Mayumba Diary: April 2006

April is a tricky month. Heralded by nothing in particular, the month starts, as March ended, in hot, humid nights, hotter days, blazing sunshine, fabulous deep blue seas, and occasional violent tropical storms with torrential rain. There can be few things sweeter than hearing the first few tentative rain drops and the swish of the palms outside as the night wind picks up. For once we can switch off the ceiling fan and enjoy the cool air as the rain intensifies and the pitter-pat on our tin roof builds to a heavy drumming and eventually an impossible crashing cacophony.

All is not as it seems however, and at sea, cold currents are on the move. For months now, the sea has been verging on bathwater temperature. However, in about the second week of April, the temperature begins to drop sharply. Incredibly, in the course of a single week, the sea can go from a balmy 28 degrees Celsius to 24 degrees. It feels nippy for an early morning swim, but is much more refreshing at midday when you need to cool off. The meeting of cooler sea and warm air produces sea mists in the morning. The broad sweep of Mayumba Bay leading to Panga Point seems to float eerily above the sea like a magical kingdom, blue and unreachable. Only the wooden pirogues of the fishermen venture into this realm, swallowed up by the mist each morning on their way to pull in their nets.

The Park guards have been busy patrolling the paths between the lagoon and the beach, and have found many signs of recent human presence; mostly new paths cut in the bush to allow the passage of hunters with shotguns. Unfortunately, having only a few guards means that we can't protect all the Park at once. The demands of protecting the turtle beach during nesting season led to a reduction of presence in the interior – a fact that poachers were not slow to exploit. Fortunately, we have found few new snares along these paths, but we feel sure that some animals have been lost to the guns during late March and early April. One grisly discovery was the body of an adult male buffalo just behind the beach in the manilkara scrubland. An old cable snare, set specifically for buffalo, but long forgotten by the careless hunter that set it, had lain dormant and rusting for some time. Some time in the first week of the month, probably in the early evening, the male made his way towards the cool breezes and refreshing shallows of the beach. Taking a slight deviation form his usual route, a low tunnel of vegetation forced him to lower his head and push through the tangle. At this moment, the snare awoke, and slipping around his neck, tightened into action. It is hard to imagine the horror of this moment for the buffalo. The snare is thick and old and does not immediately strangle him, but it holds fast, pinning him to a small radius of a few square meters. In his panic, he begins to churn at the surrounding vegetation, but sadly, not at the trunk that anchors the snare. After gouging at the earth and crushing all the vegetation around him, he slumps exhausted to his knees and lies panting in the hot sun, tormented by flies and the fear of discovery by some other predator – man or leopard.

Who knows if the tension of the wire eventually strangled the male or if exhaustion and thirst eventually killed him, but certainly no needy villager came to claim his meat. This was a cruel and totally wasteful death – testimony to the indiscriminate horror of cable snares. The snare was set outside the Park, and reminded us that we should include peripheral zones in our patrols, to reduce the danger to the Park's animals. As far as we know, buffalo do not read Park signs, and have little regard for red lines drawn on maps. Hunting with wire snares is illegal throughout Gabon, but is practiced widely. As well as killing antelope, pigs, mandrills, gorillas and buffalo indiscriminately, they are a major menace to our Park guards. When buffalo trip the small snares set for forest antelope, they are usually able to pull the snare free from its anchor, but the narrow-gauge wire digs deeply into their skin, eventually cutting circulation or causing infection. The animal begins to limp badly and cannot keep up with its group. Now alone and traumatized by pain and fear, it becomes extremely dangerous – more likely to charge than run away from a threat – including vehicles or people on foot. When this happens, we usually leave the area for a week or more, and inform the local wildlife authorities who can, in extreme cases, dispatch a hunter to shoot the injured animal. Some buffalo eventually escape their snares; others die slow and agonizing deaths.

We have been out and about in Mayumba and the lagoon villages doing an environmental education and health awareness double bill. School children in the villages have been learning about the unique importance of Mayumba beach for nesting turtles, while their parents have been learning how they can reduce the risk to their families from avian influenza. Read the full story in our ‘News' section.

See you in May…..