Amazing Animals

Amazing Animals

In each place that we went on our safari trip, our guides were amazingly knowledgeable, helpful, and patient, and they always ended by asking us to please share what we had learned with our friends, so we could spread the news and desire to save and protect these amazing animals.

I was hoping that my trip would help me re-fall in love with Uganda, since I have been feeling frustrated with it lately.  I loved the beautiful scenery, and I found one very valuable reason to be proud of my current country: they are doing amazing work to preserve and protect their natural resources.  For a third-world country, this is rare and commendable.  For instance, my parents said that when they were in Cameroon, they didn't see any monkeys in the forests because they had all been killed for meat, and even in the national parks the game was thinly spread.  So I am sharing some of these valuable stories with you.

Entebbe Wildlife Education Center:

Once upon a time, this was a zoo, but at this point it is designed for rescue and education.  The animals are mostly rescued from poachers or other disasters, so there are no non-Ugandan animals, and no Ugandan animals which haven't needed rescue (for instance, no elephants).  They work to help them live a natural life, and engage the visitors in understanding their lifestyle and needs.  On our first visit, a guide came over to our little group and accompanied us for our whole visit, sharing many stories about the animals and keeping the kids engaged and learning.

Ziwa Rhino Sanctuary:

Rhinos became extinct in Uganda during the unstable years of dictatorship.  This group has imported six white rhinos and provided them with a huge natural space, and is monitoring them as they breed.  They have had seven babies so far.  When they get to 14, they will start re-introducing them to the National Parks where they would have naturally lived.

Rhinos are currently being killed at the rate of one per day.  Their meat is inedible and they are peaceful animals, so the only reason for their murder is their horns.  They are actually made of the exact same material as fingernails and hair, so all of the "magic" potions made from their horns would be the same if they were made from fingernail clippings!  

Rhinos have a social order, but spend most of their time alone, because otherwise they would fight for dominance.  However, the children might still stay close to their mother.  When she has a new baby, she will chase the older children away while she takes care of the new one.

We were able to get very close to four rhinos as they were grazing.  They were surprisingly graceful animals, and just magnificent to be near.

Chimp Tracking in the Budongo Forest:

It is amazing how similar chimpanzees are to our own selves!  Their faces and hands are expressive.  They live in groups of 40 to 130 individuals, which proves that they are very intelligent to be able to understand that many inter-relationships.  Another proof of their intelligence is that the babies are still juveniles and stay with their mother until they are about 10 years old, which is about a quarter of their entire lives.  Both of those are about the same proportions as human beings!  The mothers are loving and attentive, and play games with their babies and educate them.  If a mother chimp dies, other chimps in her group will adopt the babies and take care of them as their own.  A mother might have another baby every 2-4 years, and have up to five babies in her lifetime, and she continues to take care of all her different-aged children -- again, strikingly similar to our own biology!  Chimps do not pair up in permanent partnerships, and different male chimps are allowed to present themselves to a female in heat, and then she can chose whom to mate with and in what order.  (Hopefully not an exact human parallel!)  If a male chimp gets mad about being scorned and decides to hit the spurning female instead, the other males in the group will come and rescue her.

Chimps live in large communities, but during the day they go out in different groups to feed, which might only be a few individuals.  They had many different calls to communicate with each other, including drumming on certain trees to report to each other across the forest.  For instance, while we were there, five chimps came across the road, called and discussed with other groups, and soon 18 of them came back to the first side!

Chimps eat primarily fruit and leaves, but also a small percentage of meat.  I had known that, but assumed that it was small rodents or birds.  It turns out that the group we visited really loves to hunt the colobus monkeys, and different groups have complicated and specific ways that they hunt their game and then share it with the group.  For instance, in one group only the hunters get to share the meat, and in another they might share first with the dominant males or the juveniles.  

