Matondo season is upon us! For those of you who don’t know – and why should you? – the Matondo is a local delicacy, a large almost luminous green caterpillar – not dissimilar in appearance to a jelly sweet, and the monkeys LOVE them! They have gorged almost exclusively on the Matondo for 3 weeks now and all have permanently orange stained arms and legs (from the disposal of the insides of the caterpillar) and green lips. There appears to be a knack to eating these little creatures – bite the head off, empty the guts and shovel in what remains, while quickly preparing the next one. The field team has to be very careful not to stand under any Matondo trees at the moment as we have been hit more than once by falling caterpillar goo!
The Matondo caterpillar.
Ben, tucking in to a juicy Matondo!
The appearance of the Matondo has prompted Titan’s Troop to range far and wide. They seem to almost blindly follow the Matondo trail, which is making our job of locating the monkeys every day more difficult.
On the morning of the 11th November we set out to do the morning census followed by a behavioural study on the monkeys, but they weren’t where we had left them the previous evening. So while tracking through their usual hang outs I started to get a little spooked and could hear movement in the long grass along the path we were walking. I was distracted from the noise by the most awful smell and while in the middle of exclaiming ‘it stinks here!’ I saw a half eaten common duiker (little antelope). On closer inspection it became obvious it was a very fresh kill, probably less than an hour. We took a few photos and the GPS location and continued our search for the monkeys. Eventually, we found them and spent a lovely few hours watching them play, sleep and eat more huge Matondo caterpillars.
Later that day we returned with Duncan Yearly, from Carnivore Conservation, and his night vision motion sensor cameras. We placed them around the now not so fresh kill in the hope that whatever killed it would come back for it. The following morning we had some amazing photos of the most beautiful female leopard who had returned to claim her prize – only 30 minutes after we set the cameras and were still in the area looking for our monkeys.
The scout now tells us that the rustling in the grass we heard in the morning was most probably the Leopard who we had disturbed eating her breakfast!!!
Christmas wishes from the Malawian bush
Andrea and Keith
Donations made here are
Dec 23rd Derek H USD 57.50
2 Comments
Enjoying the updates and continue to be utterly impressed by the good – and hard – work you all do. Envious too – one of these days I may get back to Malawi and come volunteering. Well done on working with Mua Mission to improve life for the animals kept there – I vividly remember the pythons in their pit, awful; an excellent project to work hand in hand with Mua with consideration for the community too – marvellous!
please find out more about this beautiful leopard for us and more inf. on other wild felines.