp forest?
All of these questions will go into the forest with the teams that are just now launching from Kisangani.
Ashley is testing the Rbgan before push off down the Lomami
There are four teams that will divide up to cover the unexplored portions of the TL2 landscape. Ashley will move down the Lomami to the center of the landscape with the teams led by Bernard and Maurice. He will also be with Lambert and Crispin who are setting up a community conservation project in Obenge (more about that later). John will cover the northeast portion with Dino (above) and Faustin.
A jolly pair: me and John, both dapper in Colleen’s shirts before John’s departure for Ubundu (upper Lualaba)
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