June 18, 2004
"Dull Machetes"
by Haley Houghton

As part of our forest fragmentation/lemur census project, Jodie, Katie, and I have been setting up transects in different sized and isolated fragments in the park.

This entails scouting the fragment and determining its size with GPS and then flagging trees every 25 meters through the transect. Sounds pretty simple, right? –Not if you encounter impenetrable walls of spiny plants every few meters. We didn’t realize how difficult it would be until we spent a hot afternoon in the savannah with Pierrot, Alain, and four dull machetes making virtually no headway through the wasp-infested thicket.

We chopped and chopped, but the machetes just bounced off the thorny vines. The whole time we were silently wondering if Pierrot and Alain had given us dull machetes on purpose. I wouldn’t have blamed them. After all, I grew up in suburbia—what do I know about safely wielding a machete? While violently chopping away with the oversized butter knives they claimed were machetes, we realized how absurd we looked: three young American women surrounded by tropical brambles with machetes that couldn’t even cut through the dry savannah grass. We took a break to capture the moment on film. Beware: Angry White Girls with Machetes! But Alain and Pierrot’s machetes didn’t seem any sharper than ours, and after an afternoon the five of us had cleared only 100 of 500 meters of transect. We called it a day when we heard Luke hooting in the savannah. The rest of the team had arrived with cold beer and sambos for “sundowners” at the fire tower. Bleeding from the thorns and dehydrated from the pounding sun, we stumbled defeated out of the fragment towards the fire tower. I couldn’t help but wonder if it could get any better than this.