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.
