GVI Kenya

Last night was a particularly special night for the lucky folk based in Shimoni.  Instead of tucking ourselves into beds in our house in the village, we all packed water, first aid kits, roll mats and torches and headed out into Shimoni forest for a campout! 

We have done this before, but not since this time last year.  The reasons being that during January – March season, there is no chance of rain, and the mosquitoes are few and far between!  Any other time of year and one could end up getting rather wet and eaten alive by the biting critters.

Heading to transect 2

We prepared a huge pot of potato salad, bought ourselves two whole chickens, scrubbed our handy homemade grill, and marched out to section 22 of transect 2 to set up.  We had been out scouting earlier in the day, and had found a nice open area that didn’t have too much coral rag.  We all gathered deadwood off the forest  floor for firewood and got the fire going without any trouble.  Julien (a volunteer from Portugal) proceeded to cook the chicken to perfection in a lime and chilli marinade! 

Arriving at the site

Once we were all fed and settled, we donned our forest boots and torches and headed out for a night walk!  Night walks are one of my favorite things to do in the forest – it is a completely different place at night.  The forest is alive with nocturnal creatures; the rustling of small feet in the leaf litter and the night calls of the various animals are all around you, making you strain your eyes into the shadows to look for the telltale reflections of eyes in the torchlight.

Clearing the area

We were fortunate to get some awesome sightings of several sunis and a pair of small eared galagos (bushbabies) hopping through the trees.  These two animals are the ones most likely to be seen at night, as they are the most abundant nocturnal animals in the forest. 

Let there be fire!

Sunis are tiny antelope, whose shoulders rarely rise above 40cm off the ground.  They are primarily nocturnal, and feed on leaves, shoots and fruits on the forest  floor.  They are very shy creatures, but get stunned in the torchlight, so night walks are the only times you can get a really good look at them.  Small eared galagos are one of my favorite animals – relatively large for a bushbaby, with incredibly soft, wooly fur, bushy tails and huge eyes that glow red in torchlight.  Apart from being very cute, they are considered to be the closest living representatives of the earliest primates.  Their form of locomotion has been retained, and you can see the subtle differences between them and other primates. 

Julien in charge of the chicken

Unfortunately we didn’t manage to get any good photos of the animals seen, but it was a great experience for all present.  We are going to do this a couple more times in the next couple of months hopefully, to take advantage of the season and to get some good photos of the nocturnal wildlife.  We’ll keep you updated (naturally…)

Relaxing after the night walk

Hi there, a while ago we were blogging about our midnight feasters… up to 3 bushbabies that climbed through our kitchen window under the cover of darkness to share our bananas! One of them was missing one his front legs which may be why he was such a common visitor for some easy pickings, but remained agile enough to leap around the kitchen with banana in mouth - he or she (they move too quick to be able to work out!) was named Yardy after a few suggestions… three feet in a yard!

However since March they had been notable by their absence and we were beginnig to wonder what had happened to them, hoping it was simply that with the arrival of the rains they were finding their food easily enough elsewhere. Bushbabies, in our case the small-eared galago, are nocturnal foragers of gums, flowers, seeds, fruits and insects so they have a diverse menu to choose from. They are also a little partial to alcohol, or at least fermenting fruits, and where I worked in Tanzania before, the swahili phrase ‘kama komba’ (like a bushbaby) was the local equivalent of ‘pissed as a newt’… a term for someone who it a little too drunk!

Anyway, the pleasing news for us at least, is that over the last few nights one of the bushbabies has been back to supplement its diet with our bananas and we don’t mind one bit! No confirmed sightings of Yardy yet, but we’ll be keeping a close eye on our kitchen window before bedtime once again, and will be sure to let you know!

Hello again everyone

Well I hope you’ve enjoyed the last couple of blogs from some of the other members of GVI here in Kenya.  I thought I’d do this one myself, to tell you about the exciting night we had.

Last night we embarked on our second night sleeping out in Shimoni East Forest.  This being our second time, we were even better prepared (with spare batteries for the torches this time!) and had another awesome night.

We headed in at about 6pm, when the forest is bathed in that amazing orange light, and the temperature has fallen to a slightly more pleasant level.  We headed east for about half a kilometer, approximately in the middle between transect 1 and 2.  We went back to the same spot we went to last week; a rather convenient natural clearing that is (almost) devoid of coral rag.  After collecting deadwood and preparing a safe spot for our cooking fire (we want to leave as little evidence of us being there as possible), we all laid out our roll mats and made ourselves comfortable. 

