CAMPing in Mayumba Flying into Mayumba on Monday. From the plane we also saw a humpback whale just offshore. My online silence this week is due to being in coastal and marine planning (nicknamed CAMP) meetings all week in Mayumba, a national park on the southern border of Gabon. These meetings were conviened by WCS to unify species and habitat work and fundraising all along […]

Happy Returns Last night I arrived in Libreville, Gabon after 4 days of travel from Angola. To get here I spent 2 nights in Luanda, the capital of Angola, followed by 2 nights in Johannesburg, S. Africa. It always takes awhile to get anywhere in Africa. Luanda was very loud because their elections are coming up, so people drive endlessly through the streets waving flags

Angola Trip #2 Wrap-up Yesterday I left Soyo and flew to Luanda, Angola’s capital. Tomorrow I’ll fly to Gabon via Johannesburg, S. Africa (there are no direct connections between Angola & Gabon, so it’ll take a few days to get there, par for the course in Africa). Tim & Sal are in Soyo for a few more days to deploy 2 more MARUs. Although we

Outrageous Whale Day!Another component of the whale work here is the deployment and recovery of acoustic recording devices (called Marine Autonomous Recording Units or MARUs, developed by Cornell University Ornithology Lab, Bioacoustics Research Program) to record whale song. Actually they continuously record everything 24/7 while they’re deployed, but the goal is to record whales. The devices are really cool (I wrote about the same devices

Last Peninsula trip, for now On Thursday afternoon Joao and I boated back over to the Sereia peninsula to do a few more interviews at villages. We took along Mendez and Gisela, the Angolan students, and showed them the habitat around Pululu Channel (which is more like a small lagoon than a channel) and another gorgeous channel where there are enormous mangrove trees. Mendez told

The Bone CollectorsThe day after our incredible find and collection of manatee bones at N’Tutu, Warren and I documented and sampled each one back at base. We were assisted by Gisela, an Angolan biology student who, along with a recent graduate named Mendez, came to Soyo as part of an agreement with the Angolan government to see our marine mammal research here firsthand. It was

Whale DaysManatee work in Angola is part of a larger project here that also includes cetacean and sea turtle research. On this trip Tim and our other collaborator Sal (who arrived last Tuesday) are doing cetacean work, and since most of my background with whales and dolphins has been stranding work (dead and injured), it’s been nice to have some opportunities to see happy, healthy

More images from Congo River surveys While waiting quietly for manatees or stopping in at villages to talk to people about them, we have plenty of time to see lots of other interesting things on the river… Broad-billed Roller Mudskipper, a fish that comes up on mud banks to search for food. The way this guy walked around on his fins reminded me of a

Busy days on the Congo I haven’t had much time in front of the computer over the past few days- we’ve been out on the water all day everyday and I also got a nasty cold, so I’ve been doing nothing but working and sleeping with a few meals somewhere in between. We’ve made three trips up the Congo River looking for manatees and talking