Bushbuck Sighting

On Friday one of our forest teams was treated to a sight that has not been witnessed by GVI since our arrival in 2006! I have been here for one and a half years, and the closest thing I have seen to this creature is an old skull, in the northern parts of the forest. Chris, one of our volunteers from the USA, tells us what happened:

Forest team

“It was a nice evening walk through Shimoni east forest, with the intention of getting some evening colobus behavioural surveys. It was a nice night, and we were looking forward to seeing how black and white colobus behaved in the cooler parts of the day. As it turns out, we got a much more exciting sighting than a colobus monkey (which is a phrase rarely uttered here…).
As we were walking up and down the north / south spine we had sighted some colobus in a tree in the distance. To get a better look we decided to follow a village path which led towards the colobus. This route turned out to be fruitless however, so we were deciding what to do when we heard the familiar sounds of a Zanj elephant shrew in the undergrowth. We crept around the corner to see if we could see it, but instead of a shrew we were faced with a very large antelope looking straight at us! We had a great look at it in the brief seconds before it took off into the undergrowth.

Bushbuck

We later identified it as a bushbuck! It was an amazing sighting because they are said to have been completely hunted out of this area, and hopefully this is a good sign for the future.”

Chris Allen, Conservation intern

Bushbuck Sighting