Tanzania Journal: Day Five 

The end result of their work, supported by CEPF and the GEF-UNDP Conservation and Management of the Eastern Arc  Mountain Forests project, will be a map comparing forest cover in Tanzania and Kenya in 1990, 2000, and 2007. 

While there have been smaller forest cover projects in the past, the new results marks the first time “the big picture” of forest change throughout the Eastern Arc Mountains and Coastal Forests has been mapped. They hope the information will be used for land-use planning throughout the region.

In the afternoon, Francesco Rovero and Baraka de Graaf of the Udzungwa Ecological Monitoring Centre in Mang’ula picked up Conrad and me and drove us to Mang’ula, where the center is located, about 180 kilometers southwest of Morogoro. Conveniently (for me, anyway), the road there travels through part of Mikumi National Park, and we were able to see giraffes, elephants, wart hogs and other wildlife from the road. It was a pretty amazing sight for someone from the U.S. state of Ohio. It was also great fortune to be traveling in a car full of people who are so knowledgeable about wildlife.

We discussed the relatively diminutive Mikumi elephant, which is significantly smaller than elephants found elsewhere in East Africa. (They seemed large enough to me.) We also compared their size to that of the giant elephant-shrew species that Francesco and colleagues discovered in the Udzungwas, the gray-faced sengi. While it is indeed the largest of the elephant shrews, it is still only about the size of a little dog, according to Francesco. The Mikumi elephant, on the other hand, is about the size of a really, really big dog.
View the online chat with Francesco Rovero.

Coming upon and driving into the Udzungwu Mountains was impressive. The start of rainy season provided a verdant mountain horizon outlined by red-ish dirt roads, small communities and both family farming plots and enormous stretches of commercial croplands. Big agriculture interests grow sugarcane and maize in large swaths around the mountains.

The rain-carved roadways into Mang’ula and the center made for a rough ride, but the payoff was huge. The center has a gorgeous view of the mountains, and we were able to take it all in from the porch of the center’s guest rooms, where we are staying for the next two days.

We settled in and then joined Francesco and Baraka for dinner at a nearby hotel, and discussed the center’s recent activities. The center is in the initial phase of becoming the first site in Africa for Conservation International’s Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring (TEAM) network. TEAM monitors long-term trends in biodiversity through a network of tropical field stations and standardized methods of data collection so that scientists anywhere on Earth can quantify the pace at which tropical ecosystems are changing.

The center also figured significantly in CEPF’s five-year investment in the Eastern Arc Mountains and Coastal Forests, through its participation in a CEPF-supported forest connectivity study of the Udzungwa Mountains.

Our conversation, however, was regularly derailed by the potent scent of my mosquito repellent, an herbal product that apparently tries to make up for its lack of DEET by stinking to high heaven. I had let Conrad use it as well, and the combined force of our aromas brought an urgent rolling down of windows as soon as we got in the car to travel to the restaurant, and continued to re-offend all evening. Someone at the dinner table concluded that since the scent was causing his eyes to tear up, it must be taking a terrible toll on any nearby bush babies, nocturnal creatures whose large eyes would suffer far greater irritation. The suggestion that we might find large numbers of passed-out bush babies on the ground in the morning didn’t jive well with our mission. But, of course, neither does getting malaria.

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