The Ivory Boast

Saturday, 10th July. Semliki Time: 10:15pm

My my, what a day. So, I’ve now been in Africa for a week and have seen everything from the savannas, to the markets, swamps and jungles. Lizards, antelope, monkeys, warthogs, tsetse flies have all made an appearance and, with the exception of chimps, all that's left to see are elephants, giraffes and lions and my African checklist is complete. On the subject of Elephants, a couple of years ago I embarked on a quest into a south east Asian jungle in order to find them. Despite marching for the miles through a jungle, the closest I got to seeing elephants was their dung. Three days in an African jungle, however, and I’ve already seen ‘em. We were searching for chimp-chewed acacia trees on our routine march through the jungle earlier when there was a tremendous rustling and the top third of a young elephant hove briefly into view. On hearing us, it scuttled, as best as an elephant can scuttle, into some thick undergrowth to the left of the path. We crossed the river and could here elephant jr. happily plodding about and smashing into trees on our left. A smashing sound to our right alerted us to the proximate presence of elephant sr. who was behind some bushes no more than five meters to our left. I was faced with the sight of a large flapping ear and the sound of ominous munching.

Elephants are the subjects of many horror stories and, when upset, can charge like bulls. Unlike bulls, elephants weigh as much as a bus and are twice your height and twice your speed. In short, when you see an elephant, the best thing to do is hide and in no way alert it to your presence. On the other hand, it is not often that one gets to see wild forest elephants and my curiosity was well and truly piqued. As I was treading the difficult line between trying not to be seen by the elephant and trying to see as much of the elephant as I could, the crunching sound to our left grew louder. Elephant Jr. was making a return. Practically cornered by elephants, I started to eye up the nearest trees. Unfortunately, in the spirit of the red queen, the fact that the tallest tree will always get the most sun leads to an evolutionary arms race in rainforests. Tree number one will grow taller than tree number two, which is then forced to grow taller than tree number one. The feedback loop repeats resulting in forests full of very high trees with very few low branches. My lamentations were cut short by William, our guide, loudly hissing. The elephants, startled by the hiss, slinked away. Quite an anticlimax really.

Also of note today, I found my first wads of tree-bark. The aim of my project is to try and work out why Chimpanzees eat bark and the chewed balls of vascular cambium constitute my first proper data. The bark of the acacia (and many other trees) is chewed for an hour or so and then spat out. We also found the acacia tree that the chimps tore the bark from and collected a number of long strips to drag home. Possibly I’ll be able to write something for my project after all.

I was planning to write something about the accommodation and the food (all more than ample), but as my computer is soon going to run out of battery power, I’ll leave it as that. Still no Chimps but, with luck, they’ll turn up soon!

Steps Taken
30, 192

Wads Collected
10

Pieces of Bark Transported
10

Critter Count

Black and White Colobus Monkeys (3)
Dead Black and White Colobus Monkeys (1)
Red Tailed Monkeys (1)
Elephants (2)