Perseverance

The elephants and the buffalo flooded the forest for days.  “It is the rain,” our staff explained to me.  The dry season was supposedly upon us, yet night, after the chimps and the researchers fell into their deep sleep and the leopards and genets emerged for their nightly hunt, rain began to fall from the sky in buckets.  The dry, barren swamps filled with deep, thick, blackened mud.  The bees and flies had already given up on their damp season of plenty; yet they enthusiastically returned to the forest to soak up the heavy moisture in the swamp air.  With them, came the feared beasts.  The elephants and the buffalo arrived in large numbers and tore through the forest.  They abandoned the savanna where they’d already retreated for the dry season.  They left tourists searching in vain from their land rovers and extravagant safari-lodge-porches and moved to our side of the reserve, tormenting us for days.  UWA finally sent us a ranger.  The three of us moved through the forest cautiously and silently, freezing at every low rustle in the bushes, exchanging nervous glances at the sound of cracking trees.  We never saw another elephant, but we heard them.  We found their dung, their giant tracks.  We wove through demolished trails that were covered in fallen branches and trees; we stomped through giant mud-filled crevices left by the feet of the giant beasts.  The chimps seemed unreachable.  Each time we found a route we thought could lead us to them, we were led astray to avoid the crashing and thumping of a nearby elephant or buffalo.  Modesto, our ranger, held his gun close to his side that week, finger poised on the trigger.

Then, just as suddenly as it began, the rainy spell ended.  The clouds dispersed.  The sun emerged in full force; boiling the dark swampy mud until the air sucked out all of the water and left cracked, dry dirt behind.  The elephant tracks remained like clay statues molded into the hard earth beneath our feet, a reminder of the real residents of this reserve.  The beasts moved on.  They traipsed back out of the forest, swinging their trunks and carelessly knocking down trees until they emerged in the expanse of grassland beyond.

And just like that, it seemed as if the chimps had vanished.  We hiked and searched, sweated and climbed, still returning to camp each afternoon looking breathless, dirt covered, sweat saturated, and pathetically downtrodden.  Where could they have gone?  I marvel at the way this single community of chimpanzees has ruled my life for the last four years, even before I arrived, at how they can leave me feeling so invigorated and hopeful one day, and so powerless and disheartened the next.  I’m not sure how many days it has been now.  I don’t even want to count it.  For seven hours every day I keep trying to cling to hope.  I crawl on the ground next to riverbeds, searching for knuckle prints in the dry sand.  I scan the treetops above, hoping for just one fresh nest, one sniff of dung, any sign at all that the chimpanzees have passed through.

The problem with building your dissertation around a population of chimpanzees with a potentially novel system of range use is that where they range at any given time, how they organize themselves in the forest - it is all a complete mystery.  They have evaded researchers for weeks, even months at a time for years.  Most chimpanzee communities organize themselves within a tightly controlled boundary.  Members of the community disperse within the territory, traveling in smaller “parties,” constantly reorganizing and reshuffling their party composition and association patterns.  All the while, they maintain a clear understanding of who is and isn’t a member of their strict community range.  All outsiders are considered to be hostile enemies.  Females tend to restrict their travel to a small “core area” within this territory, traveling just far enough each day to attain enough food for herself and her dependent offspring.  Meanwhile, males organize themselves into cohesive bands to go on regular “boundary patrols,” keeping out all chimpanzees from other communities and thus ensuring that the females within the territory are safe and are theirs alone.

