Routine

After over two months of our new life in Uganda, we seem to have fallen into a comfortable routine.  I still miss pieces of my life back home all the time, and moments of panic over the pressures of this job occasionally overwhelm us both.  Still, most of our days are filled with a sort of comfort that a simple kind of life like this can offer two people that were seemingly meant for living outdoors.

Six days per week we search for chimpanzees.  Our week begins on Monday mornings, when we rise an hour before the sun.  The air is always especially cool and crisp at this hour, and it stings arms and face even more after so many weeks of adjusting to this hot, dry climate. We can all hear one another rising, one by one, from our adjacent tents.  The first sound to ring out is the creaking of the rotting wood on Moses’s platform followed by the zip of his tent door and the gravel crunching under his sandals.  He scurries to the kitchen to begin boiling the water and kneading the chapatti dough just as my alarm rings from my tent.  I peal back my mosquito net to reach for every warm layer that I can find.  Once I am bundled up, there is the sound of our tent zipper and then the gravel crunching under my own gumboots.  I brew our coffee and fill my camelback with lukewarm water while Moses scrambles my eggs so that I can slather them with hot sauce.  Adam follows; and then eventually the rangers and the trail-slashers rise as well.  Adam and I scarf down our breakfasts while we stare down at our smart phones.  Field research is an amazing thing with smart phone technology.  We are able to pay a very small fee each month for semi-reliable Internet access on our phones to allow us to use Facebook and email.  As soon as the sun rises over the escarpment, we are slinging our heavy packs over our backs and reaching for our walking sticks and binoculars.  With that we begin our march down over the hill and into the dark, damp forest, our ranger close on our heels with an AK-47 slung over his back and heavy gumboot steps that match our own. 

Most days we travel anywhere from 6 to 10 miles along forest, savanna, and swamp trails.  We climb up and down escarpments, slash through bush thickets, and wade through rivers.  These hikes have left me with extreme heat exhaustion, mysterious bites and bruises, and one very scary rash that covered my face, neck, arms, chest, and hands.  At the end of every day I am caked with mud and salty sweat, my hair is a tangle of tiny branches and leaves coated in sticky spider webs, and my feet ache and throb from endless hours of hiking in gumboots.  On the very best days we are rewarded for it all with a few precious, fleeting hours of captivating chimpanzee observations.  Two weeks ago we met a group of chimpanzees just as they were leaving their nests in the morning.  I recognized one adult male immediately.  When I was here two years ago I spent hours watching and following Jacko with his flat, boxy head, his dark, long gorilla-like nose, and those strangely undescended testicles.  He crawled out of his nest with one great stretch, swung his arms to follow the tight grip of his long dark fingers on each branch, and came to rest in a large thicket of Saba floridia fruits.  Jacko gave me one unconcerned, fleeting glance that confirmed he was still quite well habituated.  Then he turned his back to me, shifted his rear into a comfortable crook in the tree, and began lazily reaching for fruits.  Saba fruits look like giant green oranges.  In the center is a sticky, melon-like flesh that all of the forest primates love to indulge themselves in.  Jacko grabbed fruit after fruit, reaching a bit farther after twenty minutes to yank a large fruit-covered vine closer to his tree-nook, grabbing more and more Saba.  He shoved each fruit into his mouth, biting through the thick green skin with his great, white incisors and spitting it to the ground in a fury until he reached the juicy orange flesh, letting the white, sticky juice run down the scruff of his gray beard until his whole face was covered in white Saba juice.   I think I could have watched Jacko eat fruit for a whole week, but I knew every second of such clear, easy observation was a gift that would not last for many more moments.  I scribbled and stared, tried to take pictures of the whole scene with my mind, memorizing his face, his hands, his feet, the way he handled and processed the fruit and analyzing every direction that he cast his glances toward.  When you study semi-habituated animals you cherish every moment that other primatologists take for granted.

