Been there, didn't do that, but it was still pretty cool

We went there in 2010 and did a little bit of volunteer work with a group focusing on mountain gorilla preservation. We did the one-day hike through Bwindi thing and had what we considered an amazing encounter with a gorilla group, but not like this. I'm just impressed at the relatively calm dominance of the silverback in this video. The silverback we saw was far less tolerant, partway bluff-charging our guides when they walked in a direction that he wanted to go (they bluff-waved their machetes around in response, and everybody settled down).  You're not allowed to approach the baby gorillas but they can approach you.  We had one that came within ten feet of us, and that was pretty amazing to us.

The silverback in this video is calm but not completely, like at minute 2:50 when he pulls an infant away that was intensely scrutinizing the tourist's face.  One interesting speculation is that the silverback may have thought that staring into the man's face would be somewhat threatening, as it would've been to the silverback, but it would be hard to reason all the way through that without using a theory of mind.  And the silverback's quick glance at the man as he left was interesting - somewhat cautious, a bit threatening, and I suspect maybe just as curious as the females and juveniles but constrained by social norms from showing it as openly.  Or maybe I'm just anthropomorphizing, but it all seems plausible.

Only 700 of these guys in the wild, split into two geographically-separated groups.  As we see from the population structure of one male and a number of females, the effective breeding population is far smaller.  These gorillas haven't been bred in captivity.

Here's hoping this video helps raise awareness and maybe some money to keep the species alive.

More Uganda

Felt like writing a little more about Uganda:

Gorillas are almost entirely herbivorous (they eat some insects, apparently).  We were watching the silverback try to eat a small green vine going up a 25-foot tree, but it snapped when he tried to pull it down.  No problem, though - he stood up and wrenched the whole tree down, putting the entire vine in easy reach.  Gorillas are like small elephants, changing the balance between trees and ground cover in the forest.

A lot of the gorillas spend a significant amount of time foraging in neighboring farms and not just the forest.  Understandable when Bwindi Impenetrable National Park is so small (about 20 by 15 kilometers) and the farmland used to be habitat, but you can also sympathize with subsistence farmers living on less than $2 a day when their tiny plots are torn up by gorillas.  The average woman has 7 to 9 children in her lifetime - they say they need to keep some children home from school to chase wildlife away from their fields.  The organization we volunteered with, Conservation Through Public Health, has a family planning program that attempts to persuade people that smaller families are better.  I've also thought that programs elsewhere to compensate people for damage to their farms, or to pay them to create buffer areas, could be good models to apply at Bwindi.

We did a river wildlife cruise at Queen Elizabeth National Park that was fantastic.  The birdlife in particular was amazing - I'm an indifferent birder overseas where I have no hope of absorbing much understanding, but these were great.

Congo seems to be improving somewhat - we were right on the border and there's lots of traffic.  Rwanda is already open for tourists.  North Uganda, previously dangerous, is now settling down some.  Some good signs in this.  OTOH, we heard that Rwanda wasn't as careful as Uganda in controlling the level of exposure that gorillas, susceptible to human diseases, have to tourists.

Everyone in Uganda and Dubai seemed happy to see Obama as president, although many didn't expect great things either, just less war.

Racial bias on Haiti from the right and the left

Rush Limbaugh should be getting more grief over this comment telling people not to help Hait than anything else he's said:

There are people who have been trying to save Haiti, just as we're trying to save Africa. You just can't keep throwing money at it cause the dictatorships there just take it all.

It seems pretty clear that Rush is for no logical reason grouping Africa together with Haiti only because they're both predominantly black. Rush says Haiti and "Africa" are dictatorships, despite the fact that Haiti isn't and the majority of sub-Saharan Africa isn't. Rush says their economies are hopeless, despite the fact that Haiti had a fragile economic recovery going before the quake, and sub-Saharan Africa has done well as a group for a decade. The implication Rush leaves for his listeners is that black people can't govern themselves and that attempts to help them are hopeless. This is the most prominent conservative voice in the country, with the possible exception of Sarah Palin.

Then there's Pat Robertson, who thinks a pact with Satan is how Haitian slaves overthrew French slave owners. Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice nails it:

Forget the religious disagreement—the “Curse of the Revolution” fantasy has been passed down from bigot to bigot for two hundred years and counting because it’s simply impossible for them to believe that a bunch of African savages and half-breeds could win an actual war against the majesty, however tattered, of the extremely white French nobility.

Only Satan can explain how blacks can win a war against whites, apparently. And btw, God supports Christian slaveowners when non-Christian slaves fight for freedom.

These blatant examples of bias aren't the end of the story. I should start by repeating what I've said before that racial bias is so widespread in society/the planet, that saying X statement is prejudiced doesn't mean the maker of X statement is any more biased than anyone else, just that the maker ought to consider the implications.

Anyway, here is the "We didn't break it, but we might own it" Haiti post coming from Talking Points Memo:

As of today, for all practical purposes, Haiti is an American Protectorate. Its own government, to the extent it ever functioned, has now collapsed....Other states and international institutions will contribute aid and resources. Perhaps the UN will expand its current mission in the nation, and assume formal responsibility. But the only nation capable of keeping Haiti from absolute collapse is the United States. Irrespective of the bodies through which we choose to work, the responsibility is ultimately ours.
....
How this response unfolds, how we structure our responsibilities, whether we choose to assume them alone or through international institutions, what sort of future we design for Haiti - these are vital questions. Ultimately, they are also political questions that will be decided by political actors. And the answers they provide will shape and constrain a wide array of seemingly unrelated policies.

(Emphasis added.)

Haiti is not Iraq - it had and it continues to have an elected government, and it's up to Haitians to design their future. We have a responsibility as fellow human beings to help, but we're not in charge.

I recognize that the government, fragile even before the quake and even more so now, can't provide the normal level of direction. But thinking we can or even should control things is the wrong approach.

More broadly, the sense that "these people weren't running things and need us to run it for them" that I get from the argument has some disturbing implications. I'm sure they're unintentional, but they need to be examined.



Bonus unrelated blogging: Ed Yong might be my favorite general science blogger for combining quality and quantity (with libertarian/conservative/atheist science blogger Razib Khan a close second). Yong's piece on metabolic rates of social insect colonies as superorganisms is a great example of his stuff. I'd known the general idea that bigger animals have slower metabolism, which I ascribed to surface to volume ratios. I can throw out that idea now - it must have something to do with ecological efficiency, and not just simple physiology. That's pretty interesting.