The Great Alberta Flood

Nobody was expecting a flood. It started raining on Wednesday, life went on, and then by Thursday morning we woke up to news of flood warnings, evacuations, roads closed and bridges destroyed. Banff is not as badly affected as some places. The park is flooded and you can't get out of town to the east, and a few buildings near the river are uninhabitable. We still have power and water and everything is open. The news from Canmore and Calgary sounds a lot worse though. Lots of people have had to evacuate and there are houses falling into the river in Canmore. Canmore was cut off completely for a while, but some buses and trucks were getting through yesterday. There were several helicopters circling over Banff, checking out the situation and looking for anyone who needed rescuing.








I'm not really affected by the flooding since I wasn't planning to leave town anytime soon, but it's always a weird feeling when there's a disaster around you. People naturally want to help but there isn't anything to help with at the moment, so all we can do is stand around in the park and gawk at the water.

I don't know why they bother with all the caution tape. If people are too dumb to notice eight inches of water on the path, I don't think a sign is going to to help them.




















This park bench would be a good place to sit for lunch- some other day!

Madagascar Memories

Sadly, I am not in some exotic location right now,
but I wanted to post some more of my photos, so here are a few more of my happy memories.


Lemur on a taxi brousse! This is one of the lemurs on the ride home to KAFS to be fitted with a new radio collar. He spent most of the journey inside a big fabric bag to minimize stress, but I took the picture when they opened the bag quickly to check on him.

A small fraction of the bounty of lychees. Lychees were in season when I left Madagascar and you could get a shopping bag full for about a dollar. They are kind of addictive so when you eat one it's easy to just keep on eating them, like chips.

 This is one of my little gecko friends. There were always a few little green day geckos chasing each other on my tent or stalking insects in the thatch roof. This one is about as long as my hand and he caught a big insect, I think it might have been a dragonfly.

Run away, it's the evil duck! Some of the ducks in Kianjavato were the usual mallards and white domestic ducks, but there was also this black kind with weird red swellings on the face. This particular duck belonged to a family who kept a little store next door to KAFS. The volunteers would go to the store for cake (mmm, mango cake with chocolate icing!) and sandwiches, and this enormous duck was always there hissing at us and snaking its neck. It looked kind of demonic so I called it the evil duck.

 I have fond memories of drinking at Hotely on a Sunday afternoon. Sunday is market day in Kianjavato and everybody goes into town wearing their best clothes, going to see and be seen as much as to shop. Hotely is right in the middle of town and their porch has a great view combined with shelter from the sun or rain, and of course the cold beer. Looking at this picture I can almost hear the rain on the sheet metal roof, taste the Namaki coffee rum and Three Horses Beer, and smell the gutter you have to cross on a little plank bridge between the porch and the street. The street is usually packed solid with people on market day but this day everyone who could was waiting out the worst of the rain under whatever shelter they could find, so there were only a few people and the hotely dog out on the street. Also in the picture is the famous red car, maybe the only car for miles around. You could tell the guys driving it thought they were pretty cool, with Celine Dion blasting from the stereo.

Havana

It is starting to rain more often. The rain is usually sudden and intense, then the weather clears right up. we had a really good rainbow last week, and I like this picture of it with Melanie, one of the other volunteers. The Malagasy word for rainbow is havana, which can also mean family. (The emphasis is on the first syllable, not like the Cuban city.) 

The fruit is starting to be ready, and you can sometimes get mangoes and papaya. The lychees are starting to get red, and I am just realizing how many lychee trees there are around Kianjavato. Hery told me they will be ripe November 23rd, but he might just be saying that so I stop asking him about it. I should get just the start of the lychees and pineapples before I have to leave.

Fruit and Lemurs

We checked into the hotel in Fianarantsoa this afternoon, then proceeded straight to the patisserie. I got quiche, tamarind juice, and profiteroles. The place had a whole menu of ice cream treats, which we read, translated (all menus are in French here), discussed, and considered at length which one to order. Then the waitress informed us that they were out of everything except profiteroles. It wasn't too much of a hardship though. Have you had profiteroles? They are ice cream on pastry, with whipped cream on top. I am pleased to report it is as good as it sounds.

It is getting much warmer here in Madagascar, the days are longer and there is starting to be fruit. I thought of it being tropical here, but we are about 21 degrees south and it is actually quite seasonal. I got a coeur de boeuf, a sort of green fruit about the size of a grapefruit that looks like a cow's heart, or it would if a cow's heart looked like the lumpy green and black thing on the left of the photo. The brighter green things are mangoes. There are also pineapples and green spiky things I have never seen before. The seasons are later in Kianjavato but we should have fruit there soon. There have only been bananas since about June. We are starting to see cucumbers again, and the carrots are new fresh ones, and there are some weird dry little things like a cross between raisins and shrivelled crabapples.

MBP, the organization I am volunteering with, has a chance to get funding if people vote for our project. They talk about the black and white ruffed lemurs and the reforestation efforts, but my bamboo lemurs live in the same forest. Being here I can really see that the project makes a difference. People can see that the lemurs are worth more alive, bringing in researchers and tourists and providing jobs, so they do not eat them anymore. You can vote here if you like.

Last weekend there was a concert in Kianjavato, a guy named Tsiliva. Everyone I know was there and there was a lot of dancing. At one point two masked men, dressed as Michael Jackson and, we think, Osama bin Laden, pretended to attack the singer and he fought them off with a really funny display of karate. I guess this is just one of the things they do here. I am getting used to the idea that I won't understand a large part of the world around me.

I keep trying to photograph the baby lemurs but it is difficult because they are very small, the same colour as the mother, and usually silhouetted against the sky. They get bigger almost by the day though. I think they should attain maximum cuteness in the next month or so, as they will become more independently mobile but still quite tiny and babyish. The one on the left is an adult just finishing a big jump and catching hold of a branch.