Eventually Jacko left us for an estrous female.  She was barely old enough to be considered a sub-adult, and I was certain this was her first menstrual cycle.  Her bottom was a giant, inflated balloon that made her look silly and awkward, as sexual swellings always do on female chimpanzees.  The poor young female looked incredibly distressed over the whole situation – us watching, the balloon on her rear, the hormones pulsing through her bloodstream, this large adult male hanging around – I could tell it was all too much for her to handle.  She refused to let her gaze leave my direction for more than a split second.  Her bulging, fearful eyes kept darting to me, then to Adam, then back to Jacko as she swung nervously from branch to branch, grabbing a Saba before quickly moving to a more private patch of vines.  After a long while, Jacko left his tree-nook to join her.  As I jumped up and tried as best as I could to scramble after him and maintain visual contact, I knew the moment was over.  He moved into a private thicket that I could not reach, and then I heard a few copulation calls before he moved away even faster.  I looked down at my watch – he’d given us three solid hours of observation.  Once all of the chimps were gone we pushed our way into the bush to search for any dung that they left behind.  Those days are wonderful, but they are rare.  I grab on to them and soak them up as best I can.  I always know that I will need them to carry me through weeks like this one.  I need those precious hours to keep me hiking day after day after day with no dung, no nests, no chimpanzees.  On those days I try to focus on the comfort of our simple life here. 

We return to the camp when the sun gets too hot for the primates to move and the forest settles into its afternoon nap.  Moses makes us lunch at 2:00 every day.  Baluku, Wisely, and Hapson return just before us after a long morning of slashing and maintaining our trails.  They drop their pangas, slip of their gumboots, and slump into plastic chairs in the kitchen.  Moses brings us all bowls of beans, potatoes, and plantains and plastic cups of freshly made passion fruit juice.  He sets out large plates of diced avocados and pineapples.  We all dive into lunch like Jacko feasts on a patch of Saba, exchanging stories of the forest, talking about who saw elephants where, wondering where the chimps are and making bets about tomorrow’s lucky spot to check.

In the afternoons, if there is enough solar power to charge my laptop, I put on my headphones and work on writing grant proposals and entering data.  If I have dung samples I transfer them to their permanent tubes of drying silica beads.  Just as the sun crosses back over the escarpment and begins to touch the savanna I settle into my plastic chair on my tent platform.  I sling my feet over the railing, pour some boxed red wine into my plastic cup, and dive into reading my latest book.  Adam sits next to me in his wicker chair with fallen wood from the forest and small pocket knives and carves all sorts of things, sipping his warm beer and taking breaks to read his book. 

When Moses puts dinner on the table at 8:00 he always clangs a fork on the metal pole in the kitchen to call us all back to the picnic tables.  All of us – the rangers, the slashers, Moses, Adam and I – we sit around one picnic table with our elbows brushing and eat from a giant plate of Kallo.  It is a doughy, starchy Ugandan staple food made from cassava flour, millet, and water.  We reach in with food-covered fingers and pull off chunks, forming the kallo into little bowls with our thumbs then diving it into our bowls of bean stew and scooping the whole steamy mess into our mouths before reaching back.  Languages, stories, and deep, hearty laughs roll around the table faster than any outsider could possibly follow.  The air is always cool, and I am always bundled up the most. Everyone speaks Lukonzo, Luganda, Ltorro, English, and Kiswahili all at once.  Moses always tells the best stories that last the longest and make the least sense.  “Then, just as I saw the elephant, I reached forward and yanked his tail right off!” He swings his arms out over the table and pulls them into his chest with a giant grin to illustrate his brave forest tale.  Wisely lives to laugh at these stories, and Baluku just listens and smiles sheepishly.  I always shake my head and giggle.

And so our days go, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly.  Everyone waits impatiently for Saturdays, when I pull out my laptop, plug in my little speakers from a shop in Fort Portal, and play a movie for the whole staff.  Most weeks I try to make sweets, sometimes no-bake cookies, and yesterday caramel pop corn.  I try to explain complicated plot lines to them.  Moses sometimes translates.  Then the guys occasionally make their own dialogue in Lukonzo.  Indiana Jones is their absolute favorite, but they applaud profusely at the end of every single movie.  They always shout “Thank you!” while Hapson, who speaks the least amount of English, occasionally gets confused and yells, “You’re welcome!” 

On Sundays we sleep in until seven.  Moses leaves the chapatti pan greased and waiting for me on the stove, and I make pancakes for Adam and I.  Wesley, Baluku, and Hapson carry basins of our dirty clothes on their heads down the hill and into the forest to wash them in the river.

