Word: fayed
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...expedition, led by botanist Michael Fay of Wildlife Conservation International, has taken us to parts of the forest we believe no human has ever seen. We are catching a glimpse of the rarest treasure on this crowded planet: an ecosystem as pristine today as it was 12,000 years ago, before humans began to transform the earth. Our journey into unknown territory is a grand adventure, one that is as exciting as it is daunting. At one point, Fay must persuade apprehensive Pygmy trackers to continue through the Ndoki, for legend holds that the forest is home to Mokele Mbembe...
...first heard about the Ndoki three years ago, when Fay told me about this wondrous forest where gorillas, chimps and other animals do not run away at the sight of humans. At the time, I was researching an article on great apes, and I thought Fay was exaggerating. I had spent fruitless days trying to get glimpses of chimps and gorillas in forests just to the north of the Ndoki, and it was hard for me to imagine that Africa might still contain forests so remote that the animals had never learned to fear mankind. Western lowland gorillas, hunted...
...long after my talk with Fay, I encountered Japanese primatologist Masazumi Mitani, who along with Suehisa Kuroda established the first research camps at the edge of the Ndoki region in 1987. Since then, the Japanese researchers, in cooperation with Congolese scientist Antoine Ruffin Oko, have conducted a groundbreaking survey of animal populations in the Ndoki and have closely studied the primates, including gorillas and chimps. Mitani told me the animals were indeed unafraid of humans, but warned that conditions in the region were "very, very difficult." Knowing the extreme privation Japanese primatologists regularly endure, I took these cautionary words very...
Later conversations with Fay and others disabused me of the notion that the Ndoki would be safe if simply left alone. Only lack of funds has stymied government plans to build a road through northern Congo that would open the region to development. And in 1990 only the arguments of Fay and Japanese researchers, backed by the U.S. government and the World Bank, persuaded Congolese authorities that there were alternatives to giving a logging concession for the Ndoki region to an Algerian-Congolese consortium...
...pick our way through the quicksand-like muck by feeling with our toes and walking sticks for a series of thin logs Japanese researchers have previously laid down. I slip once and fall up to my chest in mud before grabbing a root. Sobered by the slip, I ask Fay how deep the mud is. "Who knows?" he says, shrugging...