Anti-poaching

As I am waiting to get out of the three-week-post-international-flight-quarantine and return to the gorillas, but as I have been missing the forest all too much, today I went for a routine patrol with the anti-poaching team. The ulterior motive: interview David, the guy in charge, for a piece through which I will … give him up for adoption (little does he know that he’ll be adopted online many times this year, by some very rich Americans – some new concept our Atlanta bureau has, whereby we don’t only give gorillas, but also trackers for hefty adoptions)…

Anyhow, I am glad to report that I had a FANTASTIC day today – not only was it shiny and warm, and the forest majestic, but I actually survived the first hike in 2 months quite gloriously. On top of that, David was a great guide: he was stopping a lot along the way and explaining so much about the vegetation zones, the animal trails (other than gorilla trails), and also about the huge conflict they have with the local population (right now, many enter the forest to collect honey, and I was explained in detail how this is done as well). At the end of the day, I emerged quite knowledgeable – I now know to differentiate the dung of two antelope sub-species. WOW.

The only downside – we didn’t actually find any snares (I know, it sounds awful to call this ‘downside’, when it is actually fantastic to have a clean forest, but for my photo collection I was certainly missing something). David helped again – he called the anti-poaching team to actually set up a snare for me – and then destroy it, of course!

Next week, if all goes well, I’ll join them on a different kind of mission – the shock patrol, where they go all the way to the Ugandan or Congolese borders, with very definite targets in mind (on one of these days, they can find dozens of snares)…It is certainly a heck of a job – and I was thinking, again, how much we would need this kind of discipline and monitoring of wildlife and habitat in Romania as well….