Every now and then I stop and look around at this simple, complicated, adventurous life of ours, and I think about how different this is from the life that we had in the U.S.  I chuckle at the idea of how boring life after marriage is supposed to get, and I think about how we will explain this all to our future children one day.  I wonder how I will tell them about the day that their father and I ran from elephants in the forest, the time I almost stepped on a cobra, the evenings that we crowded around a laptop screen with our Ugandan staff and tried to explain to them who the Nazis being portrayed in the movies were.  I wonder how I will return to our life in the U.S. again one day.  Will cake really taste as good as I remember it being?  Will daily hot showers be that satisfying?  Or will I spend each morning missing the zip of Moses’s tent and the crunch of his feet over the gravel, will I miss our nights of heavy sleep under the safety of our mosquito-net cocoon, the roar of the colobus monkeys at dawn?  Whatever our life beyond this comfortable, simple world of elephants and buffalo and chimpanzees brings, I know that all of this will never leave our memories.

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.

Earthquakes and Elephants

It all began just after midnight.  Camp was still.  The forest echoed with the songs of cicadas and frogs.  The rats were in the kitchen polishing off our discarded crumbs of rice and flour.  The warm, sticky haze in the air began to give way to the chill of the night.  We were asleep in our tent.  Hours before I’d shoved in my earplugs and given in to the exhaustion of the day, switching off my headlamp and letting the weight of my eyes overcome me.  In an instant my eyes were flung open.  I peeled my sweaty hair from my face and lifted my head, yanking the plugs from my ears to listen to what I thought was the sound of thunder.  The beams of wood that held our platform above the earth began to shift.  The dark canvas walls of the tent bent and swayed.  The forest fell silent. Then it came alive with the frantic roars of colobus monkeys and screams of baboons.  I heard a deep rumble that I thought could only be thunder moving from the escarpment just east of us.  Here comes one hell of a storm, I thought as I jumped from my bed, pulling the mosquito net from under my mattress and ducking out of our cocoon.  When I entered the chilly night air I was surprised to find only a light trickle of rain and a gentle breeze.  Still, I yanked down all of my laundry, ran to the main area and moved my dung samples to a safe, dry place, expecting a heavy rainfall to follow.  When I returned to the tent I noticed that Adam was awake and confused.  He drifted back to sleep immediately, but I just sat with my eyes refusing to shut and my mind racing with questions about this eerie storm.

It wasn’t a storm.  It was an earthquake.  USGS measured it at a magnitude 5.4, with the epicenter not far to our north, at Lake Albert.  Our camp sits in a rift valley along a river.  To the east is a giant escarpment, and to the west is the Rwenzori Mountain range.  I had been stirred awake not by a gust of wind that shifted my tent, but a quake in the earth that shook the whole reserve.  This seemed surreal and exciting all at once, but I had no idea that the day was about to get stranger.

I knew where I wanted to find the chimps today.  Yesterday morning I stumbled upon them at the same spot that we did several times last week.  Adam was in town getting supplies with our camp manager.  Typically on a day like that I would go out with a ranger provided to us by the Ugandan Wildlife Authority (UWA).  The director of the project pays monthly salaries for two of the UWA rangers here in the reserve so that we can have two in camp with us at all times.  They carry a gun to protect us from poachers, buffalo, and elephants, especially from elephants.  It also guarantees that one researcher will always have someone to go into the forest with.  It is absolutely against the rules to travel alone in the forest here.  Dealing with the bureaucratic forces of an African country is often the ultimate test of patience and perseverance, to say the least, and on this particular day I was fighting the frustration of being without a single ranger for the fourth day in a row.  We keep two full time porters in camp to maintain our trails, repair camp, carry our water, and gather firewood.  We pulled one of them from his daily trail-slashing duties to accompany me on a chimp search.

