Research Centre

Eventually, Guests come to the Research Centre, the base of operations for the Pangani Forest Conservation School. The Centre is a simple, wooden structure built up against an earthen embankment. Apart from the many unique animals to be discovered here, the Centre is also packed with story details inside and out.

On the porch are several tools and other pieces of equipment, along with this crate addressed to a Morris Kyengo. We'll learn later that Kyengo is conducting research on hippos. One can only wonder what might be waiting for him in this box.

Inside the building is the head office, along with a collection of reference materials used by the researchers at work here.

At the center of the office is Dr. Kulunda's desk, which also gets used by the rest of the team. A notice on the bulletin board tells us that Kulunda is presenting a lecture tonight at 6:30. He also keeps handy a supply of stamps, his binoculars and a can of Doom bug spray (the same brand seen advertised in Harambe and used in "It's Tough to be a Bug").

The cabinets and drawers throughout the Research Centre contain supplies for those working in the reserve, everything from lanterns and water jugs to sample vials and small cages for collecting specimens. Other items for study can also be found here, including a variety of skulls and well-preserved insects. Visitors to the Centre are encouraged to open the drawers. You never know what you might discover.

At one end of the Research Centre, the building is open, revealing the side of the hill. The earth has been carefully opened up to reveal a series of burrows inhabited by a colony of naked mole-rats. A researcher named Ms. Muthoni is studying the mole-rats and their fascinating behavioral patterns.

Another researcher, Rebeccah Davies, is studying a local clan of spotted hyenas. Some of her work is on display at the Centre. She is photographing and identifying individual hyenas in the clan and trying to establish their position in the matriarchal heirarchy.

These projects are just the tip of the iceberg of the research and conservation efforts currently underway in the Pangani Forest region of the Harambe Wildlife Reserve. We've already come across Apti and Omari's okapi observations. Next, we'll leave the Research Centre and head down toward the Safi River to catch up with what Mathenge, Kyengo and Carr-Hartley are doing with cichlids and hippos.