Pan bloglodytes: The official blog of the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute

[Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of e-mail updates from Maureen McCarthy. Maureen is a former CHCI graduate student, currently working as a research assistant at a field site in Uganda. This e-mail was originally sent on September 23, 2007]

I hope you all are well. Things are going well here. We are getting the hang of the forest, chimp identification, and data collection. The research is hard work but it’s great once we finally track down the chimps and are able to collect data. The recent excitement has been that the males, who mysteriously disappear for weeks at a time, have returned. Two days ago we saw them for the first time. It’s been much easier to locate the chimps now that the males are back. Not surprisingly, they cause a lot of ruckus and vocalize like crazy and create general chaos. We strongly suspect that they were hunting black-and-white colobus monkeys yesterday, but we couldn’t see them when the incident occurred. The vocalizations from both species made us very curious about it, though. This group definitely hunts on occasion, though, so maybe at some point we’ll be lucky enough to witness it.

Yesterday we saw the males raiding a sugar cane field and dragging bunches of sugar cane back into the forest. There are guards posted along the edges of the fields, but the guard didn’t mind the chimps’ crop raiding because he said they keep baboons away and the baboons are much more destructive. I’m fascinated by the local peoples’ attitudes toward the chimps. Generally they seem pretty respectful of them and those I’ve talked to say in this culture they would never even consider eating one. Baboons are considered to be absolute pests, however.

So aside from the research, things are generally going well. We are in pretty good health so far, with the exception of various minor bug bites, rashes, intestinal distress, etc. There are apparently no mango flies in this area, but I found out firsthand that there are chiggers! Jack extracted one from my foot. There are also poisonous caterpillars which leave big puffy welts and sting for several hours. We’ve each experienced one of those firsthand as well.

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[Editor’s note: This is a reprint of an e-mail from former CHCI graduate student, Maureen McCarthy, originally sent to CHCI faculty, staff, and students on September 11, 2007. Maureen earned her Master of Science degree in Experimental Psychology while working for the chimpanzees at CHCI. In what we hope will be a continuing series of these updates, Maureen describes her current endeavors as a research assistant in Uganda, collecting data on free-living chimpanzees.]

I hope you are all doing well. I am finally moved into the village where we will be living for the next couple months. We were delayed in leaving Kampala because my luggage got lost en route. We think it took a side trip to Nairobi before we met up with it again last Thursday. We left Kampala on Friday and took a bus to Masindi, the nearest city to the research site and my current location. The bus ride lasted from about 8 am to 2 pm and was bumpy but fascinating. Sometimes when the bus stopped people would run up to the windows to sell food and drinks to passengers. At one point, we saw vervet monkeys foraging in trees along the roadside.

Finally we reached Masindi, where a cab driver named Sam was scheduled to pick us up. When we pulled into the second of three stops in Masindi, a man identified himself as Sam so we got off the bus. He asked if we were going to Murchison Falls (a nearby national park and tourist destination), and we said no, we were going to Sonso (the chimp research site in the center of the Budongo Forest). That was the first sign that something was a little off. We started asking him what our names were and where Zinta (our research boss) was, and he said he didn’t know our names and Zinta was in Kampala (not true). A moment later, another man came up to us and showed me a text message on his phone. It was the text Zinta sent him to tell him when/where to pick us up and what our names are. He was the real Sam. What we think happened is that this other cab driver saw Sam in town and figured that he was picking up some muzungus (white people), so he thought he’d go to the bus stop before Sam’s and intercept his business.

