The Habituation Experience

9 April 2009

5:00 The alarm goes off, it’s still dark. There’s no electricity so I ready myself and pack my field bag by the light of my headlamp. As I prepare myself for a day in the forest I am full to the brim with excitement and overcome with giddiness.

Today is not an ordinary day in the field for me.

Today I woke up in Kibale National Park.

Today I will spend the day tracking chimpanzees.

Located in Western Uganda, Kibale National Park is said to have the highest diversity and density of primates in Africa and is home to 13 different species. It shouldn’t surprise anyone then that I made the two day trip, crossed a border, took a handful of overcrowded matatus, a bus full of roosters and obnoxious children, and one insane but immensely beautiful motorbike ride to get here from Kakamega. And if you know me well enough, it also shouldn’t come as a surprise that I am about to spend my vacation doing what I do everyday: following primates around the forest.

5:30 I clamber down the ladder, start to follow the path up to the main lodge and immediately wish I had paid more attention when they led us out here the previous evening.

Last night I slept in a tree house, a simple structure stuck out in the forest far from any surrounding buildings, raised up off the ground, over looking a place called the Elephant Wallow. “If you are lucky, the elephants might visit tonight,” we were informed by the man who escorted us the 800 some meters from the lodge down a narrow series of paths into the forest and our “room.” And lucky, I was. A herd of forest elephants visited the wallow in the middle of the night and I awoke to the sound of them noisily chewing on vegetation right outside my window.

Just stay to the right I keep telling myself. Eventually I pop out onto the road, not exactly where I want to be but I quickly get my bearings and head up the hill to the main lodge in search of coffee, overpriced bottled water, and an incredibly expensive packed lunch prepared by the kitchen staff.

6:00 I head down the hill to the forest guard’s headquarters and meet Ronald, my guide for the day. Back up the hill to the lodge for his packed lunch and off in search of chimps we go.

6:12 We come across elephant droppings on the trail. We are in a place that doesn’t look like it could accommodate something as massive as an elephant. How did it get in here? And more importantly, where is it now? 

6:24 We stop at a fruiting Ficus mucuso. Ronald informs me this is a favorite chimp food, but we find the tree overrun with redtail monkeys. He knows of another fig in fruit so we start off in that direction.

6:30 We stop. Ronald points. From the trail I can make out a large black figure at the top of the tree. My first wild chimpanzee. From this point on I am certain there is a permanent smile smeared across my face. We leave the trail and head up hill to the base of the tree. In front of me is an enormous fig and there are perhaps 20 chimps chowing down on the golf ball sized fruits that grow off its branches in clusters. Ronald points out a nest nearby; this is where they spent the night. Apparently, they didn’t want to waste any time searching for breakfast. We settle in, it’s evident they won’t be leaving this location for a very long time.

10:07 A female with a three-month-old infant leaves the tree and builds a day nest not far from where we are sitting. I am introduced to Kachweka (Half). She was named for a half finger on her left hand. Her and her infant settle into their nest, but clearly the little guy is more interested in what’s going on below than in resting, he keeps peaking his head over the edge to gawk at us.

11:14 Finally, they begin to leave the tree. Three meters from where I am seated, Ebilaya (Irish Potato), a 9-year-old male plops down on the hard soil. He scurries along to catch up with the others that have already descended and are moving away on all fours. Ebihimba (Beans), his mother carrying his 4-month-old sibling on her back, Ebitooke (Banana), his 13-year-old brother, and Bwana (Gentle), the highest-ranking male in this sub-group are amongst them.

They spend the next hour socializing and grooming on the ground in small parties. Ronald and I stay back on the trail to give them plenty of space, the females with young infants are visibly nervous and very aware of our presence.

12:17 Now you see them, now you don’t, the handful of individuals that were resting 25 meters in front of us have vanished. They are bulky creatures but they are also stealthy and agile and able to quietly disappear under the cover of dense undergrowth.

We circle around the immediate area and manage to locate a few feeding in a Celtis africana. The visibility is poor with shorter shrubbier trees blocking our view so Ronald and I take a seat on his spread out poncho and break into our packed lunches.

