This is the rainy season in Cameroon. We are a group of professors, students and helpers in the jungle, in the mud. On one side of our nets, the forest will remain, but on the other side, the forest will be cut completely, to grow palm trees for palm oil. The nets catch colorful forest birds, and we are testing to see what diseases they have now. Then over time, with the loss of trees, we are monitoring how mosquitoes and malaria change. This is a 3-year project, and we are racing to get the data before the trees are all gone.

Getting to this forest is not easy. From the University of Buea, we drive 4 hours to the village of Manyemen. This place is like the Wild West, with a few bars, and trucks loaded with huge felled trees parked outside. Bushmeat is openly sold in the market. I have been here before, 3 times in two years, but I am still not fond of the place where we sleep. The rats in my cobwebby room gnawed into my backpack and ate my precious supply of nuts. The next morning, we begin our hike into the forest. This time we have to cross a river. Apparently not many Cameroonians learn to swim, so we carefully haul all the supplies back and forth across the flowing waste-deep waters. This is food, tents, supplies for catching mosquitoes and birds, and basically setting up a lab and mini-village of 17 people for 3 weeks in the jungle.

Then it starts raining. This is not drizzle, but monsoon tropical rain, and we are forced to create a camp and put up our tents in the downpour. Will it ever end? The first night we sleep in our flooded tents wondering how we will be able to endure this deluge. The rain doesn’t stop the next day, until the afternoon. We are now soaking wet and disheartened, but still begin to work. We can’t catch birds in the rain, and the mosquitoes don’t fly much either. So every non-rainy hour is precious.

Bathing in the river next to a massive waterfall is the best part of every day, and what I look forward to after a long day of work. When I was in this forest in January, we had no water. Now there is too much. Ideally this waterfall would remain hidden from people, but with the inevitable development of the region, it would be much more appreciated by visitors at an ecotourism lodge, or a yoga retreat center than the palm oil trees that will have this beautiful view.

We hear and catch glimpses of monkeys, and see the magnificent hornbills flying across the tree canopy. The termite mounds look like Chinese lanterns on the forest floor. Plenty of birds land in our nets. We measure them and take a drop of blood before releasing them. One day we catch an African goshawk as it is attempting to get an easy meal by preying on a dove in a net. Mostly we find Fire-crested Alethes, Olive sunbirds, and Yellow-whiskered greenbuls. This is excellent because we have been tracking the parasites of these birds for years already.

Every day, we eat simple starchy food: spaghetti, or rice with tomato paste, or plantains with peanut stew. We know the rains will return, so everything is done in a rush. The clothes never dry, even when the sun finally comes out for a few hours. The mud covers our rubber boots: slosh slosh slosh. We all hate the water in our boots, so we try to dry them by placing them on sticks next to the cooking fire. The thunder and rains usually return around 4 pm.

We have converted one large tent into a laboratory to study the mosquitoes. A small generator provides electricity to a couple light bulbs that keep the students working into the evening, among the moths and other insects that are attracted to the light. There are so many insects, but actually not that many mosquitoes in this rainy season. My body is itchily covered with bites from black flies and biting midges. No one complains. Instead we do the best we can, and try to gather as much scientific data as possible, to make it worth it.

The USA and Europe used to be covered with forests teeming with biodiversity. I tell the story of the passenger pigeon to the students here, and how the most abundant bird on the planet was hunted to extinction in North America. The animals are scarce now in this Cameroonian rainforest, and the hardwood trees are being pulled out to make our furniture. The villages are filled with young children who will have a hard time finding jobs, and will most likely never see the once abundant rainforests of their homeland. The villagers see that the climate is changing and that the forests are disappearing before their eyes, and no one is happy about it. The economic forces are beyond their control.

The professors and I leave the students in the forest to continue the work, while we return to our computers in Buea. The mold on my backpack, and the stench of my clothes will probably never wash out. My trusty tent has never been this muddy. Still, remarkably, I look forward to working with these dedicated students in this forest, next year.