Black Kites or Circling Crows of Doom

We are very fortunate in Malabo to have a full tropical rainforest in the back garden so as to speak, the camp where we work is on a peninsular below a very large volcano that is dormant but not totally dead. it has erupted in recent times but hopefully shouldn’t go off without any warnings. The older guys who have been here from when the site was built 11 years ago tell the tale of when Mount Cameroon erupted 9 years ago and they took the offshore supply vessel out to Cameroon, which is about 25 miles across the Gulf of Guinea and took pictures, but since marathon oil took over we have no privileges like that anymore. Anyhow getting back to the jungle and the wildlife, from our camp there is nothing but lush forest all the way to the top of the volcano and this does enable lots of birdlife to survive quite well here and there is a huge and thriving population of Black kites that live on and around the camp. I think they like the open grassy areas as they can see much more of there prey here rather than in the forest, they circle round all day up to 20 in a spiralling thermal at a time and then when they are hunting they skim as low as 20 feet over the ground looking for the commonly known rainbow lizards and snakes and even the Snowy egrets that strut around the site like skinny white chickens. the black kites tend to snatch up the prey and then take them to the top of the towers to eat in peace but they leave the remains festering and stinking up there, so whenever a maintenance guy gets up there he is faced with a maggoty mess that he has to kick off to the ground, I think it is only a matter of time until they are actually nesting on the towers as they have great platforms which don’t tend to blow away in the wind unlike the large trees. They have a fantastic majestic flying ability and are really beautiful to look at when we walk around the site. The forest here is very good for the wildlife but the locals have a tendency to eat anything that walks on two of four legs and that includes the local pouched rat. One of the operators was faced with two very flat and well-beaten rats in a control room that had been left by one of the locals after he had caught them, he obviously was going to take them home for supper. There was even a case of theft that involved the body of a 10 foot boa constrictor that had been killed after it stupidly entered the realms of the flesh eaters on site and was hammered by about 10 guys with shovels, it was placed in the control room for taking home later and was stolen by a passing bus driver, all hell broke loose over that one. The island could be a fantastic tourist resort for eco-holiday makers, but the problems of the locals being uneducated peasants and a penchant for killing the local wildlife means that the island is virtually wiped clean of anything worth eating including all the monkeys, which they say are caught in snares and have there backs broken so they cannot make an escape and are sold like in baskets in the bush meat market. The government here doesn’t really care about anything so a few rare and endangered monkeys are nothing to them, fortunately the volcano at the other end of the island is so remote and wild a virtual sanctuary for the remaining monkeys is there but it is only a matter of time before they wipe them all out.
There has been a reprieve for many of the contractors who were told that they were all leaving last trip, they were called back as nothing is complete and the manager who thought he was saving money by dismissing them probably got his arse kicked over it and they are all back playing there normal tedium relieving games again. Singing silly songs until early hours of the morning while the early morning guys are trying to sleep, that sort of thing, but many of the contractors have left for new projects around the world, like Sakhalin island in Russia, so Marathon is struggling to get the necessary guys to complete the commissioning. So the crows are circling in as we pass another deadline for completion and the managers who are direct employees of marathon are looking over their shoulders for the grim reaper to see if there performance has met the approval of the directors. The project started off at $400 million , but as the $1 billion was passed that project manager responsible was officially deleted as incompetent, and another installed, we are now at $1.4 billion and climbing, things are getting close to working but nothing is as it seems and anything can go wrong at this crucial moment, I see the pied crows flying round as a bad omen for things to come, I don’t really care as my project in Brazil is getting closer, should only be about 11 weeks away, but even my contract hasn’t been renewed yet so the crows may be circling for me after all.