Chimps are still hunted for their meat, and because African witch doctors like to use their teeth and bones in their potions.  Also, people capture the young chimps as pets or for display.  Several chimps in the non-zoo were captured from the wild and put in small cages in someone's house, and they charged people to come into their living room and see them.

They were beautiful, graceful and powerful animals.  It was a privilege to be able to spend time near them.

Murchison Falls National Park:

This has been a national park for some time, since before the dictatorship years.  But I am not writing a history of the park, but about some of the things that they do to protect and build pride in the animals and the heritage.

For instance, 25% of the park entrance fees goes to the villages in and around the park.  This money is allocated to help them raise livestock, put up water treatment facilities, or whatever other projects the village deems useful.  They do this so the local people will see the park itself as a resource worth protecting, instead of poaching game for meat or for sale, or killing the majestic predators to protect their livestock.  It is a long, slow road to change traditional ways of thinking about the animals.  Like many poor people, it is easy to think about having meat for today and tomorrow, and more difficult to think about preserving income for years and generations.  

They are also trying very hard to education visitors about things like not feeding the animals, taking things out of the park, and littering.  These are VERY difficult concepts for the African mentality!  Every game drive has a ranger accompanying the party, and visitors are not allowed out of the main areas.  They frame this as protection for the visitors, but I suspect it is just as much to protect the animals from human stupidity.  

They have recently discovered oil within the park's boundaries, and we saw a couple of oil wells.  When we asked the ranger about it, she said that she doesn't know if the oil wells will be able to coexist successfully with nature, but that the company did a lot of research and worked very hard with the locals and the experts to try and make it fit in with the park's needs.  In a place like America, this would be expected, but here in a poor country like Uganda, even making the attempt is commendable.

Animals like giraffes have disappeared from most of the other national parks, including Queen Elizabeth which we had visited earlier.  They are working on figuring out how to reintroduce them to their previous native habitats.

There are many National Parks and National Forests in Uganda, and they seem to be working very hard to protect the areas, education the locals, and welcome national and international visitors and give them pride in their natural resources.  Hotels are carefully limited in the parks, and all of the ones we saw or heard about were careful with their resources, blending in to the surroundings, hiring locally, and supporting artisans and workers who helped the park.  For instance, the gift shop in the Budongo Forest sold greeting cards decorated with wire from snares set all over the forest.  The income from projects like this allows the de-snaring projects to continue.

Our safari trip was very expensive by Ugandan standards, and a big investment even by our American ones.  First of all, I felt like it was worth it to give the girls -- and all three children, actually -- pride and joy in Uganda, and to give them a chance to have memories of something very special about their country.  However, as we made our journey, I felt like it was money well spent for other reasons as well.  A poor country like Uganda cannot support its natural resources on its own, like the US does (at least in part).  It is us, the visitors and the people who care, who keep everything going.  Our fees are literally saving the lives of animals and even entire species!  For instance, we paid over $100 for the group of us to go track the rhinos.  You can buy a lot of groceries for that kind of money around here!  Was it worth it for an hour or two?  It was an incredible experience, and I do think we will remember it for a long time, but it is also keeping those 14 incredible animals from being killed for their horns, and hopefully eventually bringing rhinos back into the wild all over Uganda.

And on a final note, just an interesting fact about birds.  Over 1,000 species have been identified in Uganda, including many that live only here, and more are being discovered all the time.  The fascinating part is that this is MORE THAN HALF of all the bird species identified in Africa!

Safari Pictures

I have a lot of pictures from our safari.  Here is the link to some of the best ones of animals and the beautiful scenery.

https://picasaweb.google.com/Christy.Margaret/Animals?authkey=Gv1sRgCKHLyuPZ0-qi4AE

Kids in Budongo Forest

Travel Notes IV, Budongo + Kids

There were not as many organized activities for the kids to do for our two days in the Budongo Forest, but I think that was just as well.  In the middle of a week-long trip, two days of free play for the kids is just about perfect!  The first day we were there we had our whole-group short forest walk with a ranger, and the second day they didn't manage to arrange anything for us, so we went for a walk along the dirt road through the forest.  They advised us (or ordered us, I'm not sure!) not to go into the forest by ourselves, and with the dense vegetation and the criss-crossing paths, it did seem very easy to get lost.  