Baluku and I did not find the chimps yesterday.  They found us.  Last week, when I had good, open observations for nearly 3 hours I noticed a large fig tree just off the trail.  Right before the whole group left us, I watched an adult female move across a fig branch with her infant tightly clinging to her chest.  She gingerly reached her fingers out over a clump of the green, round figs, giving each one a slight squeeze.  She plucked one, moved it to her nose, inhaled, and dropped it before moving to the next tree.  I decided right then that this was the tree to watch.  While most of the fruits in the forest are quite predictable, following the ebb and flow of biannual rain cycles with their fruiting and hibernating, fig trees scatter themselves among the whole forest, fruiting at random.  Each time one fills with perfectly ripe fruit it becomes the hottest spot for chimp activity in the reserve.  Ficus mucoso, the large tree that I was looking at right then, can feed many chimps for several days.  As soon as those figs became ripe, that female would likely return, and so would many others, spending all day long gorging themselves on the juicy little treats.  So we returned to that fig tree, clicked off our packs, found a soft spot on the trail, and plopped ourselves down.  Within minutes Hunter, the one handed male, silently appeared above me to once again stare down at this strange human with the blonde hair.  We spent nearly an hour with Hunter and a few other chimps before they left.

Today we set out straight for that giant fig tree.  The earthquake left me feeling a bit disheveled and distracted, but my first priority was to find that party of chimps once again.  We marched through the forest, headed straight for the escarpment.  My eyes scanned all around me for prints, leftover fruit pieces, nests, and motion in the branches overhead.  The further from camp we got, the faster we began to move.  After nearly two hours of weaving over and through the river, sliding through mud and ducking under fallen trees, my mind began to wander a bit.  That was when we heard that unmistakable cry of a chimpanzee – not just one chimpanzee actually, a whole group of them.  They began to call out from both sides of us, and it sounded like they were moving toward the same place that we were.  When I hear a chimpanzee pant-hoot, it freezes my thoughts, my breath, my whole body.  Then, impulsively, I run toward the sound.  This is what we began to do.  We picked up the pace instantly, skipping over logs and under vines as we softly moved toward the relentless calls of a large group of chimpanzees.  We were getting closer!  My heart was beginning to race.  My pants and my shirt and my hair were dripping with water from last night’s rain as we glided through the tall grass of the savanna.  I passed over large piles of dung on the trail.  They looked like the rain had washed them.  “Is this buffalo?” Adam asked.  “No,” I answered, “That’s elephant.  Look, it’s been washed by the rain though.”  Then he paused, “I smell something here.  Is that chimp?”  I sniffed for a second, “no, elephant.”  More calls!  I moved even faster now.

We were closer, and closer, and almost there!  I bolted around a corner, dead set on the great day this was about to become, and there they were.  Not chimps.  Not baboons or colobus monkeys.  Not even buffalo.  It was a heard of elephants, and I had run us right into the middle of it.  Now, when you are on a safari in a giant Land Rover, elephants are an amazing and exciting sight.  They were the highlight of my safari in the Masai Mara in 2008.  Right now, right here, however, on a trail at the base of an escarpment with no ranger, no gun, no car, no easy direction to run to, elephants were the very last beings on earth that I wanted to startle.  That is just what I had done though.  Here I stood, just a couple of meters from these giant beasts, paralyzed with fear.  I could not speak.  I could not breathe.  I felt like I was not even in my own body anymore, like I’d suddenly floated over this trail and looked down on us all, laughing at just how out of place I was.  I did not belong here.  They belonged here.  I’ve never felt so small and insignificant in my life.  One step.  It would only take one step of that giant foot to crush me.  For what felt like an eternity, but was actually less than 30 seconds, my mind raced with different strategies.  Could I run?  Even if I were a good sprinter, which I’m not, I would never outrun an elephant.  No, that was a bad idea.  Should I climb a tree?  There were no large trees here!  Do I speak?  Do I turn my back?  Have they seen me?  Right then the chimps called again.  Adam was moving toward me, wondering why I’d stopped moving toward the calls.  I could not so much as raise a hand to him.  My eyes met the eyes of a big, scared, elephant cow.  Like me, she seemed frozen in fear. 

Then Adam saw them, and when I knew he had, like a switch, it snapped my body back to life.  The only word that would softly come out of my throat was, “Shit.”  With that, the elephants swung their heads away from me.  They lifted their trunks, then let their legs follow, and began to storm in the other direction, all with one eye on me.  I took their cue and did the same.  Slowly stepping away, I began to turn my body to follow my feet.  I looked at Adam and realized he was spinning around to bolt. I heard myself say, “Don’t run!”  That seemed like a bad idea right then.  I had this image of us crashing through the bush, acting like a couple of crazed humans, scaring these elephants that were already on edge.  Our only hope was to keep them calm.  I found myself reaching for a tree to climb it.  That was silly, because the tree was not even as tall as the elephant.  I was wearing a giant pack and gumboots.  Where was I going to go?  We just moved back, away from the calls of the chimps.  I’m embarrassed to say that as we parted ways with the elephants all I could think was, “Shouldn’t I try to go back and follow those chimps?”  I think Adam might have carried me away if I tried though.

