#17 Elephant potholes (the one where I lost my welly!)

Aug 6, 24

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Episode 17 – Elephant potholes – The one where I lost my welly

[00:00:00] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Welcome to the East Africa Travel Podcast. I’m your host, Charlotte Beauvoisin, author of Diary of a Muzungu. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed the last two episodes as much as I did. They were a real learning experience for me.

Episode 15. Grunting with the garden gorillas.

Episode 16. Lost birds, beards and bonobos.

Thanks again to Ian Redmond, OBE.

[00:00:45] Charlotte Beauvoisin: If you’ve been listening to the first few episodes, you’ll have noticed a couple of themes: conversations with interesting people who are excited about the natural world and who are passionate about Africa. Travel advice. Conservation inspiration. And we’re taking it down a notch today as it’s just going to be you and me, on the edge of the forest, reconnecting with nature.

[00:01:07] Charlotte Beauvoisin: In this week’s episode, we’re back on the forest trails of Sunbird Hill, sploshing around in the mud, jumping in elephant potholes, and enjoying every second of being back on the edge of the tropical rainforest at Sunbird Hill.

[00:01:20] Charlotte Beauvoisin: I’m going to take you to the bird hide and the elephant trench, and the best bit: I’ll be wearing my wellies!

[00:01:26] Charlotte Beauvoisin: It’s quite fitting that we’re back at Sunbird Hill on the edge of Kibale Forest this week because we had some very sad news that our Mzee, the elder, Silver Kyamukama, passed away. I spent some time with him recently and in fact, have an episode lined up with him talking about his life as a reformed poacher.

[00:01:48] Charlotte Beauvoisin: R. I. P. Mzee, we learnt so much from you. Sunbird Hill won’t be quite the same without you. But you’ve left a tremendous legacy through the people that you’ve trained and inspired and entertained over the years, not to mention the chimps that you’ve helped habituate!

[00:02:05] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Hello, hello. Thanks for coming with me on my walk this morning. Oh, what’s that up there? I think that’s a black and white shrike flycatcher. Oh no, it’s a woodpecker. Can’t see it very well because it’s a bit grey up there. But I recognise the way it’s landed on the trunk of the tree. Could be a cardinal woodpecker. That is one that we do have around here.

[00:02:39] Charlotte Beauvoisin: It’s great, even though it’s one o’clock in the afternoon, it’s not hot because it’s been raining all morning. It’s still grey overhead.

[00:02:52] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Hornbills are very vocal this morning. Very big birds. Waaa, waaa, waaa, waaa. It’s funny, until they land on your roof first thing in the morning.

[00:03:08] Charlotte Beauvoisin: There is nothing I like better than going for a walk in my wellies! Just always remember being, you know, five years old and putting on the wellies and jumping about in puddles.

[00:03:25] Charlotte Beauvoisin: I just have to think ‘wellies’ and I feel happy.

[00:03:30] Charlotte Beauvoisin: I’m pushing through the elephant grass. I’m on a trail. It’s all very wet here. Lots of leaves have fallen in the rainstorm this morning. Normally far too hot to walk at this time of day, although being on the forest edge means that most of the trails are covered.

[00:03:52] Charlotte Beauvoisin: I can generally walk here nine o’clock, ten o’clock in the morning. Ah! something flew in my face. But I never fail to hear or see or smell something gorgeous, walking along here. I might just take you up to the bird hide. Don’t know where all these flies have come from. We don’t really get flies. You do if you’ve got livestock, cows or something, but we don’t. I wonder if it means there’s a chimpanzee around or some kind of monkey? We do have red tailed monkeys around this little section of forest.

[00:04:37] Charlotte Beauvoisin: We’re going up into the bird hide, or the bird hideout, as the boys call it. I have seen a chimp up here. Well, not in the hide! Might have happened. I have seen one in a tree next to the hide. This is such a lovely spot. One time I was up here and saw the yellowbill, now rebranded as the Blue Malkoha. It’s a very big, pale blue, kind of grey blue bird. It’s a cuckoo, or related to a cuckoo, and it’s got a yellow bill, funnily enough. Why they would then call it a Blue Malkoha, which is harder to say, write, pronounce, and everything else, I do not know. Right, back down we go.

