Bilombi is referring to the small forest duikers, but the sitatunga is also here, deep in the marshes, and so is the bongo of the elegant lyrate horn. Crossing a marshy stream, Bilombi points out the print of a larger antelope, which he says has been made by a sitatunga. Jonah shakes his head—“not long enough.” And a swift green snake with a red belly which shoots from the leaf litter into a log Bilombi calls a mamba, though it is not. Probably Bilombi is mistaken in much of the information that he offers us, and tends to err on the side of what his white companions wish to see, but all the same his eye is sharp and his bushcraft expert. And so we learn about native medicines such as this tree sap which, when boiled, will deal with urinary mischief in all women, and this peculiar paste with thin white fibers, created somehow by a tortoise eating mushrooms; he draws our attention to a strangely swaying bush where a departing mandrill has not eluded his keen eye. At one place he whacks free a three-foot section of rattan that he calls “water liana,” from one end of which, miraculously, a small but steady stream of pure good water flows into one’s mouth. At another, the old man stops short and commences a weird nasal honking, used by the forest hunters to call duiker, and sure enough, a small blue duiker, large-eyed and delicate-limbed, hurries in across the narrow shafts of sun before whirling to flee with a great thump and scatter.
Today we are recording all elephant sign seen in each kilometer of our walk, footprints and scrape marks on trees as well as droppings, which Karen, compiling her “dungdensity data,” is very good at assessing as to age. Most of the droppings found today are old ones and well scattered, scarcely more than a round dark shadow of soft soil. “There are a lot of bush pig here,” says Richard, “and they do a hell of a lot of rooting in this tembo dung. For that reason, our dung-density data”—and here he gives Karen an affectionate, sardonic glance—“may depend more on the density of bush pig than it does on the density of tembo.” (Richard’s use of the Swahili word for elephant, an echo of his days in Ruaha Park, is respectful and not an affectation; a man with fewer affectations would be hard to find.)
That elephants were here last month is borne out by the droppings, but there is no question that they are scarce here. “Soils and plants determine where an elephant can live,” Richard says, as we pause to inspect the remains of a cooking fire near a stream where people have been fishing, “and man determines where an elephant does live.” Elephant scarcity at Makokou is attributable to scarce fodder as well as to the occasional hunters from the Makokou settlement who make camp in these glades. (The men go hunting while the women fish the slow, dark forest brooks by constructing rough mud-and-log dams, braced with upright sticks, braced in their turn by long Y-sticks planted at an angle.)
Of all the countries in the Congo Basin, Gabon is thought to be the most intact, with the highest percentage of undisturbed forest and the least disrupted wildlife populations. Even so, wildlife seems scarce compared to the plentiful life in the savanna. “I’m not a forest man,” Jonah says later, “but it seems to me that the available food produced here is much less than the food produced in the savanna, even if the mass is counted that is far out of reach of the elephants, up in the canopy. And much of the food that is within their reach is unpalatable, having developed secondary compounds—bad-tasting chemicals not related to the plant’s growth—to keep elephants and other creatures from eating it. Richard is unwilling to give out premature figures, but from what I’ve seen, both here and in C.A.R., he’s getting about one-point-five droppings per kilometer of walking, which—allowing time for decomposition—works out to a rough count of one elephant going by each month.
“I doubt if this will improve very much anywhere in the equatorial forest, whether the region is occupied by man or not. According to Ian Parker’s figure of five elephants per square kilometer, there should have been two thousand animals in that area we investigated at Bayanga, which includes the high-density concentration around Dzanga Pan as well as a number of smaller pans and watercourses. I very much doubt if there were two hundred altogether, and the average across the Congo Basin must be far less. Perhaps there were more originally, but I don’t think forest elephant numbers were ever as high as people wished to think.”
It is here near the equator that we thought a pure population of cyclotis would be found. We were mistaken. A young male shot yesterday by local authorities as an alleged crop raider was immediately butchered and eaten by the people, but enough was left to determine that it was a hybrid, with bush tusks extending well forward, and round, small cyclotiform ears.