12:35 Totti, a 14-year-old male, named after the Italian footballer, is the first to come back down. A male chimpanzee can weigh 90-120 pounds, I’m not sure what Totti weighs in at but compared to the blue monkeys I’m accustomed to, he is absolutely enormous.  And here he is, sitting directly in front of me, no boundaries or barriers between us. I’m not sure what to do with myself, am I really face to face with a wild chimpanzee? I could reach out and touch him and he could do the same. For a few perfect seconds I completely lose track of myself, time stops, the forest falls away, and it’s just me and him, him and me. I am filled with awe, curiosity, exhilaration and twenty other emotions I don’t even know the words for. Seconds later, my moment with Totti is interrupted, and before we know what’s happening the females are on the ground and then everyone is gone.

12:48 This time we move straight toward the fig where we spent all morning. It looks empty, it sounds empty, and it feels empty. The place has a very different feeling than it did hours earlier, there’s no noise, no energy. A fig full of feeding primates is not a quiet place, with fruits and feces intermittently dropping from the treetop, and a variety of vocalizations radiating from the branches, it’s hard to hear anything else. But all is quiet here.

Just then and at the same time, Ronald and I see her, a lone female visibly in estrus feeding near the top. We settle in, Ronald is certain it’s only a matter of time before more arrive, they can’t stand to be away from this fig for long.

13:43 A chorus of pant hoots erupt. Pant hoots sound from every possible direction, front, back, up, down, side to side. It feels like we are completely surrounded by the vocalizations, enclosed in the middle of a chorus of calling chimpanzees. I have chills; it’s eerie and exhilarating at the same time.

The others are on their way back. Not long after and without further sound, three, four, five, ten come creeping out of the surrounding foliage and climb back up the twisted limbs of the fig where they will spend the afternoon.

16:46 Still in the fig and it’s evident many of them are about to burst. I am now sitting in a forest full of farting apes. All around us they are letting loose. Gone are the serious conversations of primate behavior Ronald and I began our day with, now we are doubled over in laughter at the sounds of primate flatulence.

18:01 They all move out of the fig at once but take off in opposite directions. We follow Kachweka with her 3-month-old in tow in the hopes that she will begin building her nest for the night. Kagasa (Enough) her 7-year-old daughter joins her and they continue feeding. Eventually, Kachweka with the infant riding ventrally moves away and Kagasa, apparently not wanting to be left behind, jumps on her mom’s back. The three of them disappear into the rapidly dimming light of the surrounding forest that way, with Kachweka carrying the two youngest of her offspring off to bed.

18:20 There is a commotion on the other side of the fig. More individuals have joined the group. The excitement is short lived and they quickly disperse to build nests and settle in for the night. Bwana is in front of us and he is bending, breaking, and weaving his nest out of twigs and foliage. He finishes and tucks right in. We leave them like that, curled up in their nests, prepared to spring up in the morning and spend another day gorging on ripe succulent figs.

Kenya-month 8 and 9

At the end of January we lost one of the older females from the TWN group. TWN is the smaller of the two groups that frequent the forest station and village, and they make almost daily stops at my house. I have been greeted many mornings by a yard full of monkeys. It’s pleasant to wake up to and one of the things I will miss most about living here.

Annie was 21 years old and she was a fixture around the village. Her and Kitty were like two little old lady monkeys, always seen meandering around together between the houses and along the road. She started acting strangely a couple weeks before her disappearance and spent more and more time away from the group, alone in the village, and occasionally with the company of Kitty. Suspicions flared, and rumors flew, this wouldn’t be the first time a monkey had been intentionally poisoned in the forest station, and by a forest guard of all people. Monkeys in the village are bothersome to people, I am sure I have mentioned before how they destroy food supplies that are left unattended. It is not so much of a challenge then to poison them; all you have to do is leave the affected food in an area both where a monkey will have access to and a place where they come searching for food, like your front stoop or the bushes beside your house. But we had nothing to go on other than the parallels between hers and the previous cases. The last time it happened one of the assistants heard the guilty guard boasting to a friend about using rat poison to off a monkey. He was quickly relocated.

