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!