The rest of the time the children just played.  I had thought there would be more lawn-ish area for outdoor games, so we had brought some outdoor toys.  It turned out the main activity was sewing.  I had brought some little felt projects, with the shapes cut out and holes punched around the edges, but with quite a lot of needlework involved.   The older children dedicated themselves happily to producing lemonade and hamburgers and pizza, which then became good toys to go around and pretend to eat and feed to everyone else!

I wasn't sure how the forest walk would go, because all three children were tired and irritated and antsy, especially our big and antsy little girl!  But as soon as we got into the forest, the older children became totally focused on all the interesting things to see, and the little one settled happily into her snuggle on my back.  The guide was excellent and did a great job with the children, finding interesting stories about all the plants and insects that we saw.  He warned us at the beginning that we should use our quiet voices so as not to scare the animals away, so needless to say, anything that could walk or fly or climb managed to get totally out of our vicinity!  

Early on the walk, he showed us a fuzzy caterpillar crawling up a tree, and told us how all the fuzz was actually poisenous spines and we should never touch him.  A while later, after Buttercup napped and woke up, the children found some fluffy seed pods from a tree, and petted them and passed them around.  But Buttercup pulled her fingers away and absolutely refused to touch it, because she remembered the dangerous fluffy caterpillar!

Hibiscus was the most active in leaping around and finding things to look at.  I was about to write "new" things, but this actually wasn't a concern of hers at all, and after a while the guide had to tell her to not stop for every single mushroom or seed pod, because we had already talked about that one over and over, and if we stopped for every one in the forest we would never see anything new!  Hibiscus has amazing eyes for spotting little things, and brought to our attention a cricket, who was so well camouflaged in the leaves that most of us had trouble seeing him even the guide and Hibiscus were pointing right at him!

The next afternoon we spent mostly relaxing on the restaurant veranda, after being told various different stories about when our guide would take us out birdwatching.  Then it turned out that there was no guide at all, and we decided that the children had sat around long enough and needed to go get some wiggles out.  My mother and I rounded up our crew and headed out to the road, which seemed like the one safe place to walk, and the accountant from the lodge either felt bad enough about not finding us a guide, or worried that we couldn't manage walking along the road, that he ended up coming with us too.  He didn't know much more about the forest than we did, but we did get him in some conversation and learn a little bit about his life and story.  Our whole trip was out of the Buganda kingdom, and it was very interesting to me to hear the stories and languages of people who live very different lives in Uganda.

I realized that this was actual my first walk with my new children!  Our family loves walking and hiking, and I think Emerson went for his first hike up our local mountain when we was only a few weeks old!  Obviously, he was carried a lot, but when he got old enough to toddle he got to toddle along some of our walks too, and he has walked more and more every year.  Last summer he and I spent almost two weeks camping on our own, and I decided he was just plain too big for me to carry him and our gear, so we each set off with our packs and went at little-boy pace.  We took long hikes every day, and a couple of them were at least seven miles, which he walked all on his own as at three and a half!  So it was a surprise to realize that I had never yet had a chance to take a plain old walk with my girls.

Since we could walk at child-pace and stop for child-interests, it was also Buttercup's first chance to take her own walk.  She walked and ran and jumped for almost the two hours we were out!  Both of the older children wanted to be carried for part of the way back, but Buttercup wanted to "me walk" the whole way.  I finally put her on my back for the last couple hundred yards back, because her strides had turned to about two inches long each, and I thought everyone needed some dinner before it got dark, but even then she screamed and cried to not get to "me do it!"

