A long overdue update

I know it’s been forever since I last posted an update, but here it is…hope you enjoy. I’ll begin with an update on the chimps. Yesterday we discovered a new chimp group that is only a 10 minute walk from camp! The other group that we’ve been following for the past 2 months is a 4-5 kilometer walk from camp depending on where the closest fruiting tree is at the moment. Alex and I are quite excited about this, and it only adds to our knowledge of the chimps of Busingiro. This work, while very demanding and slow at times is so rewarding when we find out large chunks of new information…it’s like unlocking the mystery of a very complicated puzzle.

How did we come to discover this new group of chimps? Well first I must back up a bit and explain to you in greater detail the personality of our field assistant, Kennedy. I’m not sure how in depth I’ve gone in my writings about him, but I don’t think I’ve mentioned much about him. Kennedy is a classic case of Dr. Jeckel, Mr. Hyde. He literally has 2 personalities, though neither is very pretty. Alex and I have named these two sides of him, one is doom and gloom, and the other is Eeore. Doom and gloom is his mean, nasty side where he yells at us and becomes enraged about little things. Alex and I have not been able to figure out what sets these outbursts off, but they are frequent…sometimes several times a day. His Eeore side is the side of him that Alex and I pity sometimes. He basically mopes around all day, every day like Eeore from Winnie the Pooh, like he’s always feeling sorry for himself or something. And sometimes, Alex and I do feel sorry for him, but then two seconds later he’s yelling and lying and scheming, and we remember there’s not much to pity in the man. Kennedy is also an avid smoker and alcoholic and will blow his entire salary on cigarettes and alcohol within a few days of receiving his salary. Already, Alex and I have had to lend him 20,000 Ugandan shillings to tide him over until payday. Kennedy even told us before his first paycheck that he asked Zinta to hold on to it until the very end of the month, otherwise he would spoil it. It seems that he spoiled it anyway though. So to sum it all up, and I used to feel bad about saying this, but now I’m just fed up with a lot of things, not all of which are explained here, is that Kennedy is a major pain in my ass…pardon my French.

All this leads to us finding the chimps because doom and gloom made an appearance last Thursday when Kennedy casually mentions to us that there is a male, female and infant chimp that have been sleeping close to camp almost every night since we arrived. Alex and I were excited, but angry at the same time, that only now, 2 months into our work does Kennedy feel this might be an important piece of information to share with us. And he didn’t even think it was important, as I said it casually slipped out in a conversation we were having…it wasn’t like he was making a point of telling us this. So Alex and I explain to him that he should have shared this information with us sooner, and we had to explain how our work was to discover all we could about all the chimps living in Busingiro forest, no matter how many groups there were. He obviously had not internalized this at all, even though Alex and I have been trying to drive this point home since we arrived. Anyway, this doom and gloom fighting and yelling, ended in Kennedy appearing to get the importance of what we said because on Sunday he comes running to find us to tell us that the female and infant are feeding in a ficus tree just next to someone’s house up the road. Now Kennedy said the female and infant were still in the tree, however, when we arrive at the tree and find no one there suddenly Kennedy says he watched them leave the tree before he ever even came to get us. He constantly contradicts himself like this, which makes it very difficult for Alex and I to keep up with what’s truth and what’s not….so frustrating at times!!!! So we never saw the female and infant that day, but we decided to return to the tree Monday morning to see if they would return, as the locals told us they had been feeding on that particular tree every morning for the past week at 7:00am. Unfortunately on Monday we did not see them, but we did hear a group a chimps calling from the forest very close by. We waited an hour for the female to come to the tree, but she never did. For the whole hour, though, the chimps were calling from the forest. Finally the calls started getting farther and farther away, so we went into the forest and tried to find the chimps. We never did find them, so we haven’t actually seen this new group yet, but hopefully we will someday soon. There’s a possibility that they are part of our original group, however, I feel it is unlikely because they are quite far from where we always find the others, but we won’t know until we can track them better.

