Hornbill | GVI Kenya

Colobus Census of Shimoni Forest

Category: African Fish Eagle, Coastal Forest, Colobus, Primate Research, Primate census, Shimoni Forest | Date: Aug 04 2009 | By: gvikenya

Today will be the first of a two part update on some exciting research going on in Shimoni Forest. We are attempting to build on work previously done in 2001 by Julie Anderson and then in 2007 by GVI. We are doing a colobus census of the whole forest!

Marta is a volunteer here with us for three months and is currently working towards her masters in environmental modeling, monitoring and reconstruction. She contacted us asking if she could use her time here to do the field-work for her project in the forest, consisting mainly of a colobus census – we welcomed her with open arms!

Preparing to synchronise watches

We timed the census for when we had the most number of people on the mainland, and managed to get a keen group of 15 people fired up and ready. To do the census we require groups to conduct what is essentially a primate community survey along all of our regular transects, plus groups moving through the forest in between the transects following compass bearings, so a group every 100 metres. Unfortunately our GPS’s do not work in the forest due to poor satellite coverage, so we had to devise a cunning system of counting paces and regular check points coordinated using mobile phones (on silent of course!), to ensure we were all moving through the forest at a similar pace.

The team heading in

In an ideal world, you would have enough people to do the entire forest in a single day, leaving you with a ‘snapshot’ population count. We don’t have enough people so are having to do it over two days. For those groups traveling between our regular marked and cut transects, it was pretty rough going – there was plenty of crawling through thickets and fighting through thorns. However our sense of adventure and the belief in the value of the work prevailed, and lots of smiling faces headed back to base.

Getting through one of the many thickets!

During the day five groups of colobus, ten groups of sykes and one group of yellow baboon were sighted. Some of the other casual observations included a pair of zanj elephant shrews, hornbills, African fish eagles and lots of red bellied coastal squirrels!

One of the sighted colobus

We’re all tired, but looking forward a second day out in the forest. We really can’t wait to see the results and compare them with the previous years. I’ll hopefully get a post out letting you all know how it went!

Tags: African Fish Eagle, colobus monkey, hornbill, Primate census, Primate Research, sykes monkey, yellow baboon, zanj elephant shrew

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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!