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!!!

Hello...Life without Ammenities!!

Where to begin…as was the case in Kenya there is so much that happens in the first few days of arrival that I couldn’t possibly talk about it all. I’ll do my best to highlight the things I feel are most important. Before anything else, let me say though, that I love everything and have already learned so much! Overall, everyone is so nice, I really like the project, and life is very primitive, as I will get to, but it’s actually really nice to be in the middle of the forest without much…I’m sure by the end my opinion of this may change, but it’s refreshing for now. There are minor things here and there that are aggravating me and Alex, mostly in terms of expenses we are responsible for, but most of this is due to the fact that life in the field never goes the way you initially plan, and so you have to have plan B, plan C, plan AZ. Alex and I are trying to go with the flow on these things, but stand our ground on some things we think are unfair. I will not waste time talking about these minor irritants though, because the majority of my experience here, to date, has been very positive, and I think will only continue to be.

Let me bring everyone up to date on what I have been doing for the past several days. On Thursday we took the Post Office Bus to Masindi, it was about a 6 hour ride. Alex and I were absolutely exhausted, as we had only slept a few hours the night before. The hotel we stayed in had something in the beds that was making both of us itch terribly. We were afraid that it was bed bugs or something of the sort. Alex fix for this was to cover her pillow with a plastic shopping bag, to keep the bugs locked in the pillow and away from her face. Now this is a good plan, in theory. I, myself would prefer to sleep on the bugs as opposed to a dirty bag that had been all around Kampala, but this seemed to work for her, sort of, though we really just ended up not sleeping. And every time I tried to fall asleep, I’d hear her plastic bag crunching underneath her head. It was very amusing... I’m laughing hysterically just writing about it now. You probably had to be there to see the humor in it, but I think sleep deprivation made us both a little giddy that night as well, which made everything hysterical to us. We were able to perked up a bit, the next day though, and Alex and Josephine (one of the other volunteers) fought hard for 4 seats on the bus. It’s pretty much a mad dash for seats with elbows flying and lots of pushing…thankfully they were able to save 4 seats for us all, while Zinta (the woman we’re working for) and I loaded ALL our bags onto the bus. Once we arrived in Masindi we had lunch at a local hotel and then went shopping for some items we needed, after several hours we finally made our way out to the field site Zinta is working at, Sanso, had dinner and went straight to bed. Yesterday we slept in a bit and then met with Zinta to go over the data collection methods. After hearing, in more detail, what we will be doing, I am even more enthusiastic about the project and think it will be a profitable study…hopefully!

I got to see my first live chimp in the wild yesterday!! It was amazing…though my heart hasn’t been stolen away from the monkeys yet. We have blue monkeys, redtail monkeys, black and white colobus and baboons all living in the same forest as the chimps, and I found myself drawn to them a lot more than the chimps. I’m passionate still about what I’m doing here, but I think I just might be a monkey girl, as opposed to an ape girl (hahaha, I know you’re all laughing at that), we’ll see by the end of this experience though.

We heard the chimps screaming in camp while we were going over the data collection. While Zinta spoke with a woman and we had a break, we walked up the trail a bit to see if the chimps were on the edge of the forest. Unfortunately we weren’t allowed in the forest yet. The Budongo Forest Project has a rule that people have to be quarantined for 5 days before they can enter the forest with the chimps. This precaution is to make sure the people acclimate to the new environment here and don’t get sick. Thankfully by tomorrow we have past that time and none of us are sick yet! Alex, Josephine and I walked up the trail a bit and there they were, 3 of them peacefully feeding in a tree. We all crouched down and watched them for awhile. The rest of the group, still in the forest, began screeching again and the 3 we were watching all started screaming back and jumping in the trees, it was really incredible to watch.

Today (Saturday) has been a pretty relaxing day. Alex and I have mostly sat around all day talking, which has been nice as we have been running around and moving every night since we got here. We had the opportunity to go out to our field site today though, to see it and what supplies are there so we know what we need to purchase. As I mentioned briefly in one of my emails, it is a very, very basic set up. We have 2 cement huts with no electricity or running water, an outhouse toilet, that doesn’t flush, and bucket showers. However, our camp is in the middle of this beautiful forest, with not much else around. It is so beautiful and quiet, very relaxing. I’m sure Alex and I are going to get bored at times, but overall I think we’re going to really enjoy our time there. Unfortunately right now the roofs are all leaking on all of the huts and we are just starting to enter the rainy season, which is not good. The roofs are supposed to be fixed sometime before September 17th, which probably actually means they won’t be fixed before we leave. Alex and I are not too happy about this, especially since we have to pay rent to live in a non-functioning place, but we’re going to see what we can negotiate because of this, also taking into consideration when the roof actually gets fixed. The leaking roofs and the fact that it is going to be pretty difficult for us to get food (there’s no villages close by and we have no vehicle) may make the living experience more difficult and unpleasant than we perceive at the moment, but we’ll have to see. Overall, we are very excited and cannot wait to arrive at the site on Monday and finally settle a bit.

This is a lot for now, so I will leave you all with this and will write again when I can. Please be patient as I the lack of electricity and our physical distance from internet will make it very difficult for me to be in touch often. I’m doing really well though and hope everyone is also. Miss you!!