and pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space
I recently spent a little time around Chimpanzees. They are our closest living relatives. Our common ancestors were around approximately 6 million years ago. Some of their descendants took to the savanna, adopted an upright posture and developed language and large brains.
We are proud of our large brains. I’m happy to concede that Chimps can climb trees better than me but surely when it comes to mental abilities there is nothing that they could beat me at.
This came as a surprise …
The farflung margins of the ancient world were occupied by all sorts of amazing creatures, chimpanzees included, half real half legend.
From about 1640 onwards the animals themselves took more tangible form as they slowly found their way into European menageries.
Darwin Published The Descent of Man in 1871. In it he identifies the great apes as our nearest relatives, Africa as the location where our common ancestors lived and he espoused the view that we differ merely in degree rather than in kind. Darwin’s personal experience of apes seems to have been limited to meetings with an Orangutan at London Zoo in 1838. You can read about his encounters <HERE> it’s an interesting story.
That was just about as good as it gets until 1960. By then Chimpanzees were in Zoos, circuses and laboratories. The following year there would be one in space (Ham, January 31, 1961) but no one had studied them in their natural habitat. It is possible that no one had even photographed them in the wild at that point.
That year three different young scientists took themselves to the forests of Africa and set about observing the behaviour of chimpanzees. Jane Goodall who went to work in the Gombe Stream National Park in what is now Tanzania became the most famous. Less familiar pioneers were Adriaan Kortlandt working in what was the Belgian Congo now DRC and Vernon Reynolds in the Budongo Forest, Uganda.
Reynolds and his wife Frankie spent a year at Budongo. The only trails there would have been for logging purposes, the chimpanzees would have fled screaming as the humans approached. It would have been hard work. Nonetheless the exercise culminated in the book Budongo: a forest and its chimpanzees and Vernon went on to a successful academic life eventually becoming Professor of Biological Anthropology and a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford.
Uganda meanwhile fell on hard times. Two major civil wars brought governance to a halt in the 1970’s and 80’s. In 1988 Prof. Reynolds read a report in the New Vision, the main Ugandan newspaper, that chimpanzee infants were being captured in Budongo Forest and smuggled out to wealthy pet-owners in Dubai and elsewhere. In 1990 Reynolds returned to Budongo and with a local researcher, Chris Bakuneeta, set up a base to see if there were still chimpanzees to be found.
There were. The base evolved into the Budongo Conservation Field Station and its work centres on understanding what it takes to make sure chimpanzees will always live in this beautiful place.
Progress is being made. Much more to come …
… could be a day in your life that you will never forget.
Earthwatch have written to me …
If you have any friends, family, or colleagues who you think might benefit from the once-in-a-lifetime experience of living a day in the life of a chimpanzee, please let them know that we have a team in need of more volunteers running from October 7-18, 2017, as well as 6 teams scheduled throughout 2018 that need a good head start on their recruitment …
Apply now <zzimmerman@earthwatch.org>. Tell them Rob sent you.
You can be in Budongo soon. If you need a refresher on the delights that await you there skip back in this blog to July 10th. The link again … Investigating-Threats-to-Chimps-in-Uganda
Do it.
Our last full day as Earthwatch Researchers at Budongo would be spent on patrol looking for signs of illegal activity in the forest.
Hunting in the forest was once the legitimate pursuit of some families. They could eat or sell what they caught. What they have done honourably for many generations is now poaching.
There are six former hunters employed to police the forest. The leader of the group I went with was Ofen.
The other experienced set of eyes belonged to Dr Caroline Asiimwe, the Conservation Coordinator at Budongo.
Then there were three beginners.
Ofen has worked for Budongo for 18 years. He has a wealth of knowledge.
Traditionally a hunter had a patch to himself, he would set as many as 200 snares and walk around them every couple of days. In order to find them efficiently he made marks on the trees near where the snares were placed.
The main target animals were Duiker and Giant Rats. He would look for the regular trails that Duiker used, determine whether it was Red or Blue Duiker, find a place where the trail was narrow and a snare could be concealed and then set up his trap. The snare would be smaller and set a little lower for Blue Duiker than for Red.
For the rats the technique was different, a noose, a trigger mechanism and a bent sapling. Set at the entrance to its burrow. The unfortunate rodent would put its head through the noose as it released the trigger, the sapling straightens tightening the noose and hoisting the rat into the air.
If a hunter found an animal in someone else’s snare he took a leg. To take the whole animal would, according to tradition, cause the thief to die.
We started out by visiting an area which had recently been illegally logged. The loggers typically bring only beans and their logging equipment. They set traps to supplement their diet, mainly with Giant Rats. The pit sawing equipment had been destroyed by the Forest Authority and the area thoroughly searched by the Snare Patrollers. Our follow up visit found no evidence of renewed activity.