With our other group, we have become much better at tracking them and have been discovering new paths that gives us better access to them. Unfortunately as we continue to explore new areas in the forest as we follow the chimps, we continue to find more and more logging sites. The entire forest that our original group of chimps live in is beginning to look more and more like clumps of trees connected together by logged sites. We’ve found almost 100 logged sites since we arrived and these are only the sites that cross our paths, I’m sure there are hundreds more. There’s no doubt we will exceed 100 before we leave here. Interesting though, is that for the past week our originally group has been nesting only a few hundred meters from several major, active logging sites. And when I say active, I mean there are 12 plus men that are logging them everyday. There is a fruiting tree just near the logging sites, so I suspect this is why they are sleeping so close to them, as there are not many fruiting trees left in the forest, so when they find one they must utilize it. However, I find it very curious that there is a ficus micusu tree right next to an old logging site, that people aren’t at everyday anymore and the chimps will not feed in this tree, but they do feed in a tree close to a site with active logging. This forest and these chimps just keep yielding so much fascinating information everyday….I LOVE it!!

So let me share a funny story with you all, though I did NOT find it funny at the time. About a week ago I was standing in the hut, bent over the bunk bed, putting some clothes away. Now keep in mind that it’s pitch black, and all I have is my dim headlamp, lighting the narrow view in front of me. All of a sudden I feel a thud on my head, like something just fell onto it. I reach up, about to touch my head to brush off, what I assume is some grass from the roof above, when all of a sudden one of the tarantulas falls off my head and onto the floor in front of me, directly in the spotlight of my headlamp! It took me a minute to register what had just happened, but as soon as I did I ran right out of the hut screaming. Even though it wasn’t on me anymore, my instincts set in I guess and I ran like hell. It was hilarious, in retrospect. Alex had no idea what was going on, but she knew that something had just happened that should be feared, and so she came running out of the hut after me asking what just happened. She thought that it was a snake! Thankfully it wasn’t and it was just one of the huge spiders (you all saw the photo), and luckily it didn’t do anything to me…just freaked me out a bit.

Just as I was getting over the scare of this event, and started feeling comfortable in the hut again, another spider fell from the roof on to my back, again when I was bending over putting something away. Only this time I thought it fell on me and then right off onto the ground, but I walked out of the hut and was aggravated by the incident, telling Alex what happened, when all of a sudden Alex gets this horrified look on her face and starts reaching towards my neck. Right then I felt the spider crawling up my neck, and again I let out this horrific scream. I don’t know whether I brushed it off or it jumped off on it’s own or Alex brushed it off or what, but thankfully it came off me, again without any harm. Though this time the spider fell on me 5 minutes after safari ants had come through camp and we had pour paraffin everywhere so they wouldn’t take over camp. These ants will eat things alive and they are the worst ant bites ever, so we did NOT want them in camp at all.

Okay, so there’s so much more I could write about, but this is already long enough. Next week Alex and I will be in Kampala, where I will meet with some people about possible job opportunities/discuss my idea for a master’s thesis. While there I will try to make some more posts, or at least catch-up on emails. Please forgive me for not responding to emails quickly…it’s difficult to use the internet sometimes. I hope that everyone is doing really well. I will keep you all updated on how things pan out in Kampala. I still don’t want to leave here at all, and I only have 16 days left on Zinta’s project….ahhhhh! Hopefully all will work out for the best. Miss you all so much!

The Sad State of Things

Today’s post is a lot more somber compared to last weeks, however the topic I am about to discuss is one that has been weighing on my mind a lot over the past week. I feel this is an important issue to discuss. Hopefully this post will give you all an idea of the situation the chimps and many other wildlife here are facing.

The chimps that live in the forest around our site are living in a forest that has been heavily logged, and until just the past week I had no idea how heavily logged their territory really was. For the past week, Alex, Kennedy and I have not been able to find the chimps. While we have been hearing many vocalizations from them, and often very close by, we have been unsuccessful at actually seeing them. Sometimes their calls sound like they are directly beside us, unfortunately, since they are not fully habituated, as we move closer they also move, but farther away from us, making it impossible to actually capture a glimpse of them. This situation has been somewhat discouraging, but so goes field work…you have good days and bad days and some weeks are harder than others. I’m just thankful that I get to spend every day in the forest!

