Saturday, 14th August, Semliki Time: 6:51
My data, compared to poor old Alex’s well data has been coming thick and fast. Still, I’ll admit it, I had started to get a trifle frustrated by the apparent paucity of wadded bark. The chimps seemed to be stripping bark off trees daily but, in each case, has spirited the lumps of chewed tree pith away to goodness knows where. I needed the wads to test for tannins, to test their weight and to compare them to pieces of non-wadded tree bark and it seemed like the chimps were carrying them away from the stripped trees just to spite me. Today they remedied the defect by providing me what is titled in my field journal as “THE MOTHERLOAD”. At 10:31 we heard the hooting of a juvenile chimp and, three minutes later, we rocked up underneath a tamarind tree that had been divested so thoroughly that many of the upper branches lay bare. The chimps had vanished but underneath the tree were not one or two wads but 183 freshly chewed lumps of tamarind flesh. In short, I’d hit the jackpot. Praying that the chimps would stay away long enough for me to collect everything, we got down to business. I picked up wad pieces, Moses (today’s ranger) measured the height of the strips and the arboreal Alex climbed up to take photos. By the time we’d finished, the chimps had vanished deep into the savannah, and I committed the ultimate field sin of convincing Alex and Moses to abandon the chase in order to take the freshly chewed wads to camp to weigh them before they dried. Contrary to the usual scanning of branches for the faintest rustle, on the way home I prayed that the apes would stay out of the way and, luckily, in their absence we made it home in record time. The samples were weighed before they dried and I will now be able to exclusively settle the “do chimps chew bark for the liquid content” hypothesis one way or the other. Sadly, the dental solution I was going to use to test for plaque completely failed, but my newly-devised “how many flies land on this object within two minutes” should give a reasonably accurate, if not a little slap-dash indication of the bark’s sugar and nutrition content.
‘THE MOTHER LOAD” was not the only memorable part of the day, however. The rather laborious process of weighing 183 wads of bark and putting the data into a computer was happily punctuated by a yell of “Duncan, Alex, Come here”. We were greeted by the sight of Edson, Moses and Moses (there are two) cheering at an emerald vine snake in the process of devouring a rather unfortunate gecko. Despite being about one third of the width of a gecko, the gecko slowly disappeared deeper and deeper into the snakes gaping mouth. The snake, with its jaw detached, looked at us with obvious pleasure. After somehow squeezing in the legs – a process that looked somewhat like it was giving birth backwards for its FACE – all that was left was the writhing tail. The round body of the ill-fated lizard could be seen moving inside the snake for a long time after it had been swallowed. The rangers, their third for reptile blood not yet slaked, gleefully chased another gecko round and round the water cooler towards the snake. At one point the snake made a lunge for the second gecko and very nearly caught it, but, having had one meal already, it was obvious that the snakes cold, reptilian heart just wasn’t in it. After a few minutes of stick waving, the snake gave us a tired look and slithered away. Alex and I went back to weighing wads of tree bark.
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