Baby Lemur, Baby Lemur!

We would like to congratulate PBC, a Greater Bamboo Lemur, on the birth of her new baby! We do not know yet if it is a boy or a girl. The baby is about the size of a chipmunk, with fur a bit darker than the adult animals. It has a tiny tail hardly bigger than a pencil but it already seems to be using the tail to help it maintain its balance as it clings to the mother's abdomen. It is hard to believe this tiny helpless thing will be leaping through the forest and playing with its friends in just a few months! The baby's older brother, born last September, seems indifferent to his new sibling. He still follows his mother around sometimes but he is more often foraging by himself or playing with the other juveniles.

 There are no baby pictures yet, but here is an unrelated shot of Hercules, one of our dominant males, scent marking. Male simus have large scent glands under their armpits that they like to rub on branches to mark their territory. Sometimes they mark their own tails too and you can really smell the musky scent wafting behind them as they move.

Here is Hercules (left) back in July when we put a new radio collar on him. The eyes are open because of the drug but the animal is still unconscious. He is recovering at this point and is starting to move and hold his head up. He was starting to hold on with the front legs (they have a really strong grip, even asleep) but the rear half of the body was still dead weight at this point.

Another shitty day with the lemurs...

"What is excrement?" Theoluc asks me one day while our lemur is sleeping. My old partner left him a Malagasy-English dictionary and Theoluc is reading it to improve his English, but some of the translations are not clear. Apparently he is up to the letter E.

"Just a sec, I'm upside down." The ground under the sleeping animal's tree is too steep to sit on. I tried to sit, then lie down, then I squirmed around until my head ended up below my feet, a tree root digging into my shoulder and ants crawling on me from somewhere. Theoluc has found a perch that looks much better, and politely says nothing while I struggle upright.

"It means shit."

"As in "The animal is excrementing?""

"No, it's only the noun "shit", not the verb. Like "This is a piece of lemur excrement."" I pick up a bit of old dried lemur poo. Their poo is innocuous: the fresh stuff is like pellets of wet green plant matter and the old stuff looks like hay. It doesn't smell. Theoluc nods understanding and goes back to his dictionary.

I go back to staring lazily into the distance. It is hot, but very pleasant in the shade of the forest and when you are not moving. Insects make a loud background hum, the sort of noise you hardly notice. We are near the edge of the forest so I can look out across a field of tiny knobby trees. They are grown for biodiesel and nobody knows the English name.

Crazy Busy Weeks

10-Aug-12
Camp seems empty and everyone is breathing a sigh of relief tonight. The last few weeks have been crazy. First Ed came for a few weeks and kept shouting at everyone and hiring dozens of workers to build and repair things around the camp. There are several new bridges over the drainage ditches, a concrete food storage building that is supposed to be rat-proof, lots of new sun shades for the tree nursery, and a large flat terrace carved out of the hill for a vegetable garden. KAFS is a work in progress and a permanent construction site, so every now and then you run into a new ditch or fence or people mixing cement.

The dart team showed up a few days after Ed. Most of the radio collars on our animals have dead batteries, and you have to shoot the animals with a tranquilizer dart to change the collars, so I got to cuddle some lemurs. Male bamboo lemurs have a strong musky smell from the large scent glands under their armpits, and they scent mark by rubbing their armpits on branches. They like to put their arms around you and hold on, even when half asleep, so after you hold a lemur you also smell like their territory. The technician changes the collar, checks the microchip and takes some measurements, then somebody needs to watch the animal carefully until until it recovers enough to be put into a pillowcase. Lemurs do not usually lie down so they feel better hanging from a tree in a pillowcase than lying in a cage.

The weird part is you can't put them into the pillowcase until they are strong enough to not get their necks into a position that blocks the airway, and they sometimes start crawling clumsily before they reach that point. Those ones need to be held and they like to cling to you. They have a very strong grip, even when drugged. They usually recover quite quickly and they can be released three hours after darting. The anaesthetic does weird things to the animals. For one thing their eyes are open the whole time, and you have to put special gunk to keep the eyes moist. Bamboo lemurs always seem to stick out their tongues, but the black and white ruffed lemurs don't. Oh, and one suddenly woke up and crawled off the scale while we were weighing it. Luckily Melanie grabbed it before it got very far.

We had one lemur that turned out to be old and sick and very skinny, and he slept a long time. I had him pressed against my chest for two hours to prevent hypothermia and the technician kept giving him IV fluids. I named him Elvis and he did finally wake up and we put him back in the forest where we got him. The next day we went back to check on him, and the signal from the radio collar was coming from the very spot where we released him. You can tell the direction of the signal very accurately and this signal was coming from the ground. Everybody went quiet and started combing through the bushes for a little furry body, but after a very long few minutes Theoluc came up with the collar. It must have fallen off within hours. I can confirm that Elvis is alive though: I have seen him twice since then, eating and chasing another lemur. He is visibly skinny and has a unique bald patch on his throat so I recognize him without the collar. We will not dart him again because he is not well. He is one of my favourites and I hope he hangs on a while longer.

 In case that wasn't enough excitement, the next arrival was a TV crew from the BBC. They brought at least 30 people and several tons of equipment and took the place over. They brought eight little British kids and filmed the kids watching lemurs and visiting a school and stuff. It's called Deadly Mission Madagascar, and we all had a good laugh about the title. It was somewhat interesting watching them and they were pretty good in the forest. The lemurs are really well habituated; they were fine with twenty people crashing throught the forest around them.

Anyway, everyone is gone now and it is just the usual dozen people at KAFS. The place seems a different without all the chaos, and hopefully we can get back to work as usual.