Cutting the Crap

Monday, 10th August, Semliki Time: 7:33

It must be beginners luck. Alex and I got five weeks without seeing chimps and today, when the Americans turn up, they basically threw themselves at us. It was not yet eight when we stumbled upon our first cartload of the great apes. As an aside, cartload is the correct collective noun. No jokes. Where was I? Yes. It was not yet eight when we stumbled upon our first bevy of the seemly simians, happily munching figs in the middle of the savannah. The view was tremendous and there were about six of them, three in plain sight. We positively identified one of them as ‘Buzz’ within the first three minutes and pencilled another one down as the chimp ‘McGrew’. One of the distinguishing features of ‘McGrew’, according to our book, is that he’s ‘more robust than Mitani’, a subject of great mirth among us Cantabrigian primatologists. The day was all together quite productive and, while we lost the chimps after about an hour of good observation, we caught up with them for a few minutes at around 10:50. My leg, which I had recently driven a spike through, wasn’t so great on the ascents and descents, but by the end of the day had started to hurt considerably less. Deep heat is a wonderful thing.

Today was also a special day for me. Today I became a man. Today I sieved my first chimpanzee shit. Poo sieving, quite frankly, sounded nasty. As man’s closest living relative, I was expecting chimp dung to smell foul and, under the veneer of someone who was ‘not yet settled in’, I’d managed to put off any form of poo research for weeks. I am happy to report that shit-sluicing is not only completely bearable, but is actually rather fun. The chimpanzee diet is composed of mostly fruit (when they can get it) and vegetation, neither of which are conducive to the bacteria which so revolt the human nose. The poo is collected in the forest in sandwich bags and stored for ‘later analysis’. At the end of the day, the baggies are taken to the stream and, one after the other, filled with water. Once filled, the faeces are kneaded and mushed around within the bags until they form a golden-brown stool cocktail. This is then poured into a corrugated pan and the pan is sluiced through the water, much like one pans for gold. The panning for nuggets of Pan gold was my job. Two pink washing-up gloves being the only thing that stood between me and shitty fingers, I washed and swirled with great gusto. The brown mush gradually disappeared, revealing untold treasures – in this case, a collection of fig seeds, fruit stones and plant pith. The third turd also contained, most excitingly of all, a lithe, wriggling intestinal parasite. My money’s on roundworm! We’ll probably be faeces fishing every day, and if I find any more pooey treasures, you’ll be the first to hear about it!