We tried to get out of there.  That involved some poor decisions on our point though.  We turned a corner, reached a different trail, and began our silly laughter of relief.  “Can you believe that?!”  “What just happened?!”  “That was crazy!”  We weren’t as safe as we thought just yet though.

With a quick glance at the map, we realized the only other trail to take back was a longer one that took us through the swamp.  We would continue to move down into the valley, back toward camp.  In hindsight, a swamp was a terrible idea.  What do elephants love even more than giant expanses of grassland?  They love the deep, thick, cool mud of a swamp, especially after a fresh rain.  And onward to the swamp we marched.

It was not long before we saw more dung, even fresher this time.  We fell silent again.  No gasps, no cussing, just a point of my finger, and a deafening silence between us.  I have never heard my husband hike that quietly and gracefully.  I heard him step more softly than I ever thought he could.  We had nowhere to go but forward.  We were in the middle of a herd of these beasts, and we just wanted to get home.  There were giant tracks all over.  They created small wading pools all over the swamp.  We were walking over crushed branches and logs.  It made my heart jump into my throat to think of the heavy foot that crumbled these trees beneath it.

I saw urine on the ground – a fresh, smelly, heart-wrenching puddle of elephant pee, right next to my foot.  We began examining the tracks.  Where are the toes?  Which way was this elephant going?  Were we just following it?  That was when I saw different tracks – human tracks.  Our staff had not been on this trail in weeks.  UWA did not maintain this trail.  No tourists came here.  Those tracks could only belong to one kind of person: poachers.  Inside each of the giant elephant feet was a human boot, clearly in close pursuit.  For a second these giant beasts that I was so terrified of seemed so weak and vulnerable to me.  My heart broke for them.  I understood why they would want to trample me.  Oh yes, they want to trample me.  That thought snapped me back into the reality of fleeing this whole day.

We made it out of the swamp.  We made it back to the safe part of the forest.  We didn’t laugh this time.  We didn’t shout.  We just sighed deeply, exhaling two hours of tightly held breaths as we reached out to touch each other on the shoulder.  I nearly fell over from exhaustion as Adam touched my shoulder in the same moment that the adrenaline began to leave my veins.  We collapsed onto the trail.  Both of us were suddenly starving.  For a few minutes we scarfed down chapatis and bananas in silence.  Then we began to talk.  Actually, we began to rant.  Those chimps were so close!  A whole group of them!  We almost had them!  We could have followed them all day!  We knew where they were.  I could shut my eyes and picture them shoving figs into their mouths, rolling them around and spitting out the leftovers, all while we were stuck on this side of the elephants.  The only way to the chimps was through the herd, and we weren’t going back there.  We hiked back to camp with heavy feet and discouraged, downward stares.  We spent the afternoon catching up on data, washing dung for seeds, transferring DNA samples to drying tubes, and jumping every time someone or some animal made a sudden move.  This was by far the strangest Independence Day I’ve ever had.

The Research Begins

Dian Fossey, one of the pioneers of great ape field research, spent nearly six months working on her project before she even saw a single mountain gorilla.  Jane Goodall worked tirelessly for years before her study group of chimpanzees was comfortable enough to let her follow them and watch them closely.  Habituation, the process of acclimating primates to human observers, is possibly the greatest hurdle for any primate research project.  Here at Semliki, habituation has proven to be even more difficult than at most chimpanzee research sites, which says a lot.  The project has been running for over sixteen years, and every time the chimpanzees seem to be nearly habituated some major barrier presents itself, forcing the project to bound back after years and years of slow, arduous progress.  Probably the greatest barrier was theinfiltration of rebel fighters from the DR Congo in the late 1990’s.  Our study community (the Mugiri chimpanzees) watched with terrified eyes through the thick forest foliage as men fought one another with automatic rifles and grenades on the very trails that researchers traversed just weeks before.

