Up till now, the shooting has been pretty good - everything down quickly with one shot (even if not necessarily the right animal). But now . . .
Instalment 3
March 8
This was leaving day - we were going back to Addis, so I had one last chance to get the colobus before departure around 10 am. So dawn saw us sitting on the hillside, watching the monkeys in action, and they were active. After a couple of calls which were less than 100% sure, and certain calls where the male moved and was lost in a group, we finally had a monkey that everyone agreed was a male. And he sat still long enough for me to get him in my scope. And I was sure that my PH and I were looking at the same monkey.
The last challenge in bringing down a colobus is actually hitting the thing. They have quite a bit of hair on them, and you have to be certain you’re hitting centre of mass to avoid missing or worse, wounding.
After annoying everyone by asking once too often if we were sure, I took the shot (images of being responsible for Ficker’s livelihood running through my mind . . .). All of the monkeys immediately jumped around into other trees, other than the one I shot, which just sat there. I heard one of the Ethiopians say “good hit” and I think I said aloud “fall (please)” and fall he (eventually) did, hitting more than one branch on the way down.
When we found him, we all looked for the dime, and there it was. As is usually the case with colobus, the identification was a lot harder than the shot, but it was nice to make a good shot anyway. He didn't look great though, having fallen into a pool of water.
While we’d been stalking the elusive colobus, everyone else had been busy packing up the camp. Our gear was already stowed, so we jumped into our Land Cruiser and began the return to Addis. We would see many of the same staff in the Danakil, where they would head directly to set up that camp.
Not being close enough to Addis by 6 pm, we stopped in a small town and spent the night in the local hotel. Not terrible . . .
March 9
We finally arrived in Addis before lunch and checked back into our hotel. The afternoon was spent, I regret to say, watching soccer on tv and drinking beer. Well, some of us were drinking beer. I had a margarita which I was surprised to learn, after all these years, was a “ladies drink.” Not where I come from, and not how I make ‘em.
March 10
Today was gelada day. Gelada are found in a number of parts of Ethiopia, particularly in Simien Mountains National Park. There is no particular shortage of gelada, but for historic reasons, the number of permits has always been low and remains stuck at around 5 per year. The hunting area is an open area, meaning no one has exclusive rights to hunt there and anyone with a valid quota can hunt the area. This became important . . .
The gelada is virtually exclusively vegetarian (its diet is 90% grasses) and as much as the colobus monkey is arboreal, the gelada is terrestrial. They virtually never climb trees, spending their days on the ground and their nights on the sides of sheer cliffs. Their alternate name is the bleeding heart monkey, since the males give you that perfect target on their chests - a bright red, heart-shaped bare patch of skin. They’re the only member of their species and aren’t really baboons at all, although their face and general demeanor is much more baboon-like than monkey-like - but they’re technically an old world monkey. Having said that, being the list-oriented person that I seem to be becoming, I’m going to include them in my list as a baboon. This is important because there are six types of baboons in Africa - the olive (called Anubis in Ethiopia), yellow, chacma, kinda, Guinea and hamadryas. And I have half of them - the chacma, the olive and the hamadryas. So something to aim for (so to speak).
The gelada hunting area, Debra Libanos, is about a two hour drive outside of Addis (80 kilometers, as the crow flies), and the hunt is really more of a shoot, since the gelada are apparently always in the area and all you have to do is shoot straight. Things can get a bit complicated though, since these gelada live in and around a village which has a famous Ethiopian church and an ancient monastery, and we happened to be there on a Sunday during the Christian 55 day pre-(Orthodox) Easter fast. So there were more people than usual in and around the village and the church in particular, which is just below the cliffs where the largest troop of gelada were when we were there. To avoid issues with local people, the strategy is to get in, take the shot, and then quickly grab the prize and take it away for skinning elsewhere. The less fuss the better. Someone might have told me.
I should say something about the hunting area. You drive through agricultural land as you get to the hunting area and while it’s pretty enough, it doesn’t prepare you for what you’re about to see. The hunting area is just on top of some very steep cliffs with one of the tributaries of the Abbay river at the bottom of an enormous and impressive gorge. The Abbay River is also called (by non-Ethiopians apparently) the Blue Nile, and starts in Lake Tana in Ethiopia, joining the White Nile north of Khartoum in Sudan to form the Nile proper. This gorge forms part of the Blue Nile Gorge, a spectacular Grand Canyon-esque feature, cutting through the Ethiopian landscape. It’s very impressive.
As an (other) aside, the Abbay river is the river dammed by the Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, which will be one of the largest in the world and the largest in Africa when it’s completed. The dam has caused some controversy, particularly with Egypt which is concerned about the flow of water to the Nile. But as the site of the Aswan High Dam, Egypt has a hard time arguing that it should be the only country to take advantage of, or control, Nile river flows.