In the dry season, when rocks emerge and its water is a clear dark tannin brown, the Ivindo reflects the huge paletrunked trees of the gallery forest, the flowering lianas and fire red of the new leaves. It is very beautiful, especially among the rapids and rock islands down the river, where collared pratincoles and the exquisite white-throated blue swallows are the common birds. We see no crocodiles. A few years ago, a French hide trader gave rifles to the Ba-kota, who killed every crocodile in the Ivindo on his behalf, and the same pattern was repeated almost everywhere throughout Gabon, which has almost no crocodiles left. The rifles are still here and the Ba-kota still hunt the river in their delicate pirogues, with the result that the monkeys have withdrawn from the gallery forest where they are ordinarily most easily seen.
Away from the river, monkeys are still common; we see the talapoin, smallest of all African species, hurrying along low limbs from one tree into another, and the white-nosed guenon, making a wild twirling leap forty feet down onto the understory, and DeBrazza’s monkey, a handsome creature that we saw earlier at Garamba, in Zaire, at the east end of its broken range. All three are of the great guenon tribe, the cercopithecines, which extends all the way across Africa, from the mona monkey in Senegal to the blue or Sykes’s monkey of East Africa. (It also includes the vervet or green monkey, only known source of virus-free polio vaccine, and also the carrier of the viral source of the very dangerous “green monkey disease,” which is a close relative of the AIDS virus.) Some authorities—Dr. Western is one—regard the cercopithecines as mere geographic races of one great superspecies, despite their differences of size and color and their striking varieties of whiskers and beards.
Jonah’s opinion would surely be anathema to Dr. Jean-Pierre Gauthier, a friendly and expansive primatologist who has worked out of this research station for many years. Even at breakfast, Dr. Gauthier is given to comical gorilla imitations, and also the fascinating coughs, moans, and long-distance shouts of the great guenon tribe that is his specialty. Sounds of aggression or warning may be shared by different species, he says, but the cries, the hooting of the males, the gathering calls and murmurings that keep the troop together in its travels through the forest, are so specific to each species that it is impossible for a juvenile of one species to successfully imitate the vocalizations of another. In fact, vocalization patterns in the five guenon species he has studied are directly related to the evolution of the various cercopithecine types.
Perhaps increasingly with the coming of man, forest monkeys have acquired new defenses, and many species in this brash and noisy group are largely silent. Others, such as DeBrazza’s, are largely terrestrial, and when threatened, simply leap out of the trees (where they might be shot) and scamper off. The little talapoin may roost in low branches over water, and even a female carrying an infant will dive off the branch and swim away beneath the surface, a tactic that may have evolved first to frustrate the leopard. All such defenses demonstrate how difficult it is to capture these intelligent and wary creatures. Many hundreds of hours, Dr. Gauthier says, are ordinarily devoted to every monkey darted or trapped and fitted out with a radio collar for further study.
Dr. Gauthier, who lives in Paris, has returned to Gabon to investigate what he believes to be a new cercopithecine species. It was first described in 1985 by British primatologist Mike Harrison from the Région des Abeilles (Bee Country), about one hundred miles south of Makokou, where the strange monkey,
known locally as mbaya, was first seen slung over a hunter’s shoulder. The mbaya is most closely related to L’Hoest’s monkey, and is said to be the wariest of a very wary lot, though this trait may be less significant in its avoidance of discovery than its limited range in a remote and largely uninhabited forest.
The rain-forest communities are the oldest on earth, with hundreds of insect species specific to each of the many species of its trees. Almost half of the earth’s living things, many as yet undiscovered, live in this green world that is shrinking fast to a small patch on the earth’s surface. Man has already destroyed half of the rain forests, which disappear at an ever-increasing speed, and a mostly unknown flora and fauna disappear with them.
