Chimpanzees

Rebecca, the scientist who is studying Gishwati’s chimpanzees, kindly offered to take me out with the research team for a glimpse of the chimpanzees. This group of about 20 is at the very beginning stages of habituation, meaning that they are not entirely accustomed to human visitors. Very few people have ever seen these chimps. It was an amazing opportunity.

We set out around 10am to meet the morning team, which had presumably been following the chimps since daybreak. When we found them around noon, after a brisk uphill hike that left me embarrassingly winded, the morning team had lost the small number of chimps they’d been watching. We did hear a few chimps hooting in the not-too-far distance, so we went off-trail, up and down steep hillsides that further reminded me I need to work out more. We were hot on their trail - following the paths of trampled bushes and broken vines they’d left in their slides downhill, noting wads of spit out bark or bites taken out of leaves. I was exhausted and thinking of exiting the forest with the morning team to try again another day when, very nearby, a great chorus of whoops rose from the trees.

I stuck around, and was treated to several hours of chimpanzee viewing: a mother and infant eating in a tree, the bold male who I thought of as the class clown selecting the closest appetizing tree to us for his meal, chimps swinging from trees and vines, the very unappealing swollen red bottom of a chimp in heat, chimps wadging bark, chimps eating leaves, chimps scratching and grooming, chimps building nests. What incredible creatures they are, and it is a privilege to work with the organization charged with protecting them.

Village night life

IST in Kibuye!

There was a gorgeous view, great company, redundant sessions, swimming on an island with several varieties of birds and almost sinking a boat carved out of a tree, and lots of lizards.

It's amazing how they cling to the ceiling! The two guys chasing the one with the moth in his mouth pursued him right up to the ceiling as well.

Ants in my Pants - again

Remember the scene in the Poisonwood Bible where ants swarm through the village, devouring food, chickens, small children, and everything else the fleeing Congolese villagers left behind? Fortunately, their Rwandan cousins are less vicious, or maybe just less numerous, but they still draw blood when they bite.

Today’s hike to the villages that surround the forest didn’t even bring me inside the forest LINK, just within a few meters, but the ants are still 2/2. My counterpart and I hiked for 6 hours, visiting several villages that abut the forest. He was checking on the type of crop they’re growing; last September there was tension because the chimps were crop raiding in fields of corn, so GACP is trying to convert these fields to potatoes. (They also might try to convert some to pastureland for cows; I suggested tea to be sold to the nearby Pfunda tea company.) For me it was a good opportunity to introduce myself to people in some of the other villages near Gishwati. 

Flowers of Rwanda

Happy birthday Mama Wacu! More Rwandan flowers in my Picassa album here.

Brain fruit!

While hiking in Gishwati, I encountered a most delicious and novel fruit. My Rwandan guides in the forest called it umwufe. My coworkers, as we watched the World Cup final and munched on its kernels, said that it's icyufu. I don't know if it has an English name, so I'm dubbing it brain fruit, because that's what it looks like - anyone know what it really is? It's a yellow-brown assemblage of partially edible kernels around what I think is an inedible (or at least unappetizing) core.

To eat it, snap off kernels and suck on them. The taste is a bit like the little sour-but-sweet Chinese cherries. Each kernel has a pit in it, some small enough to eat and others as big and hard as a marble. I ate the slightly stringy fruit inside the kernels and threw out the leathery skin.

Green ones on a tree, and ripe ones on the ground waiting for chimps to eat them.

Gishwati Forest

When you hear someone in Rwanda say, “we must move beyond the tragedy of what happened here,” your thoughts immediately jump to the genocide. In the case of Gishwati forest, this statement refers to the massive deforestation that has taken place over the last 80 years, and the current optimism about conservation efforts. At one time, Gishwati stretched across a vast section of Western Rwanda and was home to chimpanzees and countless other plants and animals. Rwanda’s incredible population density has driven the deforestation, and by the 1980s much of the forest was either farmland or pastures for cows, which are very common in the region. (Upon returning to town, I was asked if I had brought back any milk.) Following the genocide, refugees from the Congo resettled in the area, further reducing the size of the forest.

Today, Gishwati has diminished to a sliver of its original grandeur. In addition to the smallholder farms and pastureland that have replaced centries-old trees, locals have planted eucalyptus groves both in the forest’s former footprint and inside the remaining forest. Eucalyptus is a non-native plant that’s fast-growing and highly profitable when converted into timber. For the desperately poor people in the surrounding district of Rutsiro, the remaining forest contains timber and other valuable resources, such as fruit for eating or bark for basket making. As the population continues to grow, people are sometimes at odds with the forest and its inhabitants: for example, chimps raiding nearby corn fields.

The deforestation has left a band of 13-15 chimps isolated from other forests in Rwanda. It has increased the already massive erosion problem in the area (landslides in the surrounding districts displaced hundreds earlier this year). Some say that conserving what remains of Gishwati is impossibly ambitious. However, the Great Ape Trust’s Forest of Hope project is working to reforest the area, study the chimps, increase local awareness of environment issues, and expand local livelihoods opportunities that would encourage a symbiotic rather than extractive relationship with the forest. According to the website, they’ve grown the area of the forest by 67% in less than three years. The people I met who work with Forest of Hope were a dedicated and talented bunch, and I'm optimistic on their behalf.

Here are some photos from my 7-kilometer hike through the forest.

Below left, a tree the forest was named for. Right, a tree stump which could probably serve as a parking spot for a small car.

This next picture has got to be a metaphor for something, but I'll leave that to your imaginations.

Like something out of science fiction, these giant ferns with poisonous thorns crowded the path in places. Left, the hazardous trunk, and right, a look up at the canopies.

This slug was so big it had its own bugs along for the ride. FYI, I wear a women's US7.5.

Shortly after we arrived at the waterfall, it started to pour: a welcome relief in the dry season.

 
The rain made me nervous about my camera (for a while I tucked it into the ziplock that had held my lunch) but it brought out this giant earthworm, maybe the coolest site of the hike.

In many spots the path passed charred remnants of charcoal production, one of the deforestation culprits. 

We crossed several log bridges. Right, our guide and his scythe (used for trail cutting).

Several of these signs surround the forest to address the problem of locals using it as a toilet:

It’s not allowed to defecate here
Don’t destroy life
And the environment in general
If you are caught you will be punished








Finally, on the ride back north to Gisenyi I snapped a stereotypical "Land of a Thousand Hills" photo. The emerald blanket of tea in the foreground is common in much of northwestern Rwanda. The brown on the left has been recently harvested. The hills go on forever; no photo can do them justice.

A giant spider

Saw this huge critter in the bathroom when I was doing dishes (gross when I put it like that – but the bathroom is where the running water is). Poured a basin of dish water on him and succeeded in making him scamper into the hallway, where a shoe covered with paper did the trick.

Birds

Taken from our training center.