We headed out early Sunday morning to ensure that we’d be first, if by some small and unlikely chance anyone else also decided to shoot that day. We got there in good time, picked up a military guide who would act as our intermediary if anything came up with the locals, and climbed to our vantage point above the plains and just below a cell phone tower. Unfortunately, there seemed to be people around who didn’t have much to do, perhaps because this was a Sunday. In any event, we quickly began to attract attention, and by the time we’d sat down to overlook the gelada, there were over forty people, apart from our group, who had gathered in a semi-circle around me, and seemed to be having a wonderful time. They weren’t being at all quiet, and seemed uninterested in following any suggestions to be quiet and stop moving and milling about. I will admit to feeling a bit frustrated by the attention, and I’ll use that as my excuse for missing my shot on a big male gelada some 150 yards away at a downward angle.
Just a few of the crowd I attracted
Apparently, most people don’t miss, so I provided even more interest to the crowd than normal. We went down to the spot where the target gelada had been to make sure there was no blood, but the video was pretty clear and we were in no doubt that it was a clean miss. Of course, there were now no gelada anywhere in sight, and the circus had become more chaotic than before, if that was possible.
My frustration increased exponentially when, within minutes of getting back on the road after the miss, we ran into another Land Cruiser, which stopped beside us to say hello. It turned out that this was Jason Roussos, the well-known Ethiopian outfitter, who, unbelievably, had also come to hunt gelada that day with an American hunter. Once they had seen that we had got to the best spot first, they went down to the bottom of the cliffs to see if they could find another troop. They heard my shot, and saw the troop I had shot at racing down the cliffs, and decided to wait a minute. Apparently, the gelada I wanted to shoot stopped very close to their vehicle, and the hunter didn’t have to go very far to take a shot at my target. Needless to say, he shot better than I did, and they had my gelada in the back of their vehicle, and were off to skin it. They seemed more than ordinarily pleased with themselves, which caused me to be more than ordinarily pissed off with them and the world in general, but most of all with myself.
So, if you’re reading this and you shot a gelada on March 10, 2024 with Jason Roussos, you’re very welcome. Happy to be of service. Not.
In order to get away from the crowd, we spent the next few hours looking for other troops. Throughout that time, I would see the cell tower, and maybe because the locals thought or knew we’d have to be back, they were still there, and seemed content to make a day of it. Very frustrating, but my own fault.
After some hours of driving, glassing and walking the edge of cliffs above the gorge (my vertigo being a real impediment to full enjoyment of the landscape), and with no real options left, we went back to the top of the mountain, where the gelada had re-congregated, but we stayed on the flat area underneath the overlook from where I had initially missed the shot. That overlook would have been the better place to shoot from again, but the circus which had been there when I first shot, remained - four hours later (don’t these people have something better to do?).
We had no desire to scare the gelada and find them returning to the cliffs, so we walked slowly and diagonally until we were in the last piece of reasonable cover, nearly 140 yards from the troop. There was a big male there, but he seemed to be sitting on the edge of the cliff and a frontal shot could send him over the edge, making recovery very difficult. We waited, but as we waited, we saw people starting to climb down from our original overlook, to presumably get closer to whatever action there might be.
I was set up on the sticks, and had a very steady shot, but we were hoping the gelada would move further away from the cliff edge. With the people heading down, that seemed ever less likely, so at one point, Jacques said if you’re comfortable, take the shot and we’ll do the best we can with recovery. I put the crosshairs on the bleeding heart, and this time slowly pulled the trigger. A perfect shot to the heart and the gelada fell over backwards. At the shot, people began to race to the cliff edge and while part of me wanted the gelada to still be alive and give them a taste of those canines, I banished the thought, it being a Sunday. I saw one young fellow grab an arm and I knew that the gelada hadn’t in fact fallen over the edge (he had been inches away on a small ledge with that arm stuck in a crevice).
I can't recall how to post a video, but if anyone can tell me how, I will try to post a video of the shot.
These aren't for eating insects and grubs . . .
Since the whole town seemed to be there by then, we took our pictures and then left as quickly as we could to skin the gelada elsewhere in privacy. But first, we had to spread some birr around to compensate those who grabbed the gelada from the edge and helped carry it to the vehicle. If you don’t pay them, they can take it out on the next hunter, scaring the gelada away until they are paid to stop, but equally if you do pay them, you encourage them to congregate as they did. On balance, that’s probably better than active interference.
One quick footnote. As we were skinning the gelada, an older gentleman, who seemed to live in the area, was walking by and approached us. He looked at what we were doing, and asked our military guide if we had permission to shoot the gelada. After the guide confirmed that we did, he insisted on seeing the permit. Once that was done, he left. I have no doubt that things could be more difficult if there were a large group of people present, even if you did have the right paperwork.