[00:05:23] Charlotte Beauvoisin: It’s a good stretch, climbing up here.

[00:05:28] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Everything rots very easily. It’s in good condition now, but these beautiful wooden structures do require a lot of maintenance. My house is made of wood. It is leaning very slightly to one side. And I have termites as well, so bit of a toxic combination. It’s because the thatch is so heavy. And over time, it’s got sodden with water, so it’s getting heavier all the time. And when I come back from a trip, sometimes I can’t open the windows, because they’ve got wedged shut, so I have to pull hard to open them. My windows are just wooden shutters, and some of them don’t shut, and some of them don’t open! It does tell me that the house is moving, very, very slightly. Very slowly.

[00:06:27] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Oh, we had an earth tremor last night, talking of things falling over.

[00:06:32] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Oh God, it smells so beautiful.

[00:06:39] Charlotte Beauvoisin: There is a very strong smell of wet vegetation: rotten leaves, some kind of animal manure or dung. Along this section, we have elephant footprints. I haven’t been down here for ages. This is the trail Dillon and I call elephant potholes. Listen how squelchy it is. You can hear I’m walking through big puddles.

[00:07:14] Charlotte Beauvoisin: And because it’s always swampy and it’s at the bottom of the hill, it’s the first place to get waterlogged. And yeah, so when the elephant walks along here, you can see their footprints. Sometimes they’re muddy footprints and sometimes they’re waterlogged footprints. Ooh, very deep!

[00:07:41] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Ooh! Hold on to your wellies!

[00:07:48] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Oh, it’s nice to be moving. I’ve been hiding in the house all day, waiting for the rain to subside.

[00:08:00] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Oh, I think I’m going the wrong way. Let’s turn around. Gosh, it’s such a long time since I’ve been along here. A lot of the trails got overgrown during lockdown: no visitors, no staff, so, no patrolling.

[00:08:17] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Blurgh!

[00:08:18] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Well, little patrolling. We do have to keep an eye out for snares because we’re on the edge of a national park. One of the Sunbird Hill team will go and check for snares and it was just around here that Mzee Silver found where a bushbuck had been poached. This is private land, but it’s on the edge of the national park. Of course, animals move freely around. People do still hunt. Of course, there are high penalties if you get caught. But a snare is just a simple piece of wire. But our guys know where the poachers like to set snares, so they will look for them and dismantle them, remove them if they see them. I should learn where to look for them.

[00:09:36] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Oh! Frogs are jumping out of my way. They hear me approach. Oh, I love it. Ooh. Puddles are full of water boatmen. Wah! There’s something buzzing around my head.

[00:10:08] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Sometimes you see a beautiful footprint, or hoofprint: could be a chimpanzee, could be a duiker. Occasionally, it’s a human footprint, a bare human footprint. Not very often. That would be a child, perhaps, looking for firewood. But this is private land, Sunbird Hill, so they shouldn’t really be here. We don’t really want people coming to collect firewood because dead trees, for us, are perches and less building material. And they are habitats, ecosystems for all kinds of creatures. And the thing is: when people are allowed to go into a national park to pick firewood, for example, is they may spread disease, especially if there are great apes there. They may leave rubbish. They may spit or cough or poo or anything like that, or leave clothes that have some kind of disease on. While they’re in the forest collecting firewood, they may lay snares. These are all things that happen commonly. And also if you allow people to take wood and branches and dead trees and so on, at some point they might decide to cut a tree. So it’s easier if you just say, no, you can’t come in. But some national parks do allow some kind of resource harvesting, for want of a better term. And you can go in on certain days of the week or certain parts of the forest, and I like that, because we have to co exist. We need to be flexible, don’t we?

[00:11:59] Charlotte Beauvoisin: But the problem is, of course, is the human population. It’s massive, and people go in collecting to sell stuff. But if you’re going into the forest to collect medicinal plants, and that’s all you’re doing, then ideally, you should be allowed to do that.

[00:12:13] Charlotte Beauvoisin: It’s very slippery today. I’m walking along the edge of the elephant trench. Slightly nervous about falling in because it’s all mud and slippery leaves! I guess if I did fall in I would just have to push my way to one end where it’s full of water. It’s all swampy and then I’d climb out there.

