In November, Houston Zoo Primate Supervisor Lynn Killam went with friends to visit the National Parks in Rwanda, Africa. This is the third installment in her marvelous series. If you haven’t read the first two, CLICK HERE to read the whole series so far.
The following day, after an uninterrupted night of deep slumber, our mission was to find a group of Grey-cheeked Mangabeys (Lophocebus albigena). We were told that this hike usually took about two hours.
Some three hours and several slips and falls later, we caught up with the waiting trackers, who were probably wondering where we were. They led us off the trail into a narrow path on the side of a deep ravine, where we clung to vegetation to avoid sliding off the edge. Once situated, they directed our attention to some dark brown spots in the trees, which were apparently mangabeys.
Without binoculars they were nearly invisible, but we breathlessly pointed our field glasses in their direction, revealing several handsome, muscular animals with black crests on their heads.
A Grey-cheeked Mangabey in the forest
All the animals were feeding, and once their fruit, flower or insect was ingested they made long leaps into new territory, crashing out of sight toward more desirable foraging areas. The hour was spent searching for them in the trees and sighing in happiness as we got a good glimpse of an animal or two, interspersed with cries of alarm as we lost our grip on the vegetation and sank down into deep foliage, to be pulled up and out by our guide or tracker.
*****
The next morning, I went to an early breakfast on the veranda of the lodge, which looked out over the plantation to the nearby forest. Something in a tree caught my eye, and I grabbed my binoculars to see what it might be. As I strained my eyes to endeavor to identify the animal, Barbara walked up behind me and exclaimed “that’s a MANGABEY!” After hiking all that way the day before, here was a better view at breakfast than in the middle of their forested home.
Another Mangabey as seen from the lodge
Other primates that appeared during our Nyungwe travels were Blue Monkeys (Cercopithecus mitis doggetti),
A Blue Monkey
beautiful black and white L’Hoest’s Monkeys (Cercopithecus l’hoesti), frequently seen foraging around on the drainage ditches on the side of the roads, leading us to call them “ditch monkeys”,
L’Hoest’s Guenon
lanky Mona or Dent’s Guenon (Cercopithecus denti), and an odd hybrid fellow that may have been part Mona and part Red-tailed Guenon (Cercopithecus ascanius) who was inexplicably hanging around with the Colobus Monkeys.
All in all, this forest was a primate paradise!
Written by Lynn Killam
Photos by Barbara Lester
Keep checking back to this blog to see where Lynn, Barbara and Paul go next!
