Get to the Point

After a later than anticipated departure from Entebbe (due to a morning visit to a clinic to get Andrew’s side pain checked- no worries though, seems only to be a pulled muscle), and a couple hours of navigating through Kampala traffic, we finally hit the open road of Uganda. The vegetation gradually transitioned from wetter, cultivate farmlands interspersed with Papyrus swamps to dry, scrubby grasslands with an occasional Euphorbia tree playing the role of cactus. A couple of hours passed before a sudden left turn onto a dirt road, and a few kilometers later we came to a halt. In case you’re ever wondering, if you are ever going along in the middle of nowhere and come to a large gate, with a fence extending as far as you can see in either direction, cleared for twenty feet on either side and armed men in uniforms, you’re either going to prison or Jurassic Park. We knew it wasn’t prison, so our senses went on high alert.

So we crept along for a few more kilometers of scrubby landscape, looking for large creatures in the grass and behind the thorn bushes. We hadn’t seen anything but guinea fowl and a few (tricky!) by the time we got to the hostel complex, but after a quick bite to eat we headed back with our guide, Kawesa, to look some more. After a brief safety discussion (we even got to sign a waiver- doesn’t happen much in Africa!) and a description of the sanctuary’s history and mission we were on our way. The four of us were prepared to walk up to a kilometer off trail, but ended up only having to go a couple of hundred grassy feet (watching out for snakes!) to get to a patch of exposed clay salt-lick where we saw our first....Rhinoceros! -A big, muddy male. And while we were taking his picture and the guide was telling us how lucky we were (as all good guides do), a big mama rhinoceros and a smaller (but still enormous) baby rhino showed up. They did a little snorting at each other and at us and the guide had to move us a bit farther back (“If I tell you please to move behind the tree, please to move behind the tree. Please to move behind that tree. PLEASE to move behind that tree!). The guys with guns were assigned to protect the rhinos, not the tourists, so we figured they might not be much help if one of the animals charged and we followed our guide’s instructions.

After we had our fill of rhino stalking and rhino photographing, we moved on to let another group have a chance to look. The other animals were too far away to go searching for, but we were satisfied with our close encounter and finished off the day with a slow evening drive looking for birds and monkeys and smaller mammals in the bushes. However, as we came back to the hostel, our way was blocked by another rhino just 100 yards from our destination and we were warned that they were wandering all around us in the dark!

Off to a Somehow Good Start

Well, Mom and Nana arrived late Sunday night, fresh off a 36-hour flight from RDU through London. We didn’t make them repeat our experience of the midnight airport-to-Kampala ride of terror, instead putting them up at a quiet little inn run by a nice Irish woman within range of airport propeller sounds. Turns out, it was also just a couple of blocks away from one of the President’s estates, so when the sound of a loud party elicited calls to the police, they just shrugged and said that they couldn’t really do much because the party-hosts called the shots.

Despite it all, when we finally showed up after a long, dusty car ride from Fort Portal, the ladies were looking well-rested and refreshed. We took them out for a traditional Ugandan meal (pizza and sandwiches) before a short excursion to the nearby Botanical Gardens and the banks of Lake Victoria. We saw our first Black-and-White monkeys (Nana says all monkeys are “tricky” and to be avoided) and Denise spotted the first brilliantly colored Woodland Kingfisher of the trip. We also played with our van’s “pop-top” which allows us to stand in the car to watch wildlife, and met Chris, our driver (whom we ourselves had met only that morning). Chris has proven to be friendly and patient, and a skillful driver through challenging and unpredictable Ugandan traffic-- although he suddenly started driving at a snail’s pace when Nana got in the van and we had to encourage him to go faster or we would never get to our destinations! After another night at the hotel we set off for more great adventures!

If You Ain't Got Land...

