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!!!

The difficulties of field work

On Monday, August 27^th, Alex and I slept in a bit before we began the longest day we’ve had since we arrived. Today was moving day, we were finally going to get to move to our site, Busingiro out in the middle of the forest, but first we had some shopping to do. We packed our stuff one last time and then hauled everything to Masindi (in the opposite direction of our site) because we had to buy items we needed for our site, such as pots, pans, sheets, dishes, candles, matches, towels, etc. By the way, Alex and I have negotiated with JGI to let us take the money we spent on items for the field site off of our rent because they will get to keep all these items once we leave. We were very excited that they were so accommodating to this request. At 8:15, Alex, Josie (Josephine), Zinta and I, along with a car load of other people headed for Masindi, where we spent the entire day running from shop to shop buying all the supplies we needed and using the internet before we would be without email access for awhile. Finally at 4:15pm we loaded the car with our literally van load of gear and headed for the forest! It began pouring rain shortly after we left Masindi and Alex and I were starting to worry that our first night in camp was going to be a soaked one because of the leaking roofs on our huts. And then, we remember that when we had visited the site the Saturday before we had left the mattresses out in the sun to let them dry out and we never put them back in the hut, so we were expecting to arrive to drenched mattress as well and were worrying about where we were going to sleep.

An hour later, we reach Busingiro and find that our mattresses have been brought inside. There is some water on the floor of our hut, but not much, so we aren’t too displeased…yet. Now the real fun begins, and please understand that I cannot begin to put into words Alex’s and my reaction to our hut as the sun began to set. When we first arrived and were assessing the leakage from the roof, one of the guys that works at the field site was saying something about putting another tarp up on the inside of the roof to secure the hut more from the water, as well as from rat droppings. At this point Alex and I realize we have a rat family living in our roof…we weren’t too excited about this. Then when everyone left and we were unpacking we find a termite nest in the hut, a wasp’s nest and the most gigantic spiders you have ever seen in your life started coming out as it got darker in the hut. Alex and I had made up one of the beds and had decided that we would both try to squeeze into a single bed for the night because neither of us wanted to sleep alone if creatures were going to be crawling all over the very tiny hut all night. We felt better being close to each other. After making up one bed it was too dark to do much else, so we decided to finish unpacking the next day when we could see what we were touching. We headed to go find some food for dinner. During dinner we decided camping was a step up from what we were about to sleep in. Right at that moment, we both looked at each other and said at the same time, let’s find the tent and set that up before it get s much darker and sleep in that for at least tonight. It seemed like a better option than having little scary creatures crawling all over us in the night…a mosquito net doesn’t exactly protect you from huge rats and spiders with ENORMOUS pinchers!! We were a little uncertain of what exactly lives in the forest around camp, but we wanted to take our chances with those animals over what was inhabiting our hut. Though we were a little scared, as the tent Alex brought is a very small 2 person tent, we’re basically sleeping on top of each other, and it’s very flimsy… a big gust of wind would topple the tent in a second. We made it through the first night safe and sound though, and have since found out that there is nothing living in the forest that can harm us, so the tent has become our permanent sleeping quarters for the next 2 to 3 months.

The next day we cleaned out the 2 huts we have (1 for sleeping and 1 for our kitchen) as best we could and finished unpacking. We bought tons of Tupperware because everything has to be covered to keep it safe from the mice, rats and ants. We also covered everything in our “sleeping” hut, including our clothes, which we keep on the bed we made up, under a mosquito net; otherwise you wake up and find insects nesting in them and rat feces covering everything. So it takes some extra time to get into things we need and lots of memory to remember to cover everything again after you use it. And because we have no electricity and it is difficult to move around camp after dark, it takes some pre-planning as well for everything before we do anything. Sometimes Alex and I feel like the day is ours, and the night belongs to the insects, mice and rats.

After we had set everything up, we went to talk to some of the guys that work in camp. These guys are guides, night watchmen, park rangers, and some are teachers/educators, as we are living at one of Jane Goodall Institute’s (JGI) education centers, where school children come to learn about conservation. As we were explaining to the guys what we are researching, they started laughing hysterically that we wanted to try and find the chimps. Apparently the chimps are pretty elusive and very difficult to track. A year ago, JGI stopped the chimp trekking that used to occur at the site because they felt that the ecotourism was actually harming the chimps, but now they are not so sure this is true and so they wanted to attach themselves to Zinta’s project to see if the presence of humans was negatively affecting them. Therefore, since no one has been following the chimps for over a year, all the guides no longer know where to find them. About once a week they hear from the villagers around the site that the chimps are around because they have been crop raiding, but no one knows were their feeding trees are anymore or what there typical path is each day. Alex and I will probably be spending most of our time trying to habituate chimps that for the past year JGI has been trying to unhabituate. The guides have been telling us too, that even if we do find the chimps, they most likely will charge and then run off, so it will be very difficult to follow them once we do find them. And then, yesterday, they told us that if we do find them we will not be able to consistently find them every day. Alex and I are somewhat frustrated with this, but so is the nature of field work. I am definitely up for the challenge, but it does make it difficult to know that once we finally start making some progress she and I will be leaving and new assistants will get the advantage of seeing them more frequently with less effort. Plus if JGI doesn’t really want the chimps permanently habituated, we are trying to habituate them for only a 9 month period and not for long term study most likely, which is also a bit discouraging to know you’re working so hard for an unknown goal. It will be so great though if we can habituate them enough that we can collect the data we need to and to identify all the individuals in the group, as right now, no one knows any of them individually. If we can do this, Alex and I will have accomplished something none of the other assistants on Zinta’s project have done, and something Zinta herself has never done.

We will see how everything turns out… for now I miss everyone! Wish us luck. I will write again soon, with some funny stories, as Alex and I have had lots and lots of laughs since we arrived. Sometimes all you can do is laugh about things that happen here.

Overall, though everyone in this country is so nice and so willing to go out of their way to help us. We have been learning how to make fire, local foods and how to find fruit when it’s not fruit season and we’re not close enough to a major town where fruit is imported. Without the help of some of the guys in camp, Alex and I might not have been eating for the past few days. We were supposed to have a gas tank for out 2 burners to cook with, but the tank has been broken for the last week, and has just been fixed today, but there is no one to bring the tank to us, so we have been sharing the one fire in camp with all the guides and rangers. It’s been too wet to build a second fire. We certainly are learning the local ways and how to survive without much, which has been frustrating at times and even more rewarding at others. I’ve learned how to start a fire by blowing on embers!! I was so excited when I figured this out.

Love you all!!!