Therefore, at every opportunity, we explore the forest, and often I go out alone, for walking in solitude through the dim glades, immersed in silence, one learns a lot that cannot be taught in any other way. The canopy of huge trees is closed, so that even at midday its atmosphere is cool and dark, too dark—too mysterious, it almost seems—for photographs. The forest silence is impermeable, entirely undisturbed by the soft bell notes of hidden birds, the tick of descending leaves and twigs or soft thump of falling fruit, or even the far caterwaul of monkeys. From far above come the unearthly squawks of great blue turacos, hopping and clambering along the highest limbs like Archaeopteryx.
Increasingly uneasy in one’s own intrusion, moving ever more quietly so as not to wake things, one grows aware of immense harmony. The dust of the world spins in cathedral light in the long sun shafts falling from on high. The light touches a brilliant bird feather, an armored beetle, a mighty bean pod husk, silky and red, or hard and shiny as carved wood. The silent processions of the army ants, in their myriad species and deadly strength, glisten in dark ribbons on the forest floor; the taut webs of jungle spiders shine and vanish. High overhead, a bright orange mbolo fruit swells with sun in a chink of blue sky like a clerestory. But this underworld is brown and green, and green is the color of the stifled air.
Man hunts in this forest, and few creatures are still left—monkeys, mandrills, squirrels, duikers, tree hyrax, several pangolins—to sustain the leopard whose scat I found yesterday near a forest pool. The scat was too old to attract butterflies, which lose all caution and are easily caught when feeding on the protein in carnivore dung. Like a beautiful lotus growing out of mud was the strange blossom of elusive life that we came upon one day on the forest path, cobalt and red and black and forest green. The blossom opens as the butterflies palpitate, drawing their life, their very color from their reeking feast. And they are hurrying, for in a climate that permits ceaseless reproduction, certain butterflies may begin and end their days in a single month.
All along, an enormous sound has resounded through the silence, and suddenly it transfixes one’s awareness. It is the fierce wing shriek of cicadas, each shriek as painful to the ear as a blade sharpened on stone, yet joining with thousands of others in electric song and smoothing out in a wild ringing from the canopy high overhead. The thickbodied, green cicadas are ventriloquial, Jonah says, and I wonder if this is not also true of those hidden forest birds whose beautiful voices seem impossible to trace. Most of the birds remain high in the canopy, but bird armies, or “ejaks,” of mixed species—leafloves, wattle-eyes, malimbes, greenbuls—come flitting through the understory, and if one stands still long enough one of the hidden singers will appear.
Late one afternoon the yellow-cheeked trogon, a shy, uncommon forest dweller with emerald mantle and crimson breast and yellow spots behind the bill, flew from the shadows and perched dead still on a limb over the path. Like a spirit of the forest, it remained motionless even when we walked beneath it, and it did not turn its head to watch us go.
The Ivindo River, which flows south from the border region of Cameroon and Congo, drops off the high plateaus below Makokou in a series of white waterfalls and rapids to join eventually with the great Ogooué, which flows west past Lambarene to the sea. Like the Sangha, the Ivindo is one of many Congo Basin tributaries that are larger than any river in East Africa, or any river on the Indian Ocean except the great Zambezi and possibly the Ruvuma, on the Tanzania-Mozambique border. Nevertheless our attempts to follow it on our southward journey are thwarted by low clouds that almost turn us back. “That wasn’t a good situation,” David Western mutters, after making a tight circle back and gaining altitude before resuming his course. “The ceiling got lower and lower as we neared those mountains, and before you know it the aircraft could have been trapped down in some valley between hills, unable to see where it might climb out.”
At the Ivindo’s confluence with the Ogooué, we head west, making a landing at the Lope airstrip, between the Ogooué and the brave new Trans-Gabonais railroad designed to open up Gabon’s unexploited interior to timber and mineral development. A few years ago, when the railroad up the Ogooué was being constructed, this Lope region was very hard hunted to provide meat for the crews. Today it is a wildlife reserve, and the animals are coming back, with buffalo and elephant now quite common. One day, perhaps, Lope-Okande, as it is known, will be a true national park, but for the moment it still issues timber leases. (Virtually the entire rain forest of Gabon, C.A.R., Congo, Cameroon, and much of Zaire has already been sold in logging units to European countries and the Japanese; already about one-fifth of Gabon’s foreign income comes from wood.) And since the nation’s oil, which financed the new railroad, is drying up, and since Gabon’s mineral reserves are less extensive than was at first believed, the country’s small population and its low rate of increase may prove to be a blessing. Even so, the people are officially exhorted to produce more children and occupy the wilderness regions to the east. Whether foreign investors or the Gabonnais themselves will profit from this exploitation remains to be seen, but in view of the headlong scary rate at which the earth’s rain forests are disappearing, there seems no doubt that humanity will be the loser.