Anyway, back to our issue at hand, logging. Alex, Kennedy and I have been walking through the forest a lot more over the past week in our search for the chimps, therefore becoming more familiar with the terrain and territory of our group. I have come to realize that their entire forest is actually many small patches of forest connected by grasslands and logged areas. Yesterday we came across 13 different logged sites, and 5 of these were all within several hundred meters of each other. If logging continues at the rate it has been, the forest will soon become smaller and smaller patches and the grasslands in between will widen, making it not only difficult, but also dangerous for the chimps to move among the forest patches. Let me explain the difference between the grasslands and the logged sites. The grasslands are large open areas in the middle of the forest that are now completely covered by grasses. The logged sites, on the other hand, are areas still within the forest patches; however there is a large open space in the canopy where you can see the sky clear as day. There is still undergrowth on the forest floor in the logged areas though. These logged areas are usually approximately 20 to 50 meters in diameter, whereas the grasslands can be as wide as 500 meters or so.

Not only does/is the logging affecting the chimps in terms of destroying their area to live and move in, loggers are also heavily targeting fruiting trees, and many of these trees are ones the chimps feed on. As the chimps lose their feeding trees, their territories actually have to expand in order for them to encompass enough fruiting trees to feed the group. This loss of trees, also leads many of the chimps to crop raid in an effort to supplement their diet with enough food for survival. Naturally, the local farmers are less than please with the crop raiding, and often they are driven to secretly killing the chimps in an effort to temporarily deal with the crop raiding problem without a large expense.

As the chimps lose their feeding trees this also makes our job, as researchers, more difficult because it means the group often divides into many smaller groups in order to feed in different areas, ensuring enough food for the group. This often means the chimps do not stay in one area very long, and therefore, it becomes a huge guessing game for us as to where to look for the chimps each day when they aren’t consistently coming to a feeding tree everday. How do you guess where the chimps might be when they aren’t calling in the morning and their home range spans 7 kilometers or more? This is the question I’ve been trying to solve everyday for the past week. Sometimes we get lucky and guess right, and other days, like today, we fail.

The issue of logging has been fascinating me for the past week; therefore I have been discussing this issue a lot with our field assistant, Kennedy. I’m trying to learn all I can because the measures that are currently in place to try and prevent/stop the logging do not appear to be working very well. Yesterday, Alex, Kennedy and I chased after 3 different groups of loggers in the forest. This was one of the most exhilarating and yet terrifying moments of my life. In general, the loggers are more afraid of us than we should be of them, as they don’t know who we’re working for and automatically assume we must be with the National Forest Authority (NFA) here in Uganda, therefore they run as soon as they see or hear other people. The forest we work in is a protected reserve, and therefore all logging is illegal…however this gets a bit more complicated which I will explain in a moment. Of course, Alex, Kennedy and I are not with the NFA, but apparently they also fear muzungus (white people) and especially researchers. I kept thinking to myself though, as we were running through the forest, darting trees trying to chase these groups of men…what would they think/do if they saw that we were actually only 2 small white females and an even smaller Ugandan man?…would they be so afraid or would they just take a ponga to us to prevent us from reporting them. Kennedy says the loggers are nothing we should fear, and that they would never harm us. They know they’re in the wrong and they apparently are afraid of the tracking gear the muzungus come with (our GPS), so I was holding this high as we ran, just so they would know we can track them and the exact site they were at. Thankfully, the loggers just ran and hide yesterday, and we reported the sites we found to the NFA. Hopefully they were able to come and take the wood, and destroy the cutting tables before the loggers were able to transport the wood out of the forest and sell it themselves.

Now here’s where the story becomes murky. First off, when the NFA patrols the forest, and they come across a logging site, they take the wood and then sell it themselves. Now I suppose, what do you do with a tree that has already been cut down, right? You can’t stand it upright again and call it a day, acting like nothing happened and hoping it grows back again, so the NFA takes it, sells it, and then supposedly puts the money from the sale back into the NFA (salaries for rangers, up keep of buildings and such). Somehow though, this just leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth. Here’s the best part of the NFA’s rules though. While the Budongo Forest, where we work, is a protected reserve, the only tree that is 100% illegal to cut down is the Mahogany tree. All other trees in the forest can be cut down if one has a permit for this act. And the permits are very easy to obtain!! All one has to do is walk into an NFA office and request one, no questions asked. Unfortunately there is quite a lot of logging occurring that is done without permits, but the permits do help increase the amount of logging that occurs.

