I entered the forest without high hopes for research progress on the first day. I woke before the sun touched the savanna, tightly sealed beneath my mosquito net while the calls of a thousand birds and insects penetrated the thin nylon walls of my tent. My headlamp clicked on as I peeled back my net and began gathering familiar supplies. Binoculars, clipboard, watch, water bottle… I stuffed it all in my green pack, tied back my matted hair, and met the others in the kitchen area where we wiped the sleep from our eyes and scarfed down slices of dry bread.
Shades of orange and pink seeped over the savanna behind me as I tucked my socks and slid my feet into a pair of large, black gumboots. A familiar routine, indeed. Our ranger, Alimose, was waiting with his orange canteen slung over one shoulder, and his old, wooden AK-47 over the other. Whether this would guard us from the elephants, buffalo, and poachers or not, it surely made us feel as though we carried a guardian into isolated woodlands. Also living at the site and ready to enter the forest were two American undergraduate interns: Austin and Joel. The site manager, a field scientist from Britain named Will, was staying behind with an injury. Just before we left, a boda-boda motorcycle appeared on the horizon with two German tourists. They’d paid UWA to let them tag along with us for the day. Joel turned his back, rolling his eyes as we moved to the forest entrance.
Entering the forest felt like a descent into a world that was all at once new but familiar. We all stomped clumsily down a steep, muddy hill until the arms of ancient trees joined over us. My feet seemed to have a strong memory of how to trudge through mud and over branches silently but for the unavoidable slap of my wide rubber boots against my narrow calves. My eyes instinctively gazed upward for heavy movement of primates in the branches. There were ravaged shells of fruit and seeds all over the trail. It was not long before our paths crossed those of some of these fruit-eating culprits: baboons, then red-tailed monkeys, then the all-too-familiar lazy, leaf-eating colobus monkeys. They thrashed about in the branches like the clowns they become of any forest, their white bushy tails trailing behind them.
This time, for once, I was not here for the monkeys, but they surrounded us everywhere. Suddenly our own parade of bipedal primates halted. The whispers quickly traveled back the line to me, as the others parted to reveal my prize: chimpanzee poop! Alimose’s hand pointed to it as he gave me a proud smile. I felt every limb tense with excitement, a smile stretching my face so thin that I could not even hope to conceal my joy. “It’s fresh!” I exclaimed, dropping to the ground and tearing open my pack for collection supplies. The tourists stared at me with shock as I reached for a stick and began to scoop fresh feces into a tube of ethanol. “Excuse me, may we?” whispered one of the Germans while she raised a camera to her face. Completely focused on my shock at a fresh sample within my first hour in the field, I gave a hurried nod and let the Germans snap away at this crazy American girl.
To be honest, I can’t remember much else about the day. I pranced through the forest with price, fresh DNA sloshing in an ethanol tube on my back. What a great start to a new field adventure.
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