No student has ever spent one continuous year at this project before, and no graduate student has attempted to conduct a dissertation on these chimpanzees.  So now here I am, taking on the challenge.  Everyone involved in this project is desperately hoping that the only thing this community really needs to reach full habituation is to have one constant, quiet, determined presence in the forest day after day for a year.  I am desperately hoping that I can be the first to weave a complete story of who these chimpanzees are, where they go, what they eat, how they tap the reserve for the limited resources it holds.  To write this story I’m collecting all of the types of evidence that I can.  When you are studying a population that others have deemed impossible you cannot leave any evidence uncollected.  You cannot assume any clue to be unimportant.  That includes poop.

I collect all of the chimpanzee dung that I can.  A small part of the dung is thoroughly dried and stowed away in a crate for DNA analysis that I will carry out later in Germany at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.  The rest of it is immediately washed, sifted, and examined for seeds and other parts of food.  My hope is that eventually, perhaps even years from now after graduate school, I will take some of the dung that I have dried to examine yet another level of evidence: geochemical data.  I can test the dried dung for stable carbon and nitrogen levels to write a story of the types of foods that they eat which cannot always be found in seed form.  More specifically, this means asking whether they eat grasses and sedges, fruits and leaves of trees, or even animal protein like meat from monkeys.  Each time I collect a dung sample, whether I can see the chimpanzee that left it or not, I take a set of coordinates down from the GPS.  Later, when I sequence DNA from each sample, I will be able to write a story of where all of the community members were, whom they traveled with, when they traveled there, and what they were eating at the time.  Also, I can answer questions about who is related to whom in the community.  I can tell stories that go back for decades, all with a few bits of their dung.

This collection of dung is only part of my process of story-telling though.  At the end of each day, my greatest hope is to get some precious time near the chimpanzees.  I want to be close enough to see everything that they do, who they are near, what they are eating.  Every cough, grunt, and sniff of a fruit is an important part of the puzzle that I am putting together.  I need some observations to understand this community the way that people have been trying to for nearly two decades.

Every morning I wake before the sun begins to peek over the escarpment.  The air is still cool and moist.  The cicadas and frogs still sing their nighttime melodies as I move on a stone covered path by the beam of my headlamp from my tent to the communal dining room.  I sip coffee from my thermos and scarf down chapatis and eggs as I gather my supplies: bundles of ethanol-filled tubes, latex gloves, tiny notebooks and pens, and enough water to carry me over miles and miles of treacherous escarpment-weaving trails.  Just as the sun reaches the top of the hills I begin to move through the forest, and my senses shift to tracking mode.  I step carefully and quickly in big black gum boots over the forest floor as my eyes continuously shift from the trees above to the trail below, scanning for knuckle prints, dung beetles, and that ultimate glee of a big, dark shadow of a chimpanzee on a branch.  I smell all around me for dung.  The scents leave me a detailed record of who has been on the trail – colobus monkeys, baboons, buffalo – They all leave a trace that my nose discerns immediately.  Most importantly, I listen.  The forest is full of sounds that flood my brain.  There are countless birds and monkeys and insects shouting their own morning calls at once, but all I want to hear is the unmistakable tone of a chimpanzee pant hooting, grunting, or screaming.  When that call occurs, to my ears it is as if the entire forest goes silent and only one animal exists right then.

Yesterday our ranger, my husband, and myself hiked toward the escarpment quickly and early.  My husband and the ranger found chimps two days earlier in a giant Cynometra tree on a hill while I was stuck at camp recovering from a bout of bronchitis.  I knew that there were fruits of Ficus and Saba there as well, and I hoped with urgency and optimism that another travel party of chimps would return today.  The ranger trailed far behind us, stumbling and mumbling about the steadfast pace.  I refused to slow down though.  I spent four years of graduate school working for these precious hours of observation, and every second we lost getting to that group of chimps was one less second I got of observation before they moved on.  We reached the tree at 8:47, after nearly two hours of my swift-paced hike to the escarpment.

At first it seemed there were no chimps to be found.  The leaves rustled in the breeze, and the chill of the high elevation cooled my sweat-saturated face.  “Here we wait,” I told the ranger.  He let out a deep sigh of relief.  I unbuckled my pack, shoved my wet, dirty curls out of my eyes, and slumped into a heap on the trail at the top of a hill.  Then it happened.  Just over my head sat a large, dark shadow, and it started to move.  Just as Adam dropped his own pack he caught the excitement in my eyes, and his own gaze immediately followed mine to the tree.  It was a chimp!

