Senegal: Manatees in the Desert I worked and traveled around Senegal for almost all of January, but internet access was hard to come by, and even when I got online, I usually only had a few minutes to check emails. So I have a lot of news to catch up on! I arrived in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, on 5 January and spent the […]

Mission Senegal Happy 2009! I hope everyone had wonderful and restful holidays! I’ve been busy here in Gabon, finishing end of the year reports and grant applications and planning for manatee rescue captures in Senegal (see below for more about the situation there). I leave for Dakar on Sunday night and I’m very excited. Aside from helping these particular manatees, the opportunity to finally see

I just received a nice Christmas present- Columbus Zoo has notified me that they have awarded me a grant for my work in Gabon! This is my second year of funding from them, and I will always have a special place in my heart for them, because they were the first funders to award me money for my work in Gabon. This time the money

Gabon Magazine My first popular article on West African manatees has just been published in Gabon Magazine. To see the interactive web version, click here and then “turn the pages” to the story on page 28. Or you can select “Jump to Page” from the menu in the upper left hand corner and select page 28. Unfortunately they had to use photos of Florida manatees,

Meanwhile, in Senegal… For the past month my colleagues in Senegal have been dealing with a difficult manatee situation. Thanks to a new dam built on an arm of the Senegal River at Matam (a town on the northeastern border of Senegal), some manatees are now trapped above the dam. It is believed that waterway is an annual migration route for the manatees, so they

Presentations This past week ended well, despite not being able to get out on the lagoon for surveys. I did 3 training sessions for ecoguides, which included background on manatees and an introduction to collecting samples from carcasses (basic stuff: GPS points, photos, how to determine the sex, how to collect genetics and ear bones). It will be very helpful to have other people trained

It’s been a challenging week! Late last week I received news that 3 manatee carcasses had been reported within 1km of each other near Akaka, which is an enormous swamp area on a river system between the N’dogo Lagoon (where I am) and the N’gowe Lagoon just to the north. It raised red flags to hear about 3 carcasses in close proximity, especially after we

Number 5 When I returned to Gamba early last week I heard that another manatee carcass had been found in Sette Cama. On Wednesday I was able to catch a ride back up there on a boat that was delivering gas and beer. On Thursday morning (Thanksgiving in the USA… I was reminded of my days working for the state of Florida manatee program, because

Rembo Bongo, Part 2 On our second day of surveys we returned to Lac Mafoume, the one lake we were able to boat into last year. It was incredible to see how much the water had risen. Early morning view of the Moukalaba-Doudou mountains from Lac Mafoume. View of the channel leading into Lac Mafoume, September 2007 Photo taken in almost the same place last