The forest is such an amazing place to be as the sun is setting; you get the feeling all the creatures of the day are winding down, and you get that period of about 20 minutes where there is silence and calm.  Then once the sun has set, all the night noises begin…
After an incredible dinner of nyama choma (BBQ’d meat!), we all gathered our torches, whistles and compasses and headed off for a night walk deeper into the forest.

A.P – A former student of the Kenya Wildlife Service Training Institute – getting ready to cook dinner

We were not to be disappointed!  About 5 minutes after leaving we head a noise just to the right of us.  We all spun around and shone our torches to where the sound came from, and standing right there, no more than 3.5 metres away from us, was a suni!  A Suni (Neotragus moschatus) is a tiny antelope with long, slender legs, that stands no more than 30-40cm off the ground.  It was immediately stunned by the torchlight, allowing us an unbelievably close view of a usually very shy antelope.  It then proceeded to walk slowly around the area, foraging on nearby leaves, never going more than 6 or 7 metres away from us.  We watched it in silence for at least 10 minutes.  It was, hands down, the best sighting of a suni I have ever had!

The suni!

We carried on the walk, our spirits soaring, and were lucky enough to get a brief sighting of a small-eared galago (bushbaby), and another suni, although it simply didn’t compare to the first one!

Its eyes reflect the torchlight

Suni decides to start moving away

We then headed back to camp, and joined Adam (the unfortunate one who drew the short straw and had to stay back to watch the fire), where we all lay around the dying embers, and fell asleep to the sounds of the forest.

It was the second successful camp out in the forest, and I’m pretty convinced this is going to become a regular activity!
That’s all from me for now, I’ll be back soon!
Regards,
Matt

So the last blog was all about going out in search of the wildlife… today’s is more about the wildlife coming to us. I mentioned before that we had discovered the night time raiders of our bananas; a pair of short-eared bush babies (or short eared galagos as they should be referred to).

Provisionally named ‘Bushy’ and ‘Fishy’ – I know it doesn’t seem overly original but we’re not being quite as obvious as it seems… they’re named in honour of Ekens, our former national scholarship programme student from Kenya Wildlife Service Training Institute, and then intern, who has been battling to recovery from an accident four months ago. He loves the bush… and fish! We know he’ll be as excited as we are to have the forest wildlife sharing our office and home…

It was only a matter of days after the arrival of our expedition members, before we were back in Shimoni’s coastal forest and underway with our research programme. The beginning of 2009 did not disappoint… within just the first week it felt like we’d seen an expedition’s worth of biodiversity. Heading out at 5.30am on bird surveys was made more than worthwhile with groups of colobus seemingly in every tree above. With the onset of the dry season, the leaves are falling and we were treated to clear views of colobus crashing through the branches and Syke’s monkeys scampering below.

The bird surveys delivered a hatrick of hornbills – crowned, silvery-cheeked and trumpeter. Elephant shrews were in evidence every day, hurtling over the leaf litter as were the small suni antelope. The night walk provided everyone with a clear view of a suni as it stood in our torchlight for a minute before disappearing in to the bush and bush babies too, their bright orange reflective eyes giving them away. However the most exciting ‘cameo’ of the week was a little chap that we hadn’t recorded since our first sighting nearly three years ago… an impressively cryptic species in the dry leaf litter, it seems remarkable that we should see it at all, and very satisfying to have a short-tailed (or bearded) pygmy chameleon make a reappearance on our casual observations database.

However, it seems that we didn’t need to go to all the effort of 5.30am departures and hot sweaty treks to the furthest reaches of our transects to enjoy Shimoni’s rich wildlife… we didn’t even need to leave the kitchen. Having quietly cursed rats for leaving half chewed bananas on the kitchen floor, I was proven wrong when two brown bundles of fur climbed through the window. The short-eared bush babies have returned every night since, and I can happily report that mangoes make for a suitable alternative to bananas for our uninvited dinner guests. And just when we thought our forest week was over, and we could relax with a cold beer at Smugglers, the biggest surprise of them all dropped by… a bush pig behind the bar!