Day 5 - First Day at MEGI

We woke up today and ventured off to MEGI to do some introductory things before the expedition.  We got to the compound and they weren't kidding when they said it's like Florida inside (a lot of people from Florida and Texas live there).  They had a little residential area with cookie-cutter homes and everything the people who work there from the US would need.  When we walked in we met all of the volunteers, the visiting scientists, the grad students and Dr. Hearn, the Drexel Professor who runs BBPP and has been coming to the island since 1990. It was so cool getting to hear about all of the things the scientists and grad students are working on.  It made me think of when I was little and my friends and I would talk about what we wanted to do when got older...we always talked about conventional things like and astronaut, teacher, etc...I now am seeing how much I overlooked these types of jobs - making research or conservation biology their life!

We went over most of the things we will need to know and need to be cautious of while going through the Caldera...the southern highlands of the island.  There are obvious health things we need to wary of, like making sure we treat the water we drink and take care of cuts/bug bites, but they also emphasized the importance of being careful and not being stupid in the rainforest..aka not being a wahoo!

There are a total of three different camps in the area we will be hiking, including numerous trails we will perform daily censusing on.  They showed us pictures of all of the primates and other mammals we should keep our eye out for, including the Drills and Red Colobus, two of the most endangered species in central Africa.  We also talked about the frog, mollusk and insect work that some of the grad students and scientists will be working on during these next few weeks.

We venture out on Tuesday morning, by boat from Malabo to Moka, and I couldn't be more excited!  It's cool because us DSA students and UNGE students get to do a little bit of all of the censusing, not just with the mammals because we need to get used to various field methods for when we conduct our own research in February.

Lesson learned today - don't be a wahoo!

Hasta luego,
Lindsey