Richard Barnes, who has accompanied us from Makokou, has kindly made arrangements for our various visits in Gabon, and we are picked up at the airstrip by Lope’s warden. M. Sambouni drives us through the open savanna hills under Mount DeBrazza, named after the French explorer who discovered the Ogooué River and gave his name to the distinguished monkey as well as to Brazzaville, the present capital of Congo Republic. The extensive grassland in this region, in an odd pattern up and down the hills, seems to bear no relation to the ecological topography, and although M. Sambouni says that the savanna has always been here, he also says he must burn it each year to keep the forest from encroaching.
David Western is convinced that the savanna is “derived”—created, that is, by man’s impact; in fact, he disputes the widespread notion that the great wildlife savannas of East Africa are a natural ecosystem, mysteriously unaffected by the presence of pastoral man for three thousand years. Since it has never been forested in present memory, the grassland must have been established in earlier centuries of Bantu settlement, perhaps as early as the first migrating waves of Bantu peoples, who are thought to have followed the rivers south perhaps fifteen hundred years ago in response to long-term drought or overpopulation in the savannas. Throughout this region, the patchwork grassland is so widespread that settlement must have been much more extensive than it is today, and only the depredations of the slave trade, and the fierce intertribal slaving wars that followed, seem to account for the great emptiness of this broken landscape.
In less than an hour, we arrive at the quarters of Dr. Caroline Tutin, a young British primatologist whose airy camp on a savanna hilltop overlooks the Lope-Okande forest. For a year and a half in the early seventies, Dr. Tutin, a small, trim young woman with green eyes and red hair, worked with Jane Goodall at Gombe Stream in Tanzania, after which, for a number of years, she pursued her own chimpanzee research at the Parc de Niokolo Koba, in Senegal. It was there that she first met her associate, Michel Fernandez, a genial French pilot, mechanic, and logistical expert who constructed and maintains their p
resent camp. (Tutin and Fernandez remind me that we met in 1979, when I visited Niokolo Koba.) Dr. Tutin says that she finds field work in Gabon exciting not only because most of its forest is intact but because this high western region of the equatorial rain forest was a Pleistocene refugia, where a very large, complex, and diverse flora and fauna survived the widespread cooling and drying on this continent that occurred during the Ice Age, ten thousand years ago, when most of the rain forest disappeared. Little is known as yet about this fauna, and even less about the flora, and she suspects that new species may yet be found. She agrees with her colleague Dr. Gauthier that the mbaya is a distinct new species of cercopithecine, despite its very limited range of one hundred square kilometers across the Lolo River to the east.
At Lope, Dr. Tutin is studying the behavior of chimpanzee and lowland gorilla, both of which, she says, were first reported from Gabon by American missionaries. Though she is still partial to the chimp—“Everything in its social organization encourages the development of high intelligence”—she is at present concentrating on the gorilla. In her first two years, she has located and censused five separate groups, not counting two or three lone males, but none of these animals are as yet habituated to human beings, and the big silverback males (the French also like this term, saying “seelvairebok moll”) are still given to roaring display charges that will cause even elephants to back up.
The great majority of gorilla threat displays stop well short of physical contact, but a year ago, on December 24 (“I remember the date well,” says the victim), a lone silverback rushed out of the thicket and bit Fernandez on the calf. The gorilla took him for another male, he thinks. “If he’d wished to kill me or seriously hurt me, he could have done so very easily,” Fernandez told me, a surprised expression on his face, “but he didn’t even bite me with full force.”