[00:12:44] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Some branches have fallen in the trench. I said to Julia the other day I think you need to make sure that the boys don’t let branches fall into the trench, because it’s filling up. She’s like ” but we like the branches in there, because then anything that falls in there can climb out.” Well, I know she loves snakes, so she wants to make sure the snakes don’t get stuck down there, but there are all kinds of creepers and ferns, filling up the trench so there’s no end of ways something could climb out. Just shows you how incredibly fertile this place is. I’m on the edge of the national park and the elephant trench was excavated to create a physical barrier so the elephants don’t come out of the forest and then go straight onto people’s lands and eat their crops. It’s been here a few years now and the idea is that it should be trimmed so the elephants can see the edge and don’t fall in by accident. It’s two meters wide and at least two meters deep, but it is filling up and it is growing over and it just shows you how amazingly lush this place is. I mean, it is a tropical rainforest. Things grow and sprout and take over so quickly.

[00:13:59] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Oh, just a hundred shades of green here, different kinds of textures, thin leaves, broad leaves, creepers, vines, elephant footprints.

[00:14:12] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Yeah, of course the elephants do get across the trench. They will walk around the outside. They’ll go to the ends where the water’s filled in the trench so yeah, the elephant footprints here, even on Sunbird Hill land.

[00:14:27] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Not heard elephants in a while, but they’ll be back. They always are. Oh, there’s a very big puddle here.

[00:14:41] Charlotte Beauvoisin: I am at the bottom of the trench. I’m in a valley area and the trench is like a big swimming pool. It’s 20 or 30 meters long. I can see ripples in the surface. There’ll be all kinds of frogs and toads in there and water scorpions and insects breeding and nymphs and loads of mosquitoes, of course. (Yes, I can feel myself getting bitten through my trousers. Lots of little midges). This is where the elephant trench ends for a few metres. There’s no point having it here because there’s a swamp and so we have what we call the elephant boardwalk. I don’t know what Uganda Wildlife Authority call it. It’s kind of like a fence really that stops the elephants crossing. It doubles up as a walkway. It’s a couple of meters wide. Oh, it’s longer than I thought. It’s about a hundred meters long. There are a few sections of this. It’s a constant challenge to stop the elephants eating the maize and sugarcane and anything else that a farmer chooses to plant. In an ideal world, farmers would plant things like chilli or coffee or what we call non palatable crops. Crops they don’t like eating. But of course the first thing a farmer does, a subsistence farmer, is grow crops to eat for him and his family. Hence people will grow maize, sweet corn, right up to the edge of the national park. They will use every square inch, so it’s very precarious existence. I talk a lot about this on the podcast for two reasons: one, I live on the edge of a national park and these are very real issues for our neighbours. We don’t farm. My friend Julia Lloyd used to have pineapples but she gave up because the pineapples the elephants trashed a lot of them. And that’s why she has bought little bits of land over the years, because farmers were quite willing to sell their land, because it’s such a desperate existence. And they moved somewhere else, where there were less wild animals.

[00:16:58] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Just heard baboons. We have big troops of them. They are the biggest offender when it comes to stealing crops. They move in groups, they move everywhere, they’re very agile, they’re very bold. Elephants come and go, they’re seasonal. Chimps generally stay in the forest but aren’t as much of a problem as the baboons. There are other kinds of monkeys as well like the red tailed and the mangabey.

[00:17:19] Charlotte Beauvoisin: But the other reason that I’m interested in what we call “human wildlife conflict” is that was my first job in Uganda, fundraising for Uganda Wildlife Authority, and trying to equip the rangers to stop poachers in Queen Elizabeth National Park and to build or excavate this kind of elephant trench.

[00:17:38] Charlotte Beauvoisin: It’s quite moving actually when you meet the farmers who are guarding their crops day and night. A lot of these farmers sleep in the fields because that’s the only way they can guarantee that they will be there at the moment the animals come. Oh lots of big butterflies around today. One of our neighbours has a big fire next to his section of the trench and that keeps the animals away. If he mixes a bit of elephant dung and chilli and burns that, that could be really effective. Elephants don’t like that.

[00:18:07] Charlotte Beauvoisin: It’s really waterlogged here. This is actually the river. Water’s moving slowly through the forest. This is the river that we use for our water. We have a solar pump, pumps up water from the river.

