The kodamas-like forest and the 'mimic-your-favorite-animal' day

Another misty and cloudy day in the kingdom of samangos and, I don't know if is because of this or because of the fact that in that last 4 days I had been working around 40h on the field, plus several hours of computer work and around 15-20h of sleep, but the thicket looked like a magical forest.

The wind and the fog make all sounds coming from further than some tens of metres to disappear and the samangos seem more relaxed...apart from more likely to vanish on the mist when this turns too dense, fortunately, not too often.

If one of the most shocking things of the first misty day was the almost absence of inter-specific encounters, last day was marked by them.

First were the baboons, who slept close to the troop and were around for a couple of hours (congratulations new chacma mums, your babies are extremely cute). After they left, my samangos seemed to think that the baboons had a point on being on the ground and spent a great amount of time with Papio-complex, feeding on grass, herbs and leaf litter.

When was I attacked by a terrestrial lamprey?

Then we had a pair of guests trying hardly to fit on the troop, feeding among it (even nearly touching the samangos), following us for hours, grooming each other and even letting me be as close as 5m from them! It was a couple of bushbucks!!!

Additionally, as I said in previous posts, new season usually is synonym of changes on ranging patterns, so they frequent areas that they used very rarely in the months before. This day they took me to the furthest side of the Bushbuck trail where I have ever been with them.

Bushbucks trying to be adopted by the troop

Along our way, and after some hours immersed in the acacia forest, we dived in a very (x5) thick thicket where, as one of the baboon people told me the other day, the prickles have prickles! In the heart of the mess I found the ruins and leftovers of a lost civilization, one more technologically developed than the Bush man...the former owners of the property. Well, ok, is not as interesting as finding a Mayan pyramid, but after hours of vines and thorns is kind of exciting!

Mysterious ruins

With less than two hours left before dusk, I was expecting that the samangos, finally, showed me their secret sleeping site of the Bushbuck trail…instead, they preferred to run away and go all the way back to the area of the settlements, traveling 500m in 30 minutes (they normally walk less than 1km per day!!). When I finished the last scan, I started to prepare the equipment for the sleeping site data collection…but they were gone. I couldn’t see nor hear any monkey and the mist was thicker than ever. I ran around all the sleeping sites nearby, only managing to get lost in the forest when it was already dark and the fog didn’t let the light of my torch to reach beyond a couple of meters.

By the time I arrived to the Barn, I saw that the stuff of the Belgian weren’t there. I called through the radio (We finally have!) but she didn’t replay, so I ran to Bush Camp, imaging her in the middle of the evergreen forest trying to make her way home… But no, she was in the kitchen chatting with the Germans and the Vendas. At least, as a compensation for my heart stroke, I had a nice piece of apple cake. Fair enough.