GVI Kenya

Once again - HUGE apologies from all of us for the lack of blogs.  Fingers crossed, our technical issue is solved and the power cuts seem to have vastly reduced in number!  Things are looking up, so hopefully we will be back in our routine and giving you all daily updates on things down here on the south coast of Kenya.  Enough of that…..BLOG!!!

On Friday one of our forest teams was treated to a sight that has not been witnessed by GVI since our arrival in 2006!  I have been here for one and a half years, and the closest thing I have seen to this creature is an old skull, in the northern parts of the forest.  Chris, one of our volunteers from the USA, tells us what happened:

“It was a nice evening walk through Shimoni east forest, with the intention of getting some evening colobus behavioural surveys.  It was a nice night, and we were looking forward to seeing how black and white colobus behaved in the cooler parts of the day.  As it turns out, we got a much more exciting sighting than a colobus monkey (which is a phrase rarely uttered here…).

Preparing to head into the field

As we were walking up and down the north / south spine we had sighted some colobus in a tree in the distance.  To get a better look we decided to follow a village path which led towards the colobus.  This route turned out to be fruitless however, so we were deciding what to do when we heard the familiar sounds of a Zanj elephant shrew in the undergrowth.  We crept around the corner to see if we could see it, but instead of a shrew we were faced with a very large antelope looking straight at us!  We had a great look at it in the brief seconds before it took off into the undergrowth. 

We later identified it as a bushbuck!  It was an amazing sighting because they are said to have been completely hunted out of this area, and hopefully this is a good sign for the future.”

Chris Allen

Bushbuck (Kingdon, 1997)

In the past, I have asked some of the local people about the presence of bushbuck in Shimoni’s forests, and many have said they used to be quite abundant, but were hunted out of the area.

The bushbuck (Tragelaphus scriptus) is a small bovine, that converges with many antelope and small deer.  They are found across most of sub-Saharan Africa (excluding the south west) and are essentially dependent on thick cover, which would make the coastal forests of Shimoni ideal (Kingdon, 1997). 

From the excitement of the group (especially Kez who has been working here for over a year), I could tell it was an incredible moment for them all, and I am seething with envy!  I am over the moon that this beautiful animal may be making a comeback in the area, although one sighting is not enough to claim that quite yet.  With all our eyes and ears open, hopefully this will not be the first and last time!

Until next time…