Bush Baby | GVI Kenya

Bush Babies at Home & Komba with Calf!

Category: Cetacean research, Dolphins, Kisite Mpunguti MPA, Uncategorized, bush baby | Date: Jan 30 2009 | By: gvikenya

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…

Well they’ve been climbing through our kitchen window every night since, having decided not to be overly concerned by our presence. And they’ve brought guests; two nights ago we had three of them clambering around outside the kitchen. And last night we discovered that one of them has lost the lower half of one of its forelegs. Clearly a major disadvantage for an arboreal species but with banana in mouth its having no problems moving around the kitchen, and it seems to be an old, healed injury. ‘Stumpy’ seems a little insensitive for the third of our banana thieves so we’re inviting suggestions!

Meanwhile back out at sea yesterday, no reappearance of the spinner dolphins, but the research team caught up with some of the bottlenose dolphins near Kisite Island in the marine park, a group of 15. One of our identified individuals, ‘Komba’ (Kiswahili speakers will understand the link in this blog of two halves!) was recorded with a calf, not only happy news but also valuable data… we now know ‘Komba’ (or more formally ‘individual 036′) is a she!

Unfortunately, they also witnessed one of the tourist boats allowing their guests to jump in the water and swim with the dolphins… known to cause unnecessary disturbance and stress to wild dolphins, this was prohibited under the code of conduct introduced in 2007 and its a shame to see a regression in the standards of responsible tourism here.

Tags: bottlenose dolphin, bush baby, code of conduct, dolphin calf, dolphin tourism, galago, kisite mpunguti marine protected area

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Biodiversity in the Forest, Bush Babies in the Kitchen & Bush Pigs at the Bar!

Category: Birds, Coastal Forest, Colobus, Elephant Shrew, Shimoni Forest, Small mammals, Uncategorized, bush baby, chameleon | Date: Jan 21 2009 | By: gvikenya

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!