What happens when a country has too many people and not enough land? This is not just a hypothetical problem in many parts of east Africa, where population growth rates are some of the fastest in the world. And the results can be catastrophic when politics and ethnic divisions are mixed in, as the world saw in Rwanda. We were sent a link to the recent National Geographic Article, “Rift in Paradise” and although most of the article focuses on problems in neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo, many of the same underlying tensions are evident here in Uganda. Since part of our project here involves doing some mapping of properties around the Park, it has become apparent to us (and to our field assistants) how many of the properties have
been divided up amongst children or sold off for expenses. Many farms in our area have been split, some multiple times, in the last twenty years, and most have multiple families relying on the pieces for all of their food and income. Unlike Peru, the communities around us cannot even spare land for public buildings or a public soccer field (except for the one a few miles away, where the huge tea estate has provided one for its resident workers). We wouldn’t be surprised to hear a
similar sentiment to the one in the article: "The creation of this national park has made us so poor! People have to live on the land!" Of course, if there weren’t legally sanctioned (and enforced) parks, there is no indication that people wouldn’t just move in, clear the forest for crops, and fill up the rest of the landscape. But that is a hard argument to make to a family that has lots of hungry mouths to feed.

Papyrus Swamps

One of the interesting (and less well known) features of the landscape here are the Papyrus swamps- the most common type of freshwater wetland in East and Central Africa. The papyrus is tall enough for elephants to hide in, and provides a whole host of goods and services: materials for construction and crafts, filtered drinking water, reduced sedimentation, flood prevention, not to mention providing habitat for lots of different kinds of wildlife. It even does a little bit of climate regulation and carbon sequestration. Unfortunately, while these benefits accrue over time to everyone in the community, rapid population growth has led to people desperate for land, the collapse of community land management (ie “effective common property enforcement”) and
depletion of the swamps. While it’s technically illegal to cut/drain the swamps, once it’s done, there’s no way to prosecute the responsible party or turn it back to swamp, so the papyrus gets smaller and smaller. Several times we’ve come across places where swamps have been cut down or drained to grow vegetable crops, pasture, or eucalyptus.

Our friend, neighbor and photographer Ronan (http://www.ronandonovan.com/) took us (and his enormous camera) out a couple times to look for some of the endemic bird species in a nearby swamp, like the Papyrus Gonolek, White-winged Warbler, Papyrus Yellow Warbler, and Papyrus Canary. We got a lot of strange looks from the Ugandans walking by as we stared into the reeds, but managed to see a couple of the rare birds and Ronan’s gotten some amazing pictures of them. Hopefully they’ll be around for a little longer...

Plants are People too!

So, we’ve taken some heat for not having any plants on our species list, and to make amends, we’re adding a new inventory and a blog entry to admit our oversight. The simple reasons for our omission were twofold: 1) there are lots of plants and they’re very different from our US species, and 2) plants are harder to identify than animals and we didn’t have any sort of guide. However, now that we’ve identified all the primate species, and acquired a native tree guide from our neighbors, we would be remiss not to make some attempt at plant documentation.

As in all parts of the world, plants are the foundation of the local ecological system and are essential to human life. We’re not going to include all the food crops (corn, potatoes, sugarcane, different types of bananas, beans, yams, cassava, etc.) and cash crops (tea, eucalyptus, pine) on the list, but it is worth mentioning one special group of species on peoples’ land; as we’ve mentioned previously, land is intensively used and there are lots of convoluted boundaries between small properties (This makes mapping properties very challenging- as our field assistants can attest!). There aren’t a lot of rocks or permanent materials that can be spared for boundary marking, so villagers use a small group of plant species (many non-native) that aren’t
palatable to animals (i.e. their goats) to distinguish the divisions between gardens. Sometimes these grow into “live fences” around houses and many of the species have additional medicinal properties. And occasionally, while hiking deep in the forest, we’ve come across patches of these plants, seemly growing in the middle of nowhere, but giving a hint of where the compounds of now evicted landowners used to be. We’ve posted some pictures of them on the flickr site and will continue to update the plant list for our last few weeks here!