[00:18:19] Charlotte Beauvoisin: That’s what we use at Sunbird Hill. Oh, beautiful butterfly here, flying handkerchief, which is the kind of swallowtail, pale yellow colour.

[00:18:32] Charlotte Beauvoisin: I’m not going to disturb it because I’ve got to walk past. It’s landed on the mud, got green banded swallowtail here as well. They’ll be eating the nutrients from the mud. The only thing with wellies is you don’t have that much grip, so you’ve got to be a little bit careful climbing downhill, back through the mud.

[00:18:56] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Oh, shit! Bloody hell. That was an elephant footprint. That was very deep. Oh no, it went over the top of my welly! Hmm. There’s a very strong smell of elephant shit. Well, that’s a first. I haven’t had water over the top of my wellies since I was five or seven. My mum will laugh. Oh, wet foot.

[00:20:06] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Oh god, did it again!.

[00:20:11] Charlotte Beauvoisin: I thought I was being clever and going into a different, shallower elephant footprint. That is super squelchy now, inside the boot. Might regret doing that. No. Regret getting muddy? Never.

[00:20:39] Charlotte Beauvoisin: That’s good for the soul.

[00:20:45] Charlotte Beauvoisin: You know, I have to say I’m endlessly appreciative of being stuck here during lockdown. It got pretty samey of course. I was without a doubt going round and round in circles physically and metaphorically and I did love having all these trails to myself: no tourists, no guides, just me. Oh, I’m gonna have to stop and empty out my welly. Oh! Ooh! Squelch-a-rama. I know that every day that I went for a walk, I felt good. I didn’t always want to go for a walk. Couldn’t always be bothered. Often was busy on other things and didn’t want to leave my house. But I know that every single time that I went for a walk, I came home happy: the physical exercise, the mental stimulation. Sometimes the act of just killing an hour. And I took lots of photographs and I learned that taking a photograph of a butterfly is perhaps the hardest thing in the world to do.

[00:22:16] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Taking a good photograph. I also learned that come the next pandemic, studying butterflies will keep you going, even if the pandemic lasts five times as long, because it’s such a vast subject. I learned that. You never know what you’re going to see in nature. Just things like the fungus. Dillon and I saw the grooviest kind of fungus: the whites, the greys, the browns, the kind of mushroomy things you might expect to see, but then we found things that were like miniature asteroids: bright orange with spikes. Tiny, just a few millimeters across. We found underground flowers that only come up in the dry season. We had a lot of fun, Dillon and I. How old was he then? Eight? Nine? I taught him how to take photographs. We went hunting for fungus together.

[00:23:21] Charlotte Beauvoisin: That is the blue headed coucal.

[00:23:30] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Chimpanzees! Not sure if you can hear them from here, animal noises in the distance. The wet foot has warmed up nicely. Oh, feeling good.

[00:23:56] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Well, if that doesn’t make you want to put on your gumboots and go sploshing in a big muddy puddle, I don’t know what will. There’s something so liberating about going out into nature and getting muddy and just embracing whatever it is you find. Well, unless it’s a big elephant, I suppose!

[00:24:16] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Just a reminder that coming up over the next few episodes, we have more travel stories and conservation inspiration from Kenya and Uganda, conversations with colleagues from Nigeria and South Africa. We’re talking about everything from sea turtles to baboons, sustainable tourism and what that means. And of course, more chimps, more elephants. I’m talking of which, next week, guess who came to visit?

[00:24:43] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Thanks for listening. And if you like this episode, please share it with a friend or write a comment on Diary of a Muzungu, the blog.

[00:24:50] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Rank, follow – anything you care to mention – on Apple, Spotify, or any of the other podcast directories.

[00:24:57] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Big shout out to Aunty Sally, who is without fail the first person to message me every week after the latest episode. And Aunty Kate. I can’t wait to see her next week, to hear her feedback in person.

[00:25:09] Charlotte Beauvoisin: We’re doing well on Apple. 4. 8 out of 5 so far. And if you’re listening on Apple, I’d love you to pause and give us another 5 out of 5. Let me know what you think.

[00:25:18] Charlotte Beauvoisin: Where shall I go next? Who shall I talk to next? Send me a message.

[00:25:21] Charlotte Beauvoisin: See you next week!