We then turned our attention to an area closer to the edge of the forest and Ofen found the first snare. To sharpen our eyes the rest of us were invited to find it as well. It took a while but helped develop a search pattern. Find the Duiker trail, look where it narrows, look very carefully in the foliage. Also look for a cut stick about two metres long, there isn’t always a sapling or tree conveniently placed where the snare is to be set. Even if the stick comes free from the ground it will soon get caught in a narrow place on the trail. No point these days looking for the traditional marks, the poachers know that the patrollers will find them all too easily.
I’m especially proud of this one …
because I found it all by myself.
By day’s end we had found 6 wire snares (these days made out of motorbike throttle cabling) and an old sapling and liana spring trap. None contained any animals.
Ofen spoke with pride about the work the team had done for their chimpanzees. When he started work around 2000 the team were finding 200 traps a day, sometimes as many as 300, the chimpanzees were fewer in number and many had limb injuries from snares.
Back at camp we were shown a shed full of “man traps”. These are very spiteful devices using car springs to close a pair of spiked jaws. One was set up for us. It took a man’s weight applied to the end of a stout lever to open the jaws which were then held open by a trigger mechanism …
dig enough of a hole to set it flush with the ground and cover with leaves…
An animal or human stepping on the plate seen to the left of the upper photo is in for a very nasty surprise.
By that evening we were home again, and it really did seem like home. What could be more natural than encountering chimpanzees or a troop of baboons between the house and the dunny?
By this stage we had also found the hang outs of some of our nocturnal neighbours and could walk around after dark and say hi to the Civet, the Servaline Genet and the Bushbuck., whilst listening to the Tree Hyrax – to get the full effect turn the volume up as high as it will go …
and they look exactly as you see them in the video!
We would have two more full days at Budongo.
In times past the forests of tropical Africa were far more extensive, the human population far smaller.
The monthly household income in rural Uganda, including the value of goods received in kind, is (2009/10, Uganda Bureau of Statistics ) 142,700 Ugandan Shillings or $40 US. Put another way, two parents will have an annual income of $480 to support themselves plus perhaps three children and a grandparent.
Subsistence agriculture is the main activity for rural people. An increasing population requires an increasing area of land.
The biggest threat to wildlife in Uganda and many other places is habitat loss. The biggest threat to subsistence farming is the wildlife.
Hunting was an honourable pursuit in the past, it provided much needed protein and a little cash income. In Budongo it is now illegal, timber getting likewise.
I and the folk working at Budongo, and I’m sure, all my first world readers want to see chimpanzees and all that surrounds them secure in a living forest. But none of us want a child to starve.
Tomorrow after a morning on primate watch we would visit the adjacent village. The day after that would be snare patrol.
Stay tuned.
1738, from a Bantu language of Angola (compare Tshiluba kivili-chimpenze “ape”). Short form chimp first attested 1877.
There was a fruiting mango tree in the camp. Chimpanzees had wandered through for a feast every day. We had kept a respectful distance so as to keep our germs to ourselves, now that we had passed our quarantine period we could follow them more closely.
My first full day with them was with the Sonso group, named for the river than ran close to the camp. This was the first group to be habituated and could usually be found without too long a hike.
The aim was to spend long periods with a target individual recording their every activity in ten minute blocks. Their daily life can be summarised in a list of eating, traveling, resting, grooming and sorting out their social life – just like ours.
So far as eating goes, chimps like ripe fruit. They supplement this with young leaves and will also eat flowers. They will ingest clay occasionally. They drink mainly from puddles in tree hollows but we saw a few drink from a stream which is where they found their clay. They also like to eat monkeys.
They travel with ease along the ground or through the trees. They climb by putting their hands beyond the tree trunk, their feet go on the near side. They are expert at making the more slender trees sway until they can make a transition from one tree to the next. And they make frequent use of outer branches to slow their rate of descent towards the ground or a more rigid branch. Their internal map is in 3D, we have given up a dimension.
When they are having a break from eating they are often involved with grooming, usually in pairs or groups of pairs.
Their social life seems to be all about status and sex. It involves a lot of noise and showing off. Human parallels might be bikie gangs or drug cartels, big males capable of forming useful alliances will rise to the top. And stay there ruthlessly until toppled from power.
The Sonso group hunted Colobus twice on the day I was with them and were successful the second time. The field assistants were very quick to recognise their intentions. The group spread out around the Colobus troop, some on the ground, some at mid level and some high in the trees, all making some attempt to conceal themselves. Then a couple of individuals go after the monkeys. Colobus tend to all rush in the one direction which may be the reason they are the preferred target … you can stay concealed until the first one goes past then grab the next.
The successful chimpanzee will then rip open the monkey’s abdomen and start eating the entrails, the monkey might still be screaming at this stage.
Whilst the hunting is communal the eating is definitely selfish. A lucky few will get some meat. They will ignore the most pitiful begging of subordinate individuals. Why then take part? It doesn’t take that much effort and you may win the lottery.
The next day it was off to the more recently habituated group. We found them after about two hours roughly 8 km from camp. They passed the morning slowly moving towards camp. Then the afternoon moving away!
They had a female in estrus with them, the alpha male was guarding her very carefully. For all his efforts though it was a subordinate that got lucky whilst the boss was chasing off the number two male. There was a fair bit more hooting and drumming on trees than the day before, tensions were raised, it seemed.
They didn’t hunt and the field assistants told us that they had not hunted in recent weeks.
After arriving at the Budongo Research Station we were each assigned to a single room in one large house. The toilet was in the back yard and consisted of a concrete slab with a hole in it. Beneath that was very deep hole in the ground. Zephyr, the always genial manager of the accommodation showed us where to put our feet if we were to be successful with our aim. Very useful advice. And for the novice squatter it’s a bit further forward than you think.
The showers were about 150 meters away. The fire would be lit at 4.00 pm every day, if you wanted to shower before that it would be cold.
It was basic, a bare bulb in a bare concrete room, but a comfortable bed with a mosquito net, a bolt on the bedroom door and on the outside door to keep the baboons out.
Tomorrow would start with a comprehensive briefing followed by a lecture on chimp health. Since chimps are prone to many human diseases, especially upper respiratory tract infections new humans are kept away from them for five days. There is plenty to do, however, in the afternoon we wandered down the Royal Mile for some bird watching.
There are about 700 chimps in the Budongo forest. Two groups, about 150 individuals, have been habituated and are tolerant of human proximity. These are followed, quietly, on a daily basis by visiting researchers and field assistants. The researchers may be doing undergraduate honours research or more advanced studies. The field assistants are the real experts, most have been working at the station for years and all can recognise and name all the chimps by sight or even sound.
Days three, four and five are occupied with phenology, bird banding and then following monkeys.
Phenology (my spell checker hasn’t heard of it either) is the study of the progression of plants, in this case food trees, from budding through leaf formation to fruiting. We followed transects scoring marked trees essentially for their usefulness as primate food sources at that instant. Not the most exciting component of our stay but a 12 km walk in a tropical forest has to be good for you.
The bird banding was our chance to shine. Stay tuned.
Monkeys are definitely more exciting. They don’t come close enough to catch the flu and are excellent practice for following the chimps. With clipboard in hand we watched a target monkey for ten minutes at a time, recording their behaviour and if they ate, their food.
For instance , they might eat young leaves and unripe fruit, move trees, call, groom and resume eating. Or they might spend ten minutes resting. Or they might disappear into foliage and not be seen again in which case you choose a new one to follow.
If we’d had to wait five days for our first glimpse of a chimpanzee we would, by this stage, be at fever pitch. In fact we’d seen chimps every day, we had just had to be well behaved humans and keep a safe distance away to safeguard their health.
Note the presence of mature leaves, ripe and unripe fruit. For the moment please ignore the chimpanzee …
I started bird watching at about eight years of age. A book that my parents had and a keen classmate got me going, after that it was self sustaining. It usually consisted of a long walk making a list of what I found, I loved doing it then and I still love doing it 60 years later.
Along the way I took the time to study ornithology and earn a Graduate Diploma. I got involved in some research projects and have a Licence to Band Birds. While banding migratory waders I met Dr Will Steele who got his PhD studying sea birds on Marion Island. I met Dr Mark Antos whilst banding bush birds, he earned his PhD studying foraging in forest passerines. They are both professional biologists. We have been friends for many years.
We were in Uganda to join an Earthwatch Project investigating threats to Chimpanzees but we would also get the chance to share our knowledge of bird banding with a local team.
At breakfast the next morning the group of three Aussies were joined by Cristina and Silvana. Cristina, originally from Brazil, is a zoo keeper at Dallas Zoo looking after Chimpanzees, Gorillas and Baboons. Silvana is a banker from Switzerland.
At 8.00 am two vehicles pulled up, Geoffrey Muhanguzi, director of the Budongo Research Centre, was driving one. We were soon on our way. Our route took us north through the outskirts of Kampala then on to Masindi where we had lunch. After lunch we left the main road and slowly bumped our way north-west to the Budongo Forest arriving late afternoon. The journey was a shade under 300 km, it took about 5 hours actual driving. The traffic around Kampala was chaotic, the main road was fairly poor, beyond Masindi it was really poor.
Along the way we got to see life on the streets.
And almost everything you could imagine being transported on a motorbike from building materials to furniture. Mum Dad and three kids, no problem, four adults likewise. To transport a few planks lay them across the saddle and sit on them, just don’t try going through a narrow gap, the same technique will work for a dining table.
In the country side we passed the odd herd of extremely well horned cattle …
And eventually we reached our destination …
bobmcgee 