Things seem to be shuffled and murky at Semliki though.  The habitat here is dry and patchy.  Most of the food that females need to reach each day occurs in one long corridor of rich rainforest along the riverbanks.  In the “gallery forest,” as we call it, tall, ancient trees loom over our heads by 40 meters or more.  Their canopies reach out like umbrellas that weave into one another, creating a shady ceiling over the Mugiri River.  Outside of that gallery tunnel, hungry chimpanzees are faced with miles and miles of tall, dry grasses.  The sun beats down on their backs unguarded.  It makes us sweat and slump over when we hike under it; our boots get heavy and our faces feel like they are on fire.  There are also patches of woodland with short, sparsely fruiting shrubs and trees, and a few muddy waterlogged swamps with some palms.  One of the Mugiri chimpanzees’ favorite foods is a legume-like seedpod that grows on giant Cynometra trees along the riverbank.  They look like large snap peas, and inside are dense, chewy, oily seeds that the chimps munch on and grind in their back teeth for hours on end.  These widely dispersed, slow-to-eat foods do not allow the Mugiri community to follow the usual chimpanzee rules of boundary patrols and overlapping core areas.  We aren’t really sure how they are coping with this.  We know that aggression is rare.  No one has ever heard or witnessed any sign of a boundary patrol, while at most study sites these battles regularly result in bloody hands, severed fingers – even death.  They are fierce, tense, famous events in chimpanzee behavior.  In fact, here at Semliki we’ve never seen any lethal aggression between males.  Furthermore, we have identified enough males to decide that we are tied with the largest community of chimpanzees ever studied, numbering at approximately 150 individuals now.  Our community seems to have a range that is at least twice as large as that one though, and their range may be even larger than we realize.  I’m here to find out just how they are using the space in this reserve.  Are boundary patrols really absent here?  Have community boundaries dissolved entirely?  That would be a first for chimpanzee research.  We aren’t sure if the males use the range in tight neighborhoods, if the community shifts their ranging to different parts of the reserve during different times of the year, if females range in core areas or in fluid bands like bonobos.  It is a mystery that excites me, perplexes me, and intimidates me all at once.

To begin to answer this mystery, however, I need to actually find these chimpanzees.  So we hike.  We rise a little earlier each day; entering the forest closer and closer to the precise second that the sun rises, until finally we are going in so early that we cannot see the sticks and dirt under our feet.  We travel further.  Some days we travel slower.  We climb the escarpment from every angle we can imagine, huffing and puffing, pulling ourselves higher and higher into the thin, chilly air at the top.  We trudge through the river, splashing with our gumboots, searching for discarded fruits and smelling for dung.  Sometimes we talk; most times we walk in silence.  My mind has begun to wander.  I think of the chimpanzees.  I try to think like them.  I wonder what they like to eat, how far they can possibly travel, what the river feels like under their feet, how the sun feels on their backs.  I also think of home.  I try to push intrusive, unrelenting thoughts of ice cream and veggie burgers and cold beer from my mind.  I imagine where my friends are now.  I think of running with them often.  I think of all the things I’d tell them about my day if we were going for a usual brisk, relaxing evening on the sidewalks in our running shoes together, sharing our days through labored breaths while we swipe the sweat from our brows and weave our way through traffic and past houses and mailboxes.  Then I try to pull my thoughts back to the chimps, where we are.  I try to not let myself lose hope.

The loss of hope will be the death of this dissertation.  Creativity and patience are the only things that I can cling to now.  At the end of most days, even after ten or more miles of hiking and climbing, I often come back only to lace up my old trail shoes and jog around our camp.  The shoes are already nearly in pieces.  I keep stitching them back together anyway.  I don’t really need the exercise, but I do need those twenty minutes of rhythmic steps and faster, shallower breaths.  Even back home, ending each day this way was often the only way I held myself together.  I let my brain go wherever it needs to while I run around and around the 200 meter loop, pausing in the middle to sprint up and down the short, arduous hill that leads into the forest.  At the end of each short run I sit down on my tent porch, enjoying the familiar burn in my cheeks, the way the breeze feels on my sweat soaked neck.  This is always the moment of the day when I feel most hopeful that I will be able to do this.

It was during this moment yesterday that a new idea occurred to me.  If the chimps seem to have packed up and moved on, then so will I.  We are hearing rumors of chimp calls from the nearby village.  There is one trail near there attached to the local UWA headquarters.  Next week we will take our small tent, a few containers of cold rice and beans, our gumboots and notebooks, and my old trail running shoes, and we will continue our search.  We will not let the chimps evade us for long.