The story doesn’t end here though. The majority of the logging is conducted at night. Eight, ten, twelve men will come in at night with hand saws and axes and take down enormous trees. Then a few nights later they’ll transport the cut wood to the forest edge where it will be loaded onto a lorry and carried away by the truck loads to Kampala in the middle of the night when the NFA isn’t watching. The NFA never has rangers patrol at night! They know this is when the majority of the logging is occurring, but they don’t deploy their rangers at this time. It is beyond me why they wouldn’t find it important to invest money in night rangers. In addition, the loggers out smart the NFA in a sense. They will watch the movements of the NFA rangers, and if they watch a ranger go through the site on Wednesday, they know he will not be there again the next day, so then they come on Thursday and cut all the trees down. How can the NFA, not be on to these scams? They should sit and wait, hiding, at these sites, when they come across them, waiting for the loggers to return…they always do. Even yesterday, only 40 minutes after we chased one of the groups of loggers away, they were already trying to make their way back to the logging site to finish the job. Thankfully we chased them away again.

As you can see this is a major issue, and there is no simple solution, but it seems to me that more can be done, and I’m not sure why it’s not! Now, I know it’s easy for me to sit here and judge the work being done, and of course I don’t have the full story, as I would need to speak with many more people, including the NFA to get the whole picture, but in many ways I feel that the problem boils down to a combination of laziness and inadequate funds for the NFA to properly conduct their job. Also, there are many people, as I explained last time, which work for the NFA, but are actually in cohort with the loggers, and therefore are cheating the system to make extra money. And, wow can the money be good. One slab of Mahogany goes for 30,000 Ugandan shillings, which is about $18 or so US dollars. One tree can be cut into 20 or more slabs. This is very good money for most people here. I’m not sure what the solution is right now, but I would love to spend some more time actually studying this for real and trying to create better ways of protecting the forests here, otherwise our chimps, and the other Ugandan wildlife may soon find themselves with no where else to go…

On a lighter note, other than being discouraged at our difficulties in tracking the chimps I am still doing very well and am loving my time here! Time is moving way too fast for me, I know I’m not going to ready to leave when the time comes. This is such a beautiful and friendly country!

Hope everyone is doing well. I miss everyone like crazy! I’m trying to post more photos…I have lots this time, so look for them on snapfish.com.

Will write again soon!!

Happy Birthday Baby Chimp!!

Wow it has been a full and busy week! I have so much to tell. Let me start with the most exciting and biggest news. Yesterday Alex and I saw a female chimp just after she gave birth to a new infant!!! This is a HUGE event for us to see, as it is vary rare to witness births and deaths in the field. In the 40 years that Jane Goodall studied the chimps of Gombe, she only witnessed this event TWICE! Alex, Kennedy and I are only the second people to see this in the Budongo Forest in Uganda, so you can imagine how ecstatic we are that we were fortunate enough to experience this sighting. Zinta said that if we take really good notes on the mother over the next several months, then we can possibly publish this event as an editorial or note in some journal, since so few chimps births are documented in the literature. I took notes like mad yesterday and will only continue to if we can find this mother again. Unfortunately we haven’t had much luck winning the females over yet, they are still to afraid to be close to us. Yesterday was actually the first day that we saw this female, and she may only have stayed around with us so close by because her placenta was still attached, therefore, she couldn’t move around much until it falls off because it would get caught on branches and such. Hopefully though we can find her again tomorrow!

When we first found her and realized her placenta was still attached, we knew she must have given birth sometime that morning, possibly even just minutes before. There was a male seated directly beside the new mom, grooming her and curiously inspecting and grooming the infant. This is a bit unusual, as female chimps typically do not let ANY males near them or the newborn for awhile after birth. However, sometimes experienced mothers will allow males to get close, so perhaps our new mom is an old pro at child birth and rearing. Also, perhaps this male is the father. After about 45 minutes from when we arrived the male casually wandered off somewhere in the forest. We did not follow, but stayed with the new mother instead. She didn’t do much of anything for the rest of the day, just rested in the tree we found her in, also probably the birthing tree. As I peered through my binoculars at her she looked utterly exhausted like she could sleep for days. Unfortunately she seemed a little nervous to fall completely asleep, probably because she seemed shaking 60 some meters in the air with this brand new infant, also probably partly due to her awareness of us standing below. I will be sure to keep everyone updated on mom and baby’s progress over the next several months.

