SPECTACULAR!! I am blown away by South Africa. Completely, stunningly gorgeous. We arrived on Saturday morning after a long overnight flight and were picked up at the airport by Tim’s friend Ken who lives outside Capetown on the southern peninsula. He and his wife Romy took us on a tour that afternoon and literally within minutes of starting out, we pulled up to a beach […]

Cape TownTonight Tim and I fly to Cape Town, South Africa to attend the Society of Marine Mammalogy biennal conference. I’ll present my Gabon manatee research as a scientific poster at a Sirenian Workshop before the main conference, as well as in an oral presentation at the main conference. The thought of speaking to 500 people is more than a bit intimidating, especially when the

Getting Religion On my last night at Iguela, I was invited into the village to watch a Bwiti ceremony. Bwiti is a West African religion where participants chew the Eboga plant to hallucinate and communicate with their ancestors. They do elaborate dances with fire, flinging it (and themselves) around wildly, all while wearing grass costumes. At some points they even purposely lit their costumes on

Return to Loango Since I’m not able to go to Angola to do manatee surveys this month (visa issues), I have a bit more time in Gabon. So I made arrangements to return to Iguela in Loango National Park. I did manatee surveys there for 3 weeks last year and found 4 manatee carcasses during that time. I had to leave the skeletons behind (many

Akanda This past weekend Angela and I went up to Akanda National Park, about 30 minutes north of Libreville. Manatees are rare there, but there are occasional sightings and reports of them hunted as bushmeat, so I primarily went to talk to villagers in the area. Unlike national parks in the USA, there are villages inside parks here, which can cause conflicts over hunting and

Cap Esterias- Part II After lunch we boated back to the mainland. Innocent talked a bit about manatees, then took us to meet an older fisherman named Timothe who knows a lot about manatees, turtles and cetaceans. Innocent and Timothe are both from the local Bange tribe and their cultural belief is that manatees are sacred, so they don’t hunt them. When asked why they

Cap Esterias- Part I Last Saturday Angela, Andrea, Virginia (sea turtle reseachers) and I took a day trip to Cap Esterias, which is located north of Libreville on a peninsula where the Atlantic Ocean meets Corisco and Mondah Bays. The town sits near the border of Akanda National Park and there are several small islands in the bay. We took a Taxi Brusse (bush taxi)

Langoue Bai Fair warning- if you’re only interested in manatees, skip to the last paragraph of this posting. I occasionally write about other things I’m seeing to give another perspective of where I am, and this is one of those times! For the past 4 days I took a much needed break from work and have been in the interior of Gabon at Ivindo National

It can’t always be exciting Starting last week I’m doing more office work in Libreville- analyzing data and preparing my presentation and scientific poster on the Gabon manatee work for the Society of Marine Mammalogy conference at the end of November, and trying to organize logistics for some fieldwork in Akanda National Park in northern Gabon and in Angola. Last week the only excitement was