The dry season is squeezing the life out of everything here. The Mugiri River has turned into nothing more than a trickle, soon it will be a purposeless sand filled channel. The trees have shed their leaves and carelessly laid an extensive brittle brown carpet at their feet. Crunchy leaf litter completely conceals the forest floor and fills our gumboots as we wade through it. It’s impossible to hear over the loud crunch and crackle of our footsteps on the trail. The dusty paths, once well worn, appear now to be vacant of activity and are easily misplaced under the piles of dried foliage. And it seems that not a single tree or shrub is producing fruit. There is absolutely nothing to eat in the entire forest, that is, except for some well hidden, magic fig trees.
Sweet, ripe, juicy figs, who doesn’t love them? In a famished forest lacking a reliable food supply, a fruiting fig is a miraculous discovery. I’ve never understood how fig trees work; they seem to produce only when they feel up to it. Every other fruiting tree has their season but figs are finicky and unpredictable, but that typically means at least one is always fruiting. I spent the last month seeking out fabled places where endless supplies of round sticky fruits are plentiful, even in the driest of times (and it wasn’t all that difficult, most of the figs were already mapped in my gps unit…). It seemed like my best plan of attack and the key to finding hungry chimps. I gazed up into the huge yellow barked trees and begged them to produce a crop. I stared at tiny young fruits and willed them to grow big and pleaded with them to pack themselves full of nutrients. I parked myself patiently under many figs and just waited for hours, day after day, but no one else ever came to join me. Until finally one day I found a solitary, hardworking fig tree, standing high on the escarpment. It was alone, there were no other figs around, but it wasn’t all that lonely. It was quite popular; its branches full of life. This was a completely different scene from the dry dusty forest below; in fact, it was a paradise for those lucky creatures who stumbled upon it. I found baboons bouncing around with mouths overflowing, noisy black and white hornbills chasing each other with their casqued bills full, three different kinds and colors of turacos darting around eating plump green figs, and blue monkeys so high in the branches I nearly overlooked them. The part that caught my attention immediately though, was the village of nests surrounding the fig.
Chimpanzees make nightly nests. They sleep high above the ground in a pile of leaves carefully formed into a bed. They lace and weave branches together to build a platform and place soft leaves and twigs on top to make a mattress. It’s a technique that they are taught by their mothers. Young chimps sleep in the same nest as their mom until they are old enough to start building one of their own. I’ve seen a handful of adult sized nests accompanied by teeny tiny ones no more than an arm’s reach away. I imagine they were the attempts at nest making by some toddler. Maybe someday I’ll get a chance to observe chimps in action assembling their nightly nests, but for now I just gaze up into the empty beds and try to imagine how many nights ago they were occupied.
For being really nothing more than a pile of sticks and leaves the nests are sturdy and structurally sound, many with a triangle shaped base made from bent branches. It’s not a bed I am going to tuck into but a couple of years ago one researcher in Senegal actually spent multiple nights sleeping in nests that were constructed by chimpanzees. She was equipped with data-logging thermometers strapped to her and a tape recorder in hand to record her thoughts in the middle of the night, and she even counted the insect bites she acquired. She then compared her nights high in the trees to those spent unprotected on the ground. She was trying to answer that same old question: why? The commonly accepted theories include: thermoregulation, predator avoidance, anti-parasitism, and sleep quality. She found that they all probably held some weight.
In a half circle surrounding the fig were more than a dozen nests, the most I have ever seen in one place. All but two appeared to have been constructed in the past few days, some even the previous evening. It took us the rest of that day to take all the necessary measurements and data, but no hungry chimps returned to feed. Early the next morning we were on our way back. I could barely contain my excitement. Would they be there? How could they resist? Unfortunately, we had a long strenuous climb up the escarpment to reach our destination. My enthusiasm slightly dissipated as I thought about the sweat soaked trek ahead of us. It would take us nearly two hours to reach our target: the magic fig full of apes.
Sure enough, they were there, that was obvious immediately. How many, I wasn’t sure. Our vantage point was hardly worth the trouble. The only way for us to approach the tree was from below, it was precipitously perched high on a steep crumbly slope and we were on a trail in a valley some 50 meters below. I managed to count five females and some offspring, at least one infant and a juvenile. But within a few minutes they were all gone. Clearly, they didn’t appreciate our presence. They left the fig one by one, plopping down to the ground, travelling in a single file line up the escarpment. They moved along a chimp trail too steep for their bipedal cousins so we reluctantly tried to follow along on the trail below. Eventually we reached a point where their trail crossed ours and we waited. Unbeknownst to us, they stopped in the cover of some shrubbery and lost us. We continued huffing and puffing up the hill and they doubled back to the fig to stuff their faces some more. Bamboozled and oblivious we sat for some time. When our impatience finally got the better of us we returned to the sight of all the action. The group hung around for another 10 minutes or so, but the entire time they had their eyes on us. I felt the untrusting glare of a wary pregnant female, her belly stretched to fit the baby chimp inside and her nipples swollen ready to nurse it when it emerged. She kept her gaze fixed on me, but still never skipped a beat packing tasty figs into her cheeks. When they’d had enough, they headed up the hill where they were swallowed up by the savanna.
The next morning we made the same trek back to the mecca fig. This time we found two chimps, a lone female and her tiny infant. They too didn’t stay for long. The hours of observations I dreamt about were not going to happen this month. Females with young are difficult to follow I’m learning. While the female turned her back to us and groomed herself, the unattended little chimp bounced around along the giant zigzagged arms of the tree. Those few minutes made the four hour roundtrip hike worth all the trouble.
Since then I’ve found two more magic figs, side by side along the virtually nonexistent river. It seems my words of encouragement are helping and their massive clumps of green fruits are ripening to sweet pink clusters. The hornbills have started to arrive; I'm just waiting for the chimps now.
Cheers from the forest,
Corey
