African Manatee Work Goes Regional!! As many of you know, it has been my hope for the past several years to create a regional network of African manatee researchers to increase communication, data collection efforts and collaboration between people working in different countries. Manatee research in Africa is still in its infancy and many people who are trying to get started have told me they […]
10 days in eastern Senegal On February 9th we headed east from Dakar towards Matam, a town on the Senegal River. This is where we rescued manatees trapped behind a dam in January 2009, and it’s the place where manatees migrate in the rainy season onto a huge floodplain to feed on submerged grasses and plants in this otherwise extremely dry region. It’s a 12
Onward to Senegal… I haven’t been blogging this past month because I’ve been working on lots of annual reports, grant applications and export permits, which are all necessary and important, but definitely not thrilling enough for commentary! I’m happy to report that I’ve cleared quite alot of office work off my plate now and am heading back to fieldwork. I fly to Senegal tomorrow night
Gabon: Manatee Capture! The frustration had definitely been building. Eight days and nights around the clock setting nets and waiting, having manatees punch holes through the nets every night, second guessing our decisions about where nets should be set, and seeing manatees near the nets everyday, was making us all crazy. Not to mention the heat/humidity, the bugs and the dwindling food supply. Two team
Gabon: Sette Cama Surprises On the morning of 3 December, our team left Gamba and crossed the huge N’dogo Lagoon in 2 boats loaded with all of our gear. It took us just over an hour to reach the Eaux et Forets (Water and Forestry) brigade where we stayed in two houses on the lagoon, thanks to generosity from WWF. After arriving and unpacking all
Gabon: The long trail to Gamba We arrived in Gamba last night after 20 hours of driving most of the length of Gabon. Of the whole trip, only 6 hours of it was on paved road (albeit with huge potholes), the rest was sand tracks across the savannah, driving down riverbeds through the forest, flooded elephant paths and 2 tiny one-car-at-a-time ferries. On the paved
Gabon: On my Way to Tag Manatees! I left Dakar early this morning and am now enroute to Gabon. I’ll be there until the end of February and the big plan for this year is to try to capture manatees in N’dogo Lagoon, do baseline health assessments and outfit them with GPS tags to track their movements. They won’t be easy to catch, they’re secretive
Ghana: Manatee Training Workshop 2009 I just spent an action-packed two weeks at Lake Volta, Ghana teaching a research and conservation training workshop for the West African manatee! It was great. This is my second year participating in the workshop, and co-teaching it with Patrick Ofori-Dansen from the University of Ghana. It’s funded by Earthwatch and coordinated by Nature Conservation Research Center (NCRC, a Ghanian
Senegal: Delta Saloum Last week I spent three days in the northern part of the Saloum Delta, a huge mangrove estuary in central Senegal. It s a beautiful area with salt flats filled with flamingoes, savannah with giant baobab trees, countless mangrove channels and lots of fishing boats. I had a chance to talk to many fishermen about manatees there and to distribute informational posters,