david korte photographs

Sunday, Jan. 23

Lisa and I drive back to Vera Plaine, retracing across Friday’s savannah to the far end, where we find another forest trail to hike. This forest is sandwiched between old plantations, now overgrown with thick bush. There are tracks of forest buffalo here, perhaps the thick bush makes good cover. The view is beautiful, from a savannah hilltop we can see the ocean one way, Plaine village another, and undulating forest canopy between. Hiking along the trail, we find a steep ravine on one side, and abandoned plantation on the other. After a kilometer or so, the trail becomes thickly overgrown, and without a machete, the going becomes too difficult to continue. Returning along the same path, we come across a snare dangling from a spring pole, and within a few hundred yards we find five more, apparently non-tended, for they are all sprung. Small snares, probably set for forest antelopes, porcupines or other small forest creatures. Back on the savannah, we picnic on Lisa’s delicious hand-made pizza, and oranges, and enjoy the appearance of a flock of woolly-necked storks that have left their perch in the forest to drift in slow circles over the savannah. All this, set to the scores of bird melodies bubbling forth from the forest below.