Updates from Uganda: month one – chimps 1, chimpers 0

The chimps successfully evaded me nearly all month. In my first week I managed to locate a handful of them and spent about an hour patiently watching their backsides as they rested and groomed in a dense thicket. Then, without warning, they silently disappeared…for the remainder of the month. On a couple of other occasions I momentarily encountered a lone male or a female with a young infant but they didn’t share my excitement in locating them and bolted. Even so, every morning I get up before the sun and head off into the forest for another hopeful day of searching and hiking in the jungle. It’s sort of like waking up and going on a nature walk, only with elephants and an armed guard.

I’m accompanied on my adventures by the Uganda Wildlife Authority ranger assigned to Mugiri Camp for the week. Some of the rangers are very helpful, know the trails, and have helped researchers here or in Kibale. Other rangers believe they are present only to protect me, but when they hide behind me as we watch a herd of buffalo cross the trail ahead and when I know the forest better after only being here for a few weeks I start to wonder who’s protecting who. I spend each day walking the trails on the lookout for the large dark-haired apes I’ve been charged with studying, collecting their dung, describing their nests, tracking their knuckle prints, and listening to their pant hoots, all with the hope that it will lead me to them eventually. It’s hard to believe that an animal that is nearly the same size as me can go undetected, but believe me they can, they’ve walked right by me and I had no clue.

I was completely doubled over, right hand in a plastic bag about to grab a fresh steamy pile of chimp poo, left hand on the GPS trying to figure out where exactly we were, when it happened. A female with an infant riding on her back and a juvenile in tow walked up the trail and just before making the bend and running right into us, they saw us, changed trajectory, and vanished into the undergrowth. I completely missed the entire event and would never have known except that Shem, the ranger, who wasn’t digging in excrement, watched it unfold. It happened so fast that by the time he formed the words to tell me all I could do was stand there holding up my poop prize and look at him dumbfounded.

The other wildlife in the forest have been doing an outstanding job of compensating for the lack of chimp sightings though. There have been leopard prints at our river crossings, genets quarrelling outside my tent at night, gerbils living in the outhouse, baboons playing and frolicking near my porch, and creatures I never knew existed, like Alexander’s cusimanse, surprising us in the forest. And I nearly stepped on a young Ugandan kob my first time walking through the savanna. The kob are striking, golden colored ungulates that are finally making a comeback in the reserve after being poached heavily during the years of Idi Amin in the 70’s, the Ugandan-Tanzanian war in 1978 and 1979, as well as after and presently. In the 60’s their population flourished and it’s estimated that there were 20,000 in this 550 square kilometer protected area, but after all the conflict and rampant poaching pressure the population had dropped to a disheartening 2000 individuals. Those same events completely wiped out the Jackson’s hartebeest here as well. Luckily for the kob, the reserve and their population were not past saving and in the early 90’s the Uganda Wildlife Authority made a commitment to do so. They are now thriving.

Uganda kob in the reserve

Walking through the savanna’s tall grass can be daunting, the angry equatorial sun scorches into you, patches of vegetation swallow up your lower body, unseen creatures rustle and scurry away underfoot, and the vast open landscape can leave you feeling vulnerable and exposed. Every time we emerge from the dark dense cloak of the forest into the blinding heat of the savanna I want to turn and slink right back in. There is a constant loop of terror that plays in my mind: big snakes, lions, hyenas, buffalo, elephants, fear, fear, fear, I am going to be eaten, trampled, bitten, big snakes... I can understand why the chimps seem so nervous when they are encountered in this habitat, there’s nowhere to escape to. So when the ferocious, caramel-colored beast sprung up from where I was about to place my foot, naturally I screamed at the top of my lungs in absolute horror expecting it was about to rip me to shreds. When I realized it was a fuzzy, harmless, young antelope and it was probably thinking the same thing about the evil, bipedal monster about to obliterate it with big rubber soles I was slightly embarrassed.

I was given quite an introduction to the more destructive and dangerous members of the Semliki forest community on my very first day of work. Unlike the chimps, the elephants have a difficult time moving through the forest undetected; they leave a very obvious trail of mini craters in their wake, colossal mountains of dung, as well as broken limbs and lifeless trampled trees, and they destroy our bridges – they appear to strategically smack our carefully placed handrails down and demolish the sticks that hold them in place seemingly out of spite.

Elephant crater

We could hear them on the other side of the river on our way out to the escarpment so we paused on the trail and watched the trees rattle, shake, crack, and break and finally an enormous forest elephant came into the clearing. It was exhilarating; I’ve seen elephants before but usually from the perceived safety of an automobile, not on foot. The river was between us, we were quiet, and they didn’t seem to notice us but still my heart was racing. We left them and their prehensile trunks behind stripping bark from trees at the river and continued on our way up the escarpment to search for the chimps. My heart was soon pounding again but this time it was due to the strenuous climb up the steep sides of the valley. Finding nothing but a few nests we turned around and were headed back by early afternoon. Unbeknownst to us, the herd of elephants had made their way across the river while we were gone and were wreaking havoc in the forest just off the trail we were coming down. We didn’t hear the first one until we passed it and at that point realized we had inadvertently walked right into the middle of the group. We suddenly noticed there were multiple mammoth figures immediately to our left.  Just then, an enormous elephant came out onto the trail about 15 meters in front of us and turned its tusked head to look in our direction. That one look did it for me; I want to stay far away from the elephants. We scrambled through some vegetation as fast as we could, jumped the river, and left them to their destructive foraging. I managed to regain my composure as we continued the walk back to camp, but only just in time for us to spook a buffalo alongside the trail. At that point I nearly fainted.

We ran into the elephants over the next few days and were forced to reroute our travel but since then haven’t seen or heard much from them, which is fine by me. After that first day I was wondering how I would survive six months of being bullied and harassed by impatient and irritable pachyderms. But the bullies have moved on for now.

Cheers from the forest,

Corey