On the way out we played all sorts of running and catching and Mother May I games.  My mother is great at these kinds of games and the older children love playing with her!  Buttercup trotted along behind, working on imitating whatever they are doing.  Her physical development is very far behind for her age, but she is instinctually inspired to keep trying new things.  So we played with running while kicking our feet up, or putting them out to the side.  She practiced jumping and hopping and walking backwards and swinging on our hands and reaching for the sky!  

And what is it with kids and sticks?  Everyone found sticks that they carried and dragged and poked and swung and eventually broke, and then they cried, despite being in a forest which is naturally well stocked with sticks!  We also saw giant spiders building giant webs over the road and in the trees.  

And then we got home and had our sumptuous dinner on the veranda.  At least, the first night was suptuous and everyone enjoyed it, except the soup was much too spicey.  The second night we clarified that we didn't want things spicey, and the kitchen agreed, and then sent everything out an hour too late and with pepper all over it.  Ugandan food is not spicey at all, so either this chef has particular taste or he has decided that foreigners like heat!

Meanwhile, the children discovered that they liked hot chocolate, and wanted to order a new pot approximately thirty-four times a day!

Budongo Forest, continued

Just about then we did finally find a group of chimps feeding, and we were able to spend the full hour with them.  The guide was very knowledgeable about their behavior and we got to learn about what we were seeing.  The chimps were very calm around us, and sometimes watched us but didn't mind if we talked or moved around.  We saw babies and a huge male moving through the trees.  As I said, I had never sat around and imagined communing with the primates, but it was a magical experience.  They were beautiful and powerful animals, and in so many ways amazingly similar to ourselves, and in other ways so exotic and special.  My neck got very cramped looking up into the trees, but other than that, the hour passed very quickly, and then it was time to walk home.

We had also signed up for a long birding walk.  I thought that two of us could go chimp-ing and two of us could go for a different kind of forest walk, and all three adults could get out into the forest.  Of course I kind of wanted to be the lucky one who got out twice, but I wasn't counting on it.  When we arrived and were preparing the kids for someone leaving for a while, my mother warned them that "Mama would be gone for a little while and Gramma will stay with you, and then later Gramma will be gone and Mama will stay with you."  My father had been pretty frustrated with the kids' (dare I say?) chimp-like behavior, so I agreed and understood that he might not be willing to deal with them by himself for several hours.  However, after the chimp walk, he said his foot was bothering him a little bit, and that he would stay with the kids while we went out.  What a treat for me!

They were being a bit of a handful, but we have all been very pleased and fortunate that it has been pretty ordinary busy, lively kid behavior.  The violent sibling rivalry that dominated the first few weeks has faded into ordinary competitiveness and play, and the tantrums that have overwhelmed our lives for so long have become occasional instead of constant.  What is left is three children who are very lively, active, imaginative, possessive, curious, and very noisy!  Fortunately, we were the only guests staying at the forest lodge that weekend, so there was no one else to bother.  My observation is that the local people have no patience for children being rude or disobedient, but they do not mind children simply acting like children.  I think they all have little children or siblings or cousins at home, and they just smile at the children playing the drums for sale in the gift shop, swinging off the railing, and stopping them to eagerly tell them some disjointed but suddenly important story.

The animals are most active early in the morning and in late afternoon, and in late afternoon our guides seemed to be MIA, so we again woke up before 6 in order to leave by 7, soon after the sun was up.  Fortunately for everyone, the children seemed to have figured out the routine and the disappearing mama after the first time, and they were much calmer for their morning with Bubba.  He was very proud of how much Hibiscus helped get her little sister ready, eating the big hotel breakfast took up a good chunk of the morning, and then the children worked on their projects and played until we got back.

The birding walk was very different from the chimp walk.  I have been really enjoying looking at all the different birds that we see here in Uganda, but this was my first time on a real birding walk.  Apparently I did it all wrong!  Mom brought binoculers for both of us, but we were also supposed to bring our bird identification book, notebook, and pencil to record what we saw.  The ridiculous thing was that I actually had all of these things, but I left them in the room because I didn't think I'd use them in the forest!  Oops!

