The Return of the Males
[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.