Whereas a sick monkey in the forest would simply fall off our radar, hidden away by the dense vegetation, we were able to keep up with Annie and she was spotted around the village daily. Eventually, she did disappear. And then a few days later I found her body just off Mama Mutere, the main tourist trail that leads to the glade and lookout tower. I ran home for gloves, goggles, and a plastic bag and caused quite a stir in the village. Everyone knew she was sick and when they saw me they figured out very quickly what I had found. Erick assisted me and we did the best necropsy we could, but it wasn’t a pretty sight and I will just leave it at that. We buried her beneath the Ficus in front of my house. It is nice to have some closure for once, normally they just vanish and we are left to wonder.

A few weeks after that a younger female in the GN group began acting strangely similar. We would have never known Princess was sick if we hadn’t come across her stretched out, completely still one day just off the trail. We observed her for a couple hours but eventually had to move on. She fell behind the group, disappeared in the undergrowth and was never seen again. It doesn’t seem likely that she could have been poisoned, like we suspect Annie was, because this group doesn’t ransack the village, but we will never know the whole story. And I have to accept that.

Birthing season has finally come to a close. Bif gave birth to the last baby of the season a couple days ago (well, we suspect, there is the chance that someone is still pregnant and we just haven’t noticed). We had 25 births (but lost 3 so far), that’s half of the adult females in the five study groups. It seems like every other monkey is running around with a baby, and I guess every other adult female actually is.

I gave the assistants a survey for fun a while back and the worst mom award went to Pansy, hands down. She has no surviving offspring. The majority of her children never made it through infancy. She had one that lived for a few years but to no fault of her own, he was killed by a gaboon viper. Pansy gave birth this year and I finally saw her terrible parenting skills for myself. The first day she was seen with the infant I found her holding it away from her body, upside down by the tail, and looking at it like it was from outer space, while it was screaming at the top of its lungs. She did this multiple times. You can’t help but laugh at her. She seemed to get the hang of it after the first week, and her baby looked strong and healthy, but one day it was just gone. It amazes me what terrible moms they can be. Now Pansy is seen snatching up and suckling everyone else’s babies on a regular basis. And with nine infants in the group, many of whom are one month old now and frequently running around on their own, she has her pick.

Some of the monkeys are very good moms, if their baby makes one little peep, mom is there to comfort it in a snap. And they are growing quite fast, many are already wobbling around on their own legs, but for the most part they still stick with mom. I am not looking forward to the day that all of these infants are running together in a big baby gang, it will be impossible to keep track of who is who.

The month of February flew by. I met up with some German researchers and American and German volunteers in the forest and we made a few excursions to explore more of Western Kenya. The first trip was to Kitale and Saiwa Swamp National Park. Saiwa is the smallest park in Kenya and rarely visited. Unlike the majority of the parks here, vehicles are prohibited and one has to explore the park’s three-square kilometers on foot. It was created as a sanctuary for the sitatunga, a most unusual antelope with splayed and elongated hooves designed to help it successfully live in the swamp. And I think we managed to see one, but we are still not really sure.

Mount Elgon National Park followed. Elgon is termed the “loneliest park in Kenya,” and the only other group of trekkers we encountered consisted of three Germans we had met in the Kakamega Forest two days before. The mountain is an extinct volcano that straddles the Kenyan-Ugandan border and is famous for its caves and salt-mining elephants. One such cave, Kitum, is rumored to have been the location where two victims of Marburg Hemorrhagic Fever, a virus closely related to Ebola, contracted the deadly virus. We explored Kitum, Mackingeny, and Chepnyalil caves. We saw thousands of bats, avoided deadly viruses, but weren’t lucky enough to catch a glimpse of any illusive salt-mining elephants. Then we spent a day climbing to the top of Koitoboss peak at 4187 meters. We were required to hire an armed guard to accompany us through the park and ended up getting two for the price of one. On the hike one walked in front while the other brought up the back, and both carried enormous weapons. We must have resembled a procession of prisoners.

I also made a trip to visit one of the assistant’s compounds. Ernest lives 45 min by bike from the forest station. He makes that trip every single day to work and then has to follow the monkeys for 8 hours, I was exhausted after the bike trip there and it was mostly downhill! At his place I sampled matoke for the first time. Matoke is boiled green bananas, also known as plantains. For those of you who spent any time with me in Costa Rica you know how I like my plantains. Matoke was alright, but I will stick with patacones!