We took a cab ride for about another hour on bumpy and partially flooded dirt roads to get to Sonso. Along the way we saw some baboons crop-raiding n a field. Sonso’s camp was really nice. Electricity, hot showers in the evening, water filters for clean drinking water … ah, the luxury! We spent couple days there learning about the data collection procedures with Zinta and meeting the other Budongo researchers. The first evening we were there, there was a going-away party for one of the people there, so we met the whole crew there, ate good food, and watched the Ugandan staff have a dancing competition. It was pretty idyllic. A few chimps even wandered through the edge of camp. I never expected to see my first free-living chimp as I was just standing in the middle of camp. They are so well-habituated there that they don’t seem to pay much attention to human presence. As far as primates go, we also saw blue monkeys, baboons, and black-and-white colobus monkeys there. I can’t even list all the other cool species we’ve seen so far.

The next morning, I awoke the the sound of chimpanzee pant hoots. We got up and went into the forest with Zinta and a field assistant and followed the chimps. It was extremely easy since a huge group was sitting in a tree along the road into camp for the first few hours of the morning. We watched, learned about the data collection procedures and took photos all morning. The following day we went to Masindi to get supplies and finally to our house. The house is meager but we are adjusting. No electricity–instead we have LED lights and candles. There are two bedrooms, a little kitchen area where we can store food, a “shower” room (basically a cement room with a floor drain–no actual shower), and a front room with a dining table. There is a pit latrine outside. We have a very kind field assistant named Joseph and a woman named Prosi who cooks and cleans for us. We also have all sorts of creatures sharing our house with us. There are bats in the rafters, toads (we found one in the house but let it outside because it seemed skinny and food-deprived), geckos, ants and a whole variety of other insects, a colony of wasps outside, a rat we’ve heard but not seen, and three dogs who live outside in the village and have adopted us as their caretakers. Most of this is (believe it or not) just fine and to be expected, but I was more than a little unsettled when I found a baby bat in my bed on the first night. We since learned how to more properly secure the mosquito netting so that nothing, including bats, can get in!

Yesterday was our first day out at our site, Kasokwa. Whereas Sonso is pretty deep in the forest, Kasokwa is a small forest fragment at the edge of the reserve. It’s a little island of forest in the middle of human habitation and development. The chimps are less habituated and we spent all morning with Joseph, Zinta, and Andrea (the manager of the Kasokwa Forest Project) just trying to locate the chimps. This was much harder work than our day at Sonso. We spent much of the day crawling through thick brush and vines in search of the chimps. At one point we heard a chainsaw and the crash of a falling tree. A few minutes later we came upon the loggers with the mahogany tree they had just cut down. This logging is illegal but happens anyway with little enforcement of the laws. After three years of giving the CHCI bushmeat talk and telling people not to buy teak and mahogany, it was pretty surreal to run into it actually happening on Day 1 in the forest. Joseph estimates that there are just a few dozen 100+ year old trees in that forest fragment, and that number will continue to dwindle as people continue to log. It will be difficult to be at Kasokwa and not get depressed about the state of the forest and the tiny group of chimps in it.

Anyway, we eventually located some of the chimps in a distant tree and observed them through binoculars for a little while but we never got any closer and lost them after about 45 min or so. Today is a day off, so we are doing some shopping in Masindi. It is a very rainy day, so most people are staying inside. They think it’s funny to see us muzungus in our rain gear splashing through the puddles with our backpack and supplies.

Now that I am settled in, I will hopefully establish a regular routine for emailing, etc.

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Cleve Hicks, a former graduate student at CHCI, has written a new article to appear on RichardDawkins.net about the newly discovered Bili apes. The chimpanzees are facing new threats from mining and bushmeat. Cleve has given us permission to reprint his article on the Friends of Washoe website.

Read The Bili Apes Are In Trouble! by Cleve Hicks

Learn more about bushmeat, the single biggest threat to chimpanzees in Africa

Read more about The Bili Ape Project, at the Wasmoeth Wildlife Foundation

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With all of the hype of the latest J.K. Rowling book and movie this past July, Lindsay and I thought the chimpanzees needed to be included in on this phenomenon, this prodigy, this boy named Harry Potter! With this idea formulated for our enhanced enrichment, we set out to realize a vision, to charter a journey into the magical world of Harry Potter. Armed only with our Harry Potter obsession and our imaginations we created an epic day, built with our very own muggle hands to bring the magic of Hogwarts to the chimpanzees.

