The Great Primate Handshake – Volunteer in Africa, working to conserve monkeys and apes through film and educational content production

I woke at 4am…as did a couple of other light sleepers. The forest came alive with the most incredible sounds radiating out into our sleeping world. One special sound is probably what woke us. It sounded like a a cross between a gang of scrambler bike exhausts and a machine gun. The sounds took speedy turns in revving their machine-gun engine around our camp, each responding to the call of another. We were encircled by the most amazing Doppler effect of noise shooting around. Were these birds or monkeys? They were the calls of the Black and White Guereza Colobus monkey. I wish I could have recorded the sounds for you…you would be amazed. Then as suddenly as they started, they stopped, and the birdsong started. What exquisite sounds; a cacophony of different bird calls and songs, whooping, zig zagging, cooing, chiff chaff, knocking, tweeting, singing hammering, screeching, and even what sounded like a Welsh sing song call.

Over breakfast Ash, Jonathan and I held a deep discussion on the animation merits of the types of primates we had seen so far, and others we would like to see. Both Ash and Jonathan are animators, so the conversation was fun. We decided that:

• Colobus monkeys were the hippies of the primate world. Cool, easy-going, hairy, and just liked to hang about eating and messing.
• Sykes monkeys were the ninjas, with their nimble agile mannerisms, lean little camouflaged bodies and twitchy movements.
• Baboons were the cheeky villains, the hooligans always looking for something to steal or make off with, intelligent, cunning, fast, strong.
• Chimpanzees were the higher class, gentlemen of the primate world. Very smart, playful and intelligent…perfect party hosts.
• Orang Utans were the hairy ginger Rastafarians, cool, funny, doped out and seriously misunderstood. (No Orang Utans are not indigenous to Kenya…they’re just cool apes)
• Red-Tailed monkeys were the toffs, saying yuh, yuh, yuh, elegant graceful educated movements, eating delicately with their hands.

After breakfast, camp was visited by a troop of Colobus monkeys and a family of blue monkeys who came right down to the ground to play. Cameras clicked away and the monkeys shamelessly posed, ate and carried on playing.

Just after 9am we all trooped down to the KEEP HQ (Kenyan Environmental Education Programme) visitor building and classroom for an introduction to Kakamega Forest by Leonard, our official liaison contact for the Kenyan Forest Service. He told us that the Kakamega Forest covers 23,000 hectares and is all that is left of a once-massive forest that existed over a hundred years ago, that stretched across central Africa all the way to western Africa through Uganda, across the Congo, Cameroon right through to Nigeria. It is now the only sub-tropical rain forest left in Kenya. There is another Kenyan forest elsewhere, slightly larger, called the Mau Forest, but it is not a rain forest. Settlements and deforestation for building and agriculture have had a severe impact on these forests.

The Geek team who in more formal places are known as the Web Team, spent an hour relocating the satellite dish to optimise the signal strength for our internet connectivity.

The Kenyan government recognised the growing problem back in 1964 and Gazetted the forest to prevent any further decline in size and destruction which even then it understood would have longer term consequences on agriculture, drying out of rivers and lowering of the water table, and as seen in other parts of Africa, extreme soil degradation and erosion.

Rather than erect a fence around the forest, the Kenyan Forest Service took a subtler approach and allowed tea farmers to farm the perimeter with tea plantations, and then kept an eye on the plantations to see if they had grown or if someone had cut down trees on the inside, thereby illegally encroaching on the forest. This policy has worked well.

Kakamega is an extraordinary environment providing a home for:

• 200+ species of tree
• 50+ species of medicinal plants
• 60+ species of orchid, 9 of which are endemic and only found in Kenya
• 330 species of birds
• 500 species of butterfly, many of which migrate over from Europe in winter
• 43 species of snake, of which 16 are poisonous
• 7 species of primate

• Black and White Guereza Colobus
• Blue Monkey
• Red Tailed monkey
• De Brazza (very rare in Kenya)
• Olive baboon
• Potto (prosimian, similar to a bush baby)
• Vervet Monkey (although mainly in neighbouring communities)

• Aardvarks and many other mammals
• Squirrels, including the flying squirrel
• Civet (a nocturnal cat)
• Giant Forest Hog
• Countless insects
• Genet (another nocturnal cat)
• The last leopard sighting was in 1992 (although it is believed there are still some in the forest).

We joined a large school group from the Shiveye Secondary School. They were a group of boys and girls, aged 16 to 18, all neatly dressed in a uniform of white shirts, and mauve skirts or trousers; some boys wore ties. They were so well behaved and courteous; all had some form of notebook and most took copious notes of everything they were being taught. This was a treat of a field trip for them, and they loved every moment, asking lots of tough and interesting questions. The school group was broken in to three parties; we did the same to follow them around the forest trail. Each group was allocated two professional forest guides. OMG – our guides were Moses and William, both skilled and unbelievably knowledgeable about the trees, bushes, environment, animal and insect life. The trail walk and talk was breathtaking as we meandered through the forest, stopping every few minutes to hear about different plants, trees and flowers.

One of the girls found a monkey skull in the undergrowth and passed it around before throwing it back. Moses had explained that the forest was a sanctuary into which nothing was brought and from which nothing taken.

A pair of grass cutters were working illegally we were told; they did not have permission to walk in and cut grass from the open area. Yet, oddly, nothing was being done to stop them. They worked hard with their machetes slicing away at the long grass in a large swampy clearing our guides took us to.

Medicinal plants were shown, some for curing prostate cancer, others for stomach ache, snake bite and lots more.

The children were such good fun, they wanted to use our binoculars to spot birds and trees at a distance. They were also very curious about our photographic equipment and wanted to have their pictures taken. I got on particularly well with one group of about 12 the kids who loved seeing themselves on the small camera screen; they asked me if I could let them have copies. Yes of course, what a terrific idea. I’ve arranged with their school Principal to print off the photos and send them to him in early August when back in the UK.

At the end of the three hour walk, we left the kids for our lunch. Many of them did not have any sort of lunch with them at all; some had a stick of maize cooked or raw. The thought that many of them were going hungry as a norm, yet still turned out for a field trip in a school uniform and broad smiles, humbled us.

In the afternoon, before the rains came again, we got back to our own routines of writing up and editing our work. This was a great opportunity to catch up with my blogs. Once again, sorry for the break in service.

If you like these blogs (and if you don’t like them), please feel free to paste a comment so that I get some useful feedback to improve content over the last few days of our expedition.