walking alone in the forest

One day back in early May, I had to let various families know that I had returned after doing the survey and wanted to walk with them to map their fields (machambas). So I had a long bike ride that day, stopping at the houses that I needed to to set up an appointment. I passed through a section of forest where it was obvious that back in early April, furtivos or illegal loggers had brought trucks in to pick up timber to haul off to Quelimane and ship to China. I decided to take a detour and investigate the damage. I brought my bicycle into the truck tracks a bit and then set about photographing what the loggers had left behind. They basically cut the tree at its base (about 1 ft from the ground) and then cut just under the crown of the tree. The ground was littered with decaying tree crowns and stumps, the middle trunk sections all missing...except those that had been deemed too skinny by the buyer and owner of the truck. Many trees had been cut only to stay on the ground because they were judged too curvey or to skinny. I wandered into these areas, photographing various plants that I had never seen before, and noting where the tire tracks had turned and carved yet more space through the forest.

Later that day I was sitting with a friend of mine in the community who is in charge of the community's forest concession (which is currently being robbed by the furtivos). I described how I had mapped the furtivo entry points with my GPS, and had photographed evidence of the logging at each entry point and then tried to piece together the growing road network through the forest in my notebook. He seemed pretty excited that someone was paying attention to this devastating process, but he also looked very concerned. "Who were you walking with?" he asked. "Oh, no one, but the families in the area know me, so they let me walk alone in that area and trust that I won't do anything bad," I said. "Well, that's not the issue, we know you aren't robbing our machambas...it's that there are traps in the forest that we set to catch animals to eat," he said. "Oh F@#$," I thought.

There are metal traps that could really clamp your leg/foot and are the number one reason why so many dogs in the village have 3 legs and fresh wounds with bones jutting through where the rest of their leg was. Then there are large contraptions made of special types of wood that the unknowing passerby can get trapped in for days before the owner of the trap comes by to check up on the trap. It takes about 4 men to set one of these up and to open the trap when they want to pry whatever got caught - usually a large gazelle- out. There are signs left in the forest which tell those in the loop that there are traps in the area. They hack some of the bark of the tree with a machete in a certain pattern, or they wrap tall grass around the trunk. I was compeltely unaware of these signs and could have walked into any of these traps as I wandered through the forest mapping and photographing. I thought I only had some of the world's most poisonous snakes to worry about...