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Sampling Equipment: The snake belt

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- I'm going to buy you a snake belt - my guide  Mamadou said while driving by the N7 on our way to Tonboronkoto (Kedougou, East Senegal) It was only my second day at Africa, and I hadn't completely updated my brain software from ''Confident European'' to ''Silly Toubab''.  I didn't want a new belt, and less of all if the belt was made of snake skin, maybe a CITES protected one. -Thanks, but no need for that, I already have one -I answered firmly. Niokolo Koba entrance - Not this one. You need this one. You are going to the Rainforest, you need this belt. Everybody here wears one when working at the fields. So, that was it. My guide trying to sell me something - I thought. I know that they have to live and so, but I'm not buying something I don't want. - No, really Mamadou, I don't need one, Thank you. - You don't understand. This is a magic belt. There are a lot of snakes in the Rainforest, and this be
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Why this blog?

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Spanish version ( Warning !: If you haven't read   '' The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes From a Mud Hut''  stop wasting your time here. Read it and come back later.  If you have, you know what I'm talking about.) Field biologists travel to places no one would, to work  under the harshest imaginable  conditions   and always under a tight, tight budget. What can go wrong?.  Dr. Nigel Barley  is  an anthropologist  who wanted to write his Ph. D. Thesis about the Dowayo tribe in Cameroon. After one year on the field, he wrote not only his Thesis, but a book with the real stuff that he suffered/enjoyed (thin line this one) as well.  I had always thought of the stories in the book as events painted with a layer of exaggeration or even imagination  that maybe were real, maybe invented, all of them funny. I know now they were real. And accurate. In October 2016 I took my first field trip to the African forest at Dindefelo (Senegal). I carried two bo
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