The Chimpanzees would need broomsticks, obviously, to get around this mysterious world, we fashioned Nimbus 2000 Pan troglodytes models for their flying desires.

However, you can’t be a true wizard unless you have your trusty wand! These were provided for any spells they wished to cast. The wands had an applesauce snack hidden inside for their fun day.

In order to recreate the magic of Hogwarts, masterful portraits were hung on the walls and floating candles were suspended all around the grand room. With the Gryffindor emblem emblazoned on our banners and the heroic colors of maroon and gold adorning the enclosure, the East Room was transformed into a magnificent rendition of Hogwarts and the spirit it embodies.

Not only were there broomsticks, wands, portraits and floating candles, but there were snitches, witch hats, scarves, Harry Potter book covers, the whomping willow and fun laboratory experiments which resembled frozen fruit and water in the shape of cups.

But alas! One is never safe in the world of Harry Potter. Lo and behold a Basilisk had slithered its way into the east room and lay sulking in the shadows of the shaky tree ready to strike at any moment! But have no fear, Loulis and Dar promptly destroyed the shredded paper filled Basilisk before it could cause any harm.

With the danger now eliminated, Tatu dug into the candles in an earnest search to see what she could find, only to be showered with more shredded paper (of course she found 1 of the only 2 candles that did not have a marshmallow in it!). Discouraged temporarily, Tatu turned her attention to the yummy fruit hidden in ice. Meanwhile, Dar cast his frozen treat onto the ground in order to get at the fruit inside. Washoe calmly worked on her own fruit cup all the while.

Later in the day somebody found a marshmallow in the floating candles and the marshmallow frenzy began! Everybody was able to enjoy the fun food and enrichment of Harry Potter day. We feel that we were able to sufficiently recreate a magical world for the chimpanzees and include them in the Harry Potter craze. An epic day indeed!

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Music has been a part of my life since I can remember; I began playing the piano at age six, the trumpet at age ten, and the euphonium at fourteen. I was fascinated by the effect music had on me: it calmed me and excited me at the same time; it was a means to express myself that I had never explored.

We wanted to bring some of the magic of music to the chimpanzees – the excitement of sitting in an orchestra pit right before the concert begins, the feeling of awe a child has when he or she sees a musical instrument for the first time, the elegance that surrounds a night at the symphony.

The first step toward creating our “Night at the Symphony” at CHCI was selecting elegant clothes that the chimps could nest with during this special day. My mother had purchased glittery top hats for Dar and Loulis, and we selected two beautiful gowns from the enrichment room for Washoe and Tatu. These were set out on the tire in the East room, with artificial roses around them to simulate those thrown on stage by patrons at the symphony beckoning an encore.

Instruments came next, designed especially for the chimpanzees to interact with! Hallie and I constructed a harp out of cardboard and yarn: the frame was cardboard and the yarn (complete with dried apples tied in) formed the strings! This was put on the wall for the chimpanzees to discover during their morning forage. My father sent some PVC pipe from his workshop and we filled them with beaded necklaces (and a few slices of fresh oranges) to create shakers. To finish off the decorations and preparation, black and white streamers were tied all around the East room and music notes cut out of cardboard were taped all over the walls, wooden platform, and shaky tree!

The chimpanzees seemed to enjoy this day of enrichment thoroughly! Dar and Loulis headed straight for the harp with the dried apples and picked out each one, while Washoe and Tatu set to opening the shakers with the oranges inside. A few boxes of colored water were set around as well for added enrichment and Tatu managed to gather all of them for herself!

Hallie and I had so much fun bringing a magical “Night at the Symphony” to Washoe’s family – judging by the way Washoe and Tatu manipulated those shakers, we just might have some musicians on our hands!

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