Go Apes!

Tuesday, 14th July. Semliki Time: 07:11pm

After yesterdays gloomy and exhausting day, I slept well and woke up feeling refreshed. Alex’s alarm hadn’t been loud enougb to wake either of us and, at 6:45, we were a whole 45 minutes late in getting up. This cheered me- off to a good start.

Our good start continued when, shortly into the forest, we heard chimp calls. Only a short time later, we saw chimps. On our arrival, they hooted and screamed, obviously quite spooked. The Semliki chimps are only semi-habituated and, while the males will calmly swing overhead and munch and chew and defecate with pleasure, the young’uns and the females don’t feel at all comfortable in the presence of humans. The two juveniles we’d stumbled upon hastily retreated to the top of a high canopy and sat there for an hour. We too sat there for an hour trying to make notes.

08:40 out of sight
08:45 out of sight
08:50 out of sight
08:55 oos
09:00 oos.
09:05-15: “
20-30: “

Just as I was starting to wonder whether the conclusion to my dissertation would be “Chimps sometimes eat bark but most usually like to sit for long periods at the top of tall trees”, our charges began to scream again. This scream was answered by another scream somewhere in the distance. The distant scream became louder and was accompanied by a rustling. Soon enough, into plain view, clambered another, braver, juvenile with a cute brown face and a large white tuft on his bottom. He gingerly but quickly climbed over an unsturdy-looking low hanging branch and joined his friends in the canopy overhead to a cacophony of hoots and cheerful screams. Ten minutes later, another couple of screams echoed through the valley and a large, black coloured male swung towards us with a smaller individual following behind him, just out of sight. I almost decapitated Edson with my binoculars as I quickly raised them to my glasses. Realising that glasses and binoculars didn’t quite mesh, I raised the glasses to my forehead and peered through the binoculars. Before my very retina appeared a fantastic and highly detailed close-up of a leaf. Blinking, I removed the binocs and tried to relocate the hulking male. This proved difficult as my glasses were on my forehead and all I could see was a blacking blur. I replaced the glasses and, upon locating the black faced chimp and shoved my binoculars back into my face so hard that the frame left a red mark on my nose. By the time I’d finally negotiated the complexities of using two vision aides, he’d wandered out of sight behind a branch.

Soon enough though, we moved round a tree and the newly named “Chimp D” was once again in view. As we were staring at him, the white tufted “Chimp C” swung from the high canopy and greeted Mr “Chimp D” with friendly hoots. With the brawny “Chimp D” around, there was no need to fear the noisy humans on the forest floor. Raising my binoculars I gazed up at Chimp D and looked into his face. The noble beast turned slowly and with a wise, almost human-like expression looked deep into my eyes as if to say “What the f*** you staring at buddy!”. Having understood, I turned away and pretended to groom Edson for lice. Edson groomed himself for lice also, scratched his armpits and hooted. Neither of us found lice but “Chimp D” was satisfied by the display and lay back on the branch, allowing “Chimp C” or “White-bum” to groom him. The grooming lasted for almost forty minutes and, for some reason, was touching to watch. “Chimp D” lounged back and occasionally scratched himself while little white-bum combed every inch of his body. We looked for a long time at the list of chimp IDs and eventually decided that “Chimp D” was not “Chimp D” at all, but “Mzee”, a suspected alpha from 2008.

Mzee, bored of being groomed shook himself and headed into the higher branches to feed on saba fruit. White bum did the same, as did an out of sight juvenile in the trees to the left. The rustling was such that working out which of the circling chimps was witch became like a ball and cup game. By the end, we had no idea who was white-bum, who was Mzee and who was chimp + 1. One thing was for certain, from the pieces of saba that kept nearly hitting us it was easy to tell that they were feeding.

Not being allowed to eat near the chimps, by about one we were all completely starving and, at half one, we cracked. Silently, we snuck off to a nearby path and ate our belated elevenses. Chapattis have never been sweeter. On our return, Mzee was still munching, which he and his friends continued to do for another hour. We lay back and watched, which things crawled under our backs and over our legs. At 2:50, they were off. Screaming and climbing quickly. We have chase stabbing ourselves on twigs and slicing ourselves on thorns. Eventually saw them plop out of the tree in front of us and vanish into an impenetrable thicket. We bravely penetrated the impenetrable thicket at great cost to our clothes and entered the savannah, where chimps were rolling around, happily grooming each other with their teeth and eating vine leaves. When we got closer they got spooked and popped off into the thickest part of the thicket. Having now had an almost eight hour day we decided to call it one and traipsed home. With eight pages of notes and many question marks, measuring behavior is difficult. A few more days like today, though, and I’ll be a pro!