Make way for “progress”
[Editor’s note: This is the third is a series of e-mail updates from former CHCI graduate student, Maureen McCarthy. Maureen is currently in Uganda studying a small group of free-living chimpanzees in a threatened habitat. The locals have given Maureen the pet name “Akiki” which means “traveler.” Jack, who is working alongside Maureen, is called “Atoki,” which is a type of flower.]
I miss you and hope you are well. Life is going well here. I am in good health and the research is going pretty smoothly. We are locating the chimps each day and collecting data. We collect behavioral data as well as fecal and urine samples. The samples will be examined to determine disease presence and stress hormone levels. Collecting these samples is sometimes an adventure in and of itself. At Sonso, the main Budongo Forest site, often the researchers can stand right beneath the chimps and just catch the samples as they are being created, so to speak. At our site, Kasokwa, we typically see the chimps urinating or defecating from over 40 m away, then have to walk, climb, crawl, or sometimes wade through swamp to the tree the chimps were occupying once they have vacated it. Then it’s an Easter egg hunt of sorts. I remember a primatologist who mentored me as an undergrad telling me how excited she got when she found gorilla dung. (She focused her research on the feeding behavior of gorillas.) I am beginning to understand where she was coming from, although at least we get to collect behavioral data too in addition to the lovely samples.
As I previously mentioned, one of the biggest challenges of the research is trying not to feel a bit hopeless and frustrated on a daily basis. A couple days ago, as we were looking for the chimps, we found a wire snare set on a path in the forest. Wire snares are used to trap small mammals such duikers small deer) and bushpigs, but chimpanzees often get caught in them. They an be severely injured or even killed by the snares. Many animals including chimps die slowly and painfully over days as the result of getting caught in snares. Two of the mere 15 chimps in the group we study are missing limbs from snare hunting. One adult female is missing a hand while another has lost a foot. Imagine trying to climb through the trees or carry an infant when you have lost a hand in a snare. Both females have adapted well, but sometimes move very slowly so as not to fall from the trees. Anyway, we thought we saw the men who set this snare as they walked through the forest about an hour before we stumbled upon it. We searched for more since we were certain they had set more than one trap, and sure enough, our field assistant Joseph found a second trap a short while later. We removed both.
In addition to that, people are building power lines through the forest. It’s utterly maddening. The forest is a very narrow strip, just 50 m wide in some places and 75-100 m wide in many other places. They are clearing a path right down the length of this ridiculously narrow strip to make way for the power lines. As I mentioned previously, the authorities who are supposed to curb snare hunting and logging and protect the forest appear to do little or nothing of the sort. Despite all this, the chimps are resilient and the humans seem to respect them, so this gives us at least a bit of hope…for now. Aside from the research, we are enjoying some great rainy season storms and will spend Independence Day (October 9) with the other researchers at Sonso. Our field assistant is apparently coming down with malaria (yikes) so we may
have some unplanned days off coming up.