Counting animals: data translated to a visual form. My colleagues laptop screen is showing Salonga National Park, a World Heritage site.

I often get asked what the Bronx Zoo, my employer, does in the DR Congo. Whereas my project is information related, my colleagues work in the parks which many are World Heritage sites. Our specialty is counting animals, or what they call “inventories”.

“So how do you count animals?” For big mammals we count their shit. And a lot of shit there is over a wide area. Gorilla, elephant, okapi dung, you name it, we look it or it.

Our teams that cumulate 30 people split themselves in small groups and walk “transects” (straight line) kilometers on end. GPS, digital camera, and notebooks are used to witness all the details and location of interesting findings: turds, bonobo nests, traps, hunting camp, rivers, openings in the forest (bais), and villages.

Not a simple walk in the park. The exercise can last up to three months, if security permits. The forest is often shared with renegade soldiers, like Maï Maï. Think of Apocalypse Now and you have a fairly good image of the blokes in the woods.

All the data is then brought together in Excel. Boring data entry it is, but a critical step nonetheless. Then our GIS expert, Falk Grossman*, takes all this and creates charts and maps. Thousands of entries are transformed into shapes, making the big picture. The trouble is, with so many parameters, the analyzed data can be interpreted in many ways. Creativity is required to produce a final report.

“Is there anything left in Congo?” is always the next question. There is, but that's a little more complicated to answer.

*Can you believe it? He walked across Salonga National Park from North to South. That’s the size of Belgium. If you can make him talk, he has the craziest stories from his "transects".