Unfortunately with good news, there is often some bad news as well. Thankfully though, this unfortunate news has improved somewhat since it first occurred. Four nights ago, Alex’s and my tent was broken into by some children that were staying in camp that night. One of the employees of the camp we’re staying at brought his family and all his children to the camp for the day and night. They were very curious and intrigued by Alex and I, so much so that Alex and I finally had to politely ask them to leave and explain that we were trying to do work. The children were starring at us like we were animals in a zoo Saturday night, as we were packing our field bags for the next day and getting urine and fecal samples ready. After they left we locked all our windows and the door to our hut because they appeared way too interested in all the “things” we have. Anyway, to try and make a long story short, the next day we went out into the field and when we returned that night we noticed that our tent was filthy inside and that everything was moved around. I stupidly left my cell phone and laptop in the tent during the day and we had not locked the tent. I had been telling myself all morning remember to take the items out of the tent and lock them up inside and then we ended up getting rushed for work and I completely forgot. Thankfully, the children did not steal these items; they only turned them on and changed some settings on them. Unfortunately they did steal Alex’s alarm clock and a small LCD flash light of Alex’s. This story has improved because these items were returned to Alex last night.

Alex and I were extremely angry and upset the night this happened. We felt so violated and creped out that people had been inside all our personal things and laying in our sleeping bags. Alex and I have since placed a lock on our tent and always remember to take any valuable items out in the morning that we may have brought in the night before. So the break-in was partly our fault, but it still was a very unpleasant experience, and we have definitely learned our lesson! I think too that part of this was a difference in cultures. I couldn’t understand at all how someone could even think it would be alright to just go into someone else’s space and things without asking, but then I realized that I think may people in this culture do not have a concept of “mine” and “yours” in the sense that we in America do. I think when someone has something here it is available to the community if need be and doesn’t necessarily just belong to one person. Plus they were children, though most were old enough to know better, but children often don’t understand when they can’t touch something. Thankfully everything has turned out ok in the end, and now Alex and I are feeling guilty for bringing the incident up because we fear the children may have been beaten for what they did. At the same time though, we had to say something so that it wouldn’t happen again.

As a very quick wrap up, some of the other highlights of the week are as follows. On Friday, Alex and I attended a going away party for one of the researcher’s at Zinta’s field site. It was a ton of fun. We played games and I got picked for one of the teams and won a sack race, where I had to get in a sack and jump to the finish line. Overall, my team came in second. After the games we had a huge feast and then there was a dance at the local forestry college that we stayed at our first few nights here. The dance was so much fun. It was so nice to have a chance to relax and let loose for the first time since we got here. On Tuesday our tent flooded and we had to set-up Zinta’s tent which she gave to us as a back-up in case our first one flooded. It flooded because our tarp fell on top of it for the second time…I think we have since fixed the problem so hopefully this will not happen again. It was a torrential down pour though for the entire day!! Everything, including ourselves was completely drenched!

Other than that we have had a pretty good week overall with the chimps. We finally are finding them consistently everyday, and many of the males are becoming comfortable with our presence and we can usually follow them for at least a few hours. We’re finally obtaining some data…yea!! Hopefully things will continue to progress as well as they have this week. There has been lots of good and a few frustrating and angering things, but Alex and I are still surviving well, and are really enjoying out time here. I can’t believe though that September is already half over…time is really flying by. Oh and one last thing, snakes and cockroaches are now added to the list of creatures that our inhabiting our hut, so the tent is going to definitely be our permanent sleeping quarters. I have no idea where the cockroaches came from because we do not keep any food in our living hut or in the tent or anywhere near these places! Oh well, we’ve accepted that the hut does not belong to us.

Hope everyone’s doing well. Miss everyone tons!!!