Finally into the forest again – elephants, duikers, gorillas, birds, and lots of trees. This trip has had too much teaching and meetings to plan the future and sitting in various modes of transportation and not enough elephants! While all is important, and I knew it would be this way ahead of time, still it is rejuvenating for me to hike in the forest and connect with the environment we are working to save.
Today we deployed an ARU in the 5km wide buffer zone where the Precious Woods forestry concession shares a boundary with Ivindo National Park. I’m not entirely sure what this means in terms of logging activity (and Precious Woods might have logged this area before the designation of a buffer zone) but the Wildlife Conservation Society wants to monitor hunting activity here. The ‘cascade bai’, where we recorded elephants in 2007-2009, and where two elephants were recently shot, is only a few kilometers from this buffer.
Certainly there are plenty of old logging roads penetrating into the buffer zone, nearly all now closed off with huge tree-trunks pulled into place as they finished work here. Fortunately we had an employee from the company with us, with his huge chain saw, because at least three times our access road would have been impassable because of tree-falls. After several hours of stop and go driving we reached the place just outside of the buffer zone where the road was permanently blocked because a bridge had been destroyed. From here we walked about six kilometers to where we put the ARU.
The same path we walked was used recently by not only elephants, but lots of red river forest hogs, duikers of a couple of species, and a young leopard. Although we did see one old poacher camp there were no recent footsteps in the road (but lots of recent rain would have washed away anything more than a few days old). We had one wonderful encounter with an elephant along the edge of the old road.
Delays getting to the jump-off point and some pretty steep topography made me decide to put the ARU less far into the buffer zone than I had hoped. But we will get good information one way or the other.
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