Frank finally finds his voice

Frank has always been a troublemaker, from a young age preferring to hang out with his older brother Fred and the bigger boys, you could be sure anyone playing with him would end up getting more than they bargained for. His stocky frame and characteristic swagger are easily recognised especially as he’s the only young male chimp who managed to grow his hair into a mowhawk.. His image was almost complete with a rakish scar he pick up in a recent fight (giving him the temporary nickname of Frankenstein..) but there’s always been one big problem – his voice.

When all the other bigger males answer the distinctive loud long pant hoot call of the alpