For the last part of our eastern Senegal trip, we were determined to drive down the eastern side of Lac de Guiers, which we had started when our car originally broke down several weeks ago. Our plan was drive back to Richard-Toll to meet Niaga, our friend from Toleu village, since he knew the eastern side of the lake well. But as we rolled back […]

I received news from my colleague Boureima Boubacar in Niger that an adult female manatee was killed by a hunter on June 11 in Niamey, the capital. Several days before, a group of approximately 6 manatees had been seen in the area and from the description of their behavior, it sounds like it was a mating herd. Boureima called a local TV reporter and they went

Back in 2009 I tagged three manatees in the Senegal River as part of a collaborative study with my colleagues from CBD- Habitat (a Spanish NGO) and Oceanium Dakar (a Senegalese NGO). You can see my original post about it here. It was the first time West African manatees had ever been tagged with satellite-linked tags, and we learned alot about their dry season movements in the

Yesterday afternoon we walked along part of the Navel tributary to see if we could spot the live manatee that had been reported there, but we didn’t see it. We met up with the same farmer I met the day before, but he hadn’t seen the manatee again. The foreground of this photo is the farmed area, but the plants don’t extend all the way

Now there’s something I never thought I’d see. Can you find the manatee in this picture? We drove to Kanel this morning and met up with Moutar, a local fisherman and our manatee contact, who has monitored the manatee situation here for many years. He took us to meet the local Water and Forestry officer, who knew where the manatee carcass that died last August was, and

It felt like getting to Matam was one of the hardest things I’ve done in a long time. After 3 weeks of endless car repairs, we were finally ready to try again to get to eastern Senegal for manatee fieldwork. Tomas and I left Dakar very early Tuesday morning, and it was exhilirating driving out of the city in the cool pre-dawn air. We had an easy trip

Sunday afternoon we got the news that the local mechanics were not going to be able to adequately repair the electrical system in the car to work with the new engine. The advice of our friends Billy and Mamadou (who know alot more about engines than I ever will) was to have the car towed back to Dakar and get the rest of the work done

Late yesterday morning Tomas got a call that another baby manatee had been found entangled in net in Lac de Guiers. It was near the location where the first one had been caught the other day, so we wondered what was going on with the nets there, and hoped it wasn’t the same calf caught again. It took several hours to arrange a truck to

On Thursday the new car engine was put into our car. Yes, that’s it hanging from a tree in the photo above! The mechanics spent hours hooking up the various tubes and wires, and I naively thought this meant we were close to being finished with the repairs. Tomas and I discussed where we would drive first- should we continue our original plan to drive