Wild Chimp Chasers

Saturday, 24th July. Semliki Time: 03:33pm

Bill McGrew, my dissertation supervisor and the ultimate source of chimpanzee knowledge this side of the Channel (and maybe the Atlantic!) has always referred to his job as ‘chimp chasing’. I used to think of this as an indulgent joke - primatologists must be predominantly involved in research and, after all, the chasing must surely be only a small part of their daily lives. Oh how wrong I was. Having now spent two and a half weeks trying to collect behavioral data on wild chimps, I can happily say that the title ‘Chimp Chasing’ is no understatement.

Today we happened upon chimps very early, at 8 am. “Hurrah”, I thought to myself, pulling out a notebook, “now to collect some data”. A chimp somewhere out of sight hit the buttress of a tree very hard and the rest, to the man, promptly vanished. We crashed through the undergrowth, hot on their trail. On top of the usual collections of thorns, twigs and spiderwebs, I also managed to garner a large smear of an unidentified botanical irritant, which burned my forehead. The tracks led us out on the savannah, where we tracked their passage through the grass. Sadly, chimps weren’t the only animals to have been through the grass, and we soon found ourselves carefully following a wild buffalo. Despondently we returned to the trail, only to see five or six chimps milling about in the trees. The notebook emerged. The chimps vanished. Que another thrash through the undergrowth, culminating in our guide, Moses, bending a thorn branch towards him and letting it spring back right into my face. I staggered out of the forest into the beating heat of the savannah again, nursing the laceration which neatly divided my mystery acid burn. Okay, maybe more of a scratch than a laceration, but it still hurt. The chimps had gone. Back we went to the trail. Again we saw the chimps. The chimps saw us and made off in the opposite direction. We thrashed through more undergrowth, but had lost the blackguards for good. It felt more like we were chasing wild geese than chimps.

Incidentally, the expression “wild goose chase” comes from a 16th centuary custom where a man on a horse was chased by other men on horses and eventually caught. It’s interesting how these expressions become bastardized over time. In keeping with the traditional meaning of the expression, while today’s wild goose chase may not have culminated in chimps, we did catch the goose… As we were wearily heading back to camp, we stumbled upon a scared, baby mongoose in the cavity of a hollowed out tree. It was wonderfully cute and fluffy, and terrified as anything of the huge eyes that were staring down at it.

As if to goad us, the chimps have started making noises very close to the camp. Tomorrow is Sunday and, while I suggested delaying the weekend by a day, the look of horror on our guide’s face made it seem best not to press the issue...