We walked very slowly, and spent a long time on the road, because we could see the birds in the treetops more easily.  Again, the guide was very knowledgeable, and shared information not only about the birds, but also about her own story and her life (as we asked and asked).  I think she was kind of bemused about how we were totally inexperienced, but then enjoyed showing us things that were totally new to us.  I get the impression that many people stop at the Budongo Forest on their way in or out of the main park to do a chimp walk, but fewer people actually spend time there, and maybe only real birders stop to do a bird walk!  There are a spectacular number of species in the forest, including some that are endemic to only that exact area.  We were fortunate to see the little brown groundbird, Purvells illadopsis, which only lives in this exact forest.  All in all, we saw twelve bird species, and clearly heard and could identify five more.  Some of them were glimpses, but other ones we got to watch through the binoculars for a long time.  Although there are so many birds in the forest, they are very difficult to see because there is so much vegetation.

I think possibly getting into birding could be an interesting hobby.  I am not so naturally interested in all the specific names and details, but I really enjoyed having something else to look for and examine in the woods.  I felt like I am getting to know and be involved with nature much more closely as I learn to know the birds.  In some ways, I enjoy seeing the birds even more than the animals, because they are so prevalent.  We can see and hear birds all the time!

We had another special bonus on our walk.  The day before, we had walked for a couple of hours before we got near to the chimps, and then they were feeding very quietly, but while we were birding we heard the chimps whooping, calling, and drumming right near to us!  They were talking to each other and getting ready to cross the road.  It was amazing to hear all their different sounds and communications so near to us.  Even though we weren't officially tracking the chimps we saw several of them as well, and through most of our walk we could hear them talking in the distance.  I was happy to get to experience a new side of the chimpanzees, and I was even more happy that my mother got a chance to experience them.

Well, since I am not winning any journalism awards for this disjointed entry, I will skip around and describe the lodge a little bit.  We debated whether to spend one night or two, and we were all very happy that we spent two days.  The lodge was tucked into the forest in a very natural and beautiful way.  There was one fairly large building with the kitchen and administration, with local-wood couches set up inside, and dining on the veranda.  As I said, it seemed like most visitors didn't make it past that main area, but then we followed little paths into the woods where the bandas (cabins) were tucked in the trees.  I think there were smaller ones, but we were lodged into one building with a room on either side -- and unfortunately no door in the middle, but we could knock or call back and forth.  The rooms were clean and they were set up to be fairly elegant but also made with natural materials and fitting into the forest environment.

There were nice porches and chairs, but we couldn't take much advantage of them, because of the baboons!  Since the lodge was just in the forest, the animals could come by any time they wanted to.  It sounds like most of the truly dangerous animals, like leopards, are very shy of people, but baboons are real pests and not shy at all.  Apparently they would get into anything we left out and ruin it.  Also, they do eat some meat and love to hunt monkeys, so we didn't want to let any of the children run around alone, especially Buttercup.  The baboons apparently know better than to take on an adult human, but also know that they are bigger and stronger than little children!

There was also a giant row of safari ants making a path between their nest and their food going right across the path near the lodge.  Safari ants are fascinating and cooperative creatures, and it would be interesting to stop and watch them, except they also start crawling up and biting anything that disturbs them, like people-feet.  They don't have venom, so the bites don't continue to be irritated, but it hurts like the dickens when they suddenly start crawling along and biting over and over again!  We all got some bites, but pants tucked into socks and close-toed shoes solved most of the problem.  However, Buttercup kept getting ants mysteriously in her legs or arms that started biting her at totally random times, like the middle of dinner.  We don't know how they got there at all, since Buttercup always got carried over the ants!  It kept our bigger children close-ish to us, though, because they didn't want to go over the ants by themselves, so there was no running off to the cabins when we didn't expect it!