Rule number one of habituating chimpanzees: Do whatever you can in the first five minutes that you find them to not scare them away.  My first reaction was to instinctively jump back to my feet, then dive back down into a crouched, submissive form.  I grabbed for leaves, tore them, sniffed them, pretending to munch away.  Adam followed my cue.  I made soft noises.  (It is best to let the chimps know that you are not trying to hide from them, but you are not going to disturb them either.)  In between sniffs of leaves and fruit I snuck glances above.  This chimp was intrigued – perfect!  He stared down at me, moving in for a better look, perhaps wondering what sort of leaves this strange creature eats.  After a few minutes he seemed bored enough with me and sat in a branch above, where he could keep one eye on me, and the other on his fresh Saba fruit-feast. 

That was when I began to use my binoculars to get a better look, and as it turns out, I knew this chimp very well.  Two years ago I spent two months at this site to conduct my pilot study, and when I met Hunter at that time he was still a juvenile, just becoming a sub-adult male.  He was starting to spend less and less time with his mother, and more time roving around the forest with adult males.  Hunter was a tough male to forget.  I was shocked the day I first saw him, screaming and carrying on, swinging through the trees, because I quickly realized that this swinging chimp was missing one of his hands.  We think that Hunter probably lost one hand to a poacher snare.  We fight a constant battle with poachers in this reserve, and it is likely that if this project wasn’t here then no one else would deter them.  Hunter probably got caught in a snare that was meant for a cob.  He was lucky though, because most chimps that face this fate find their death.  Hunter got away with one hand, and here he was: two years later, now a thriving sub adult male, stealing glances at me between mouthfuls of Saba fruit.

It was clear within minutes that Hunter wasn’t alone.  Further back, in a large Cynometra tree, I saw a giant huddle of chimpanzee body parts.  I searched through my binoculars as hard as I could to try to make out just how many individuals were grooming one another. Hunter was the lone male in this party.  Traveling with him were two adult females, both with infants.  Neither of these females seemed to match any of the descriptions in my list of community chimps, so we do not yet have new names for them (see below).  One female’s infant was getting pretty old.  He/she spent most of those hours riding ventrally on mom, clinging to tuffs of her hair with tiny vice-grip fingers.  After I was there for a while he got brave and began to move on his own though, shakily moving across branches and hanging by one wiry, uneasy arm.  The other female held an infant so tiny that his/her little eyes only struggled to open after I had been with the group for over two hours.  This infant did not have the same vice grip fingers as the other yet.  He reached with one little hand to attempt a clasp on his mother’s hair, but still she had to clutch him tightly and steadily, constantly reaching to secure his weak little neck with her other hand.  The older infant moved precariously from the clutch of his mother to the arms of a juvenile nearby.  The juvenile received the infant warmly, engaging in a gentle game of hang-and grapple, catching the shaky infant each time his tiny arm gave out.  A second juvenile sat near the females, stuffing his mouth with figs.

This group let Adam and I sit within 10-20 meters of them, us completely captivated, them mostly uninterested (except Hunter, who seemed quite curious) for two hours and forty-five minutes.  Just before they dropped down to the river and then scrambled up and over the escarpment, away from the trail, one of the juveniles left a gift for me.  As soon as I saw the poop drop from the branch down to the floor I nearly leapt with joy.  They moved on, and I rushed to the forest floor, sniffing and scrambling on the side of a steep cliff, determined to find at least a speck of that dung for some precious juvenile-DNA.  When I smelled the dung I knew I was close.  I tried to grip rocks and trees and keep myself from falling over the edge as I began to search leaf surfaces.  The dung had splattered all over layers upon layers of foliage and never reached the ground, but I managed to find enough pieces to carefully slide them into my tube of ethanol.  Adam took a GPS point, and we struggled back up the cliff face to the trail, beaming with pride after a successful day.

Note: We may be searching for names for one or two of these females now.  If you are interested in the opportunity to name a chimpanzee from the Semliki Chimpanzee Project, please see ourwebsite.  The project works as a non-profit organization, and donations support staff, camp and trail maintenance, and ultimately the survival of this community.  In exchange for a donation, you can name these adult females.