Saying goodbye

Hello all,
Happy holidays! I must begin this much-belated update by paying tribute to a dear friend, Washoe, who passed away on October 30. I had the honor and privilege of spending a few years in her presence, and she has influenced my life in innumerable ways. This is the case for so many people I know. For those of you who don’t know much about Washoe and her family, please go to www.friendsofwashoe.org and read Next of Kin by Roger Fouts. I promise you’ll be glad you did!
Any explanation I give of Washoe’s life won’t do her any justice, but I want to share a dream I had one night shortly after I heard about her death. I was in the middle of a field here in Uganda, and I saw Washoe running toward Ruhara, one of the adult female chimps in the community I’ve been studying. Washoe and Ruhara breathy panted and greeted each other with an embrace. It was clear to me they were old friends who had just reunited. A moment later, the rest of Washoe’s chimpanzee family appeared in the field. They became piloerect and started pant hooting excitedly and looking toward the nearby forest edge. I couldn’t tell why they were so excited, so I moved away to get a better perspective and leave them to their excitement. Suddenly, dozens of chimpanzees emerged from the forest. Washoe and her group ran toward them, and all the chimps greeted each other. Then more and more chimpanzees emerged from the forest, and before I knew it there were hundreds of chimps in the field. I realized there were far more chimps in the little forest than I could have imagined, that chimps weren’t in nearly as much trouble as we thought. I felt a huge sense of relief and contentment. My simple, obvious interpretation is that the dream represents my wishes for chimps. Captive chimpanzees were free from captivity (and now Washoe is indeed free), and free-living chimpanzees were present in large numbers and doing fine.
In reality, chimpanzee populations throughout Africa are being decimated. In the days after Washoe’s passing, I continued to go to the forest and watch trees being cut down, watch the government come into the forest to shoot baboons because they are considered vermin by the local people, find snares just meters from the chimps as they pant hooted in the trees above. And despite all this, there are rays of hope. On November 25, Ruhara gave birth to a healthy little baby chimpanzee. The little Kasokwa chimp group increased in size from 13 to 14 individuals.
As if this wasn’t enough excitement, we heard and observed the chimpanzees hunt a black-and-white colobus monkey just a few days later. Although free-living chimpanzees are known to occasionally hunt, it is rarely observed by researchers. Jack and I were following the chimps as they traveled through the forest, but thought we had lost them. Just as we turned to head to a different area, certain that there was no sign of the chimps in the vicinity, the forest erupted into a chorus of pant hoots. We couldn’t see the chimps, so we sat down and listened as the pant hoots continued and then turned into frenzied screams. Next we heard the deep, throaty calls of a colobus monkey amidst the screaming. We suspected they were hunting, and the calls had moved 20 or 30 meters away, so we moved a little closer to see if we could get a glimpse of them. As we moved around a bit to try and get a better view, we cracked a few branches loudly enough to alert the chimps to our presence. They began alarm calling loudly, and the vocalizations turned toward our direction and got louder! That was our definite cue to back off and leave them to their hunting. We later heard from another researcher that the chimps in the nearby Budongo Forest seem to actively avoid being observed while they hunt. A few minutes later, the screams died down and we heard food grunting—evidence of a successful hunt. We again moved a little closer and saw the alpha male feeding on a colobus monkey. He shared the meat with one of the adult females and her two offspring. We observed these four individuals for about a half hour as they feasted. We knew other chimps were nearby, as evidenced by the sounds of food grunting, bone breaking, and food-induced flatulence, but we couldn’t see them. This time, however, none of the chimps objected to our presence. Although they clearly saw us, they were far too consumed with consuming their meat to care about being observed. It was a truly exhilarating experience to watch them share their monkey feast. This was our last official day of research in the forest, and a spectacular way to end it.
            A week or so later, we did a night survey to look for amphibian species in the forest. Jack led some research to examine the amphibian species present, and nighttime is the best time to find and catch them. We did night surveys in China, but this was quite a different experience. The forest looks and feels like a completely different place at night, and we heard a chorus of unsettling and unidentifiable eerie sounds. For me, the highlight was seeing a potto, a nocturnal primate that is rarely observed, even by researchers who have studied nocturnal critters.
            Since the formal research ended, we’ve been examining other forest fragments for the presence of chimps, and we’ve also had some time to travel and enjoy ourselves. We took Prossy, our cook/maid/dear friend, to Jinja, the city at the source of the Nile River. At our little hotel, Prossy climbed a flight of stairs for the first time in her life. We took her to the hotel roof (about 5 flights up) so she could get a nice view of Jinja. We all enjoyed Chinese food (Prossy even tried chopsticks), went shopping, and took a short boat ride to the source of the Nile. Actually, Prossy is terrified of water, and since we’d already tested her fear of heights, we decided to accept her refusal to take the boat ride. We went without her instead and left her to enjoy herself with a soda on a patio fixed firmly on dry land.
We’ve spent the past few days in Kampala. A couple of those were spent with our field assistant, Joseph. We went out to dinner for Korean food with him and feasted from an amount of food that was more appropriate for 8 rather than 3 people. This was the first time we’ve seen Joseph say, “I’m so full. I cannot eat any more.” The man will eat anything and in huge quantities, so this was quite an accomplishment for us.
When we haven’t been traveling, we’ve been staying with a lovely British man we met on one of our first days in Uganda. He works in the area near the forest and our village, and has been traveling all over the world and throughout Africa for almost 30 years. He’s hospitable and charismatic and begins nearly every story with, “Once when I was in Pakistan…” or “Once when I was in Mozambique…”
So that about sums it up. I fly out today and will be back in the States this Wednesday. I’m so sad to leave but looking forward to seeing or talking to many of you very soon. Thank you for reading my updates and keeping in touch! 
 

Make Way for “Progress”

I am in good health and the research is going pretty smoothly. We are locating the chimps each day and collecting data. We collect behavioral data as well as fecal and urine samples. The samples will be examined to determine disease presence and stress hormone levels. Collecting these samples is sometimes an adventure in and of itself. At Sonso, the main Budongo Forest site, often the researchers can stand right beneath the chimps and just catch the samples as they are being created, so to speak. At our site, Kasokwa, we typically see the chimps urinating or defecating from over 40 m away, then have to walk, climb, crawl, or sometimes wade through swamp to the tree the chimps were occupying once they have vacated it. Then it’s an Easter egg hunt of sorts. I remember a primatologist who mentored me as an undergrad telling me how excited she got when she found gorilla dung. (She focused her research on the feeding behavior of gorillas.) I am beginning to understand where she was coming from, although at least we get to collect behavioral data too in addition to the lovely samples.

As I previously mentioned, one of the biggest challenges of the research is trying not to feel a bit hopeless and frustrated on a daily basis. A couple days ago, as we were looking for the chimps, we found a wire snare set on a path in the forest. Wire snares are used to trap small mammals such duikers (small deer) and bushpigs, but chimpanzees often get caught in them. They can be severely injured or even killed by the snares. Many animals including chimps die slowly and painfully over days as the result of getting caught in snares. Two of the mere 15 chimps in the group we study are missing limbs from snare hunting. One adult female is missing a hand while another has lost a foot. Imagine trying to climb through the trees or carry an infant when you have lost a hand in a snare. Both females have adapted well, but sometimes move very slowly so as not to fall from the trees. Anyway, we thought we saw the men who set this snare as they walked through the forest about an hour before we stumbled upon it. We searched for more since we were certain they had set more than one trap, and sure enough, our field assistant Joseph found a second trap a short while later. We removed both. (Jen, have you seen Reynolds’ talk yet? I think it was in the past couple days. I am eager to hear about it.)

In addition to that, people are building power lines through the forest. It’s utterly maddening. The forest is a very narrow strip, just 50 m wide in some places and 75-100 m wide in many other places. They are clearing a path right down the length of this ridiculously narrow strip to make way for the power lines. As I mentioned previously, the authorities who are supposed to curb snare hunting and logging and protect the forest appear to do little or nothing of the sort. Despite all this, the chimps are resilient and the humans seem to respect them, so this gives us at least a bit of hope…for now.

Aside from the research, we are enjoying some great rainy season storms and will spend Independence Day (October 9) with the other researchers at Sonso. Our field assistant is apparently coming down with malaria (yikes) so we may have some unplanned days off coming up.

Return of the Males

We are getting the hang of the forest, chimp identification, and data collection. The research is hard work but it’s great once we finally track down the chimps and are able to collect data. The recent excitement has been that the males, who mysteriously disappear for weeks at a time, have returned. Two days ago we saw them for the first time. It’s been much easier to locate the chimps now that the males are back. Not surprisingly, they cause a lot of ruckus and vocalize like crazy and create general chaos. We strongly suspect that they were hunting black-and-white colobus monkeys yesterday, but we couldn’t see them when the incident occurred. The vocalizations from both species made us very curious about it, though. This group definitely hunts on occasion, though, so maybe at some point we’ll be lucky enough to witness it. Yesterday we saw the males raiding a sugar cane field and dragging bunches of sugar cane back into the forest. There are guards posted along the edges of the fields, but the guard didn’t mind the chimps’ crop raiding because he said they keep baboons away and the baboons are much more destructive. I’m fascinated by the local peoples’ attitudes toward the chimps. Generally they seem pretty respectful of them and those I’ve talked to say in this culture they would never even consider eating one. Baboons are considered to be absolute pests, however.

So aside from the research, things are generally going well. We are in pretty good health so far, with the exception of various minor bug bites, rashes, intestinal distress, etc. There are apparently no mango flies in this area, but I found out firsthand that there are chiggers! Jack extracted one from my foot. There are also poisonous caterpillars which leave big puffy welts and sting for several hours. We’ve each experienced one of those firsthand as well.

Settling into Village Life

I am finally moved into the village where we will be living for the next couple months. We were delayed in leaving Kampala because my luggage got lost en route. We think it took a side trip to Nairobi before we met up with it again last Thursday. We left Kampala on Friday and took a bus to Masindi, the nearest city to the research site and my current location. The bus ride lasted from about 8 am to 2 pm and was bumpy but fascinating. Sometimes when the bus stopped people would run up to the windows to sell food and drinks to passengers. At one point, we saw vervet monkeys foraging in trees along the roadside.

Finally we reached Masindi, where a cab driver named Sam was scheduled to pick us up. When we pulled into the second of three stops in Masindi, a man identified himself as Sam so we got off the bus. He asked if we were going to Murchison Falls (a nearby national park and tourist destination), and we said no, we were going to Sonso (the chimp research site in the center of the Budongo Forest). That was the first sign that something was a little off. We started asking him what our names were and where Zinta (our research boss) was, and he said he didn’t know our names and Zinta was in Kampala (not true). A moment later, another man came up to us and showed me a text message on his phone. It was the text Zinta sent him to tell him when/where to pick us up and what our names are. He was the real Sam. What we think happened is that this other cab driver saw Sam in town and figured that he was picking up some muzungus (white people), so he thought he’d go to the bus stop before Sam’s and intercept his business.

We took a cab ride for about another hour on bumpy and partially flooded dirt roads to get to Sonso. Along the way we saw some baboons crop-raiding in a field. Sonso’s camp was really nice. Electricity, hot showers in the evening, water filters for clean drinking water….ah, the luxury! We spent a couple days there learning about the data collection procedures with Zinta and meeting the other Budongo researchers. The first evening we were there, there was a going-away party for one of the people there, so we met the whole crew there, ate good food, and watched the Ugandan staff have a dancing competition. It was pretty idyllic. A few chimps even wandered through the edge of camp. I never expected to see my first free-living chimp as I was just standing in the middle of camp. They are so well-habituated there that they don’t seem to pay much attention to human presence. As far as primates go, we also saw blue monkeys, baboons, and black-and-white colobus monkeys there. I can’t even list all the other cool species we’ve seen so far.

The next morning, I awoke the the sound of chimpanzee pant hoots. We got up and went into the forest with Zinta and a field assistant and followed the chimps. It was extremely easy since a huge group was sitting in a tree along the road into camp for the first few hours of the morning. We watched, learned about the data collection procedures and took photos all morning.

The following day we went to Masindi to get supplies and finally to our house. The house is meager but we are adjusting. No electricity–instead we have LED lights and candles. There are two bedrooms, a little kitchen area where we can store food, a “shower” room (basically a cement room with a floor drain–no actual shower), and a front room with a dining table. There is a pit latrine outside. We have a very kind field assistant named Joseph and a woman named Prosi who cooks and cleans for us. We also have all sorts of creatures sharing our house with us. There are bats in the rafters, toads (we found one in the house but let it outside because it seemed skinny and food-deprived), geckos, ants and a whole variety of other insects, a colony of wasps outside, a rat we’ve heard but not seen, and three dogs who live outside in the village and have adopted us as their caretakers. Most of this is (believe it or not) just fine and to be expected, but I was more than a little unsettled when I found a baby bat in my bed on the first night. We since learned how to more properly secure the mosquito netting so that nothing including bats can get in!

Yesterday was our first day out at our site, Kasokwa. Whereas Sonso is pretty deep in the forest, Kasokwa is a small forest fragment at the edge of the reserve. It’s a little island of forest in the middle of human habitation and development. The chimps are less habituated and we spent all morning with Joseph, Zinta, and Andrea (the manager of the Kasokwa Forest Project) just trying to locate the chimps. This was much harder work than our day at Sonso. We spent much of the day crawling through thick brush and vines in search of the chimps. At one point we heard a chainsaw and the crash of a falling tree. A few minutes later we came upon the loggers with the mahogany tree they had just cut down. This logging is illegal but happens anyway with little enforcement of the laws. After three years of giving the CHCI bushmeat talk and telling people not to buy teak and mahogany, it was pretty surreal to run into it actually happening on Day 1 in the forest. Joseph estimates that there are just a few dozen 100+ year old trees in that forest fragment, and that number will continue to dwindle as people continue to log. It will be difficult to be at Kasokwa and not get depressed about the state of the forest and the tiny group of chimps in it.

Anyway, we eventually located some of the chimps in a distant tree and observed them through binoculars for a little while, but we never got any closer and lost them after about 45 min or so.

Today is a day off, so we are doing some shopping in Masindi. It is a very rainy day, so most people are staying inside. They think it’s funny to see us muzungus in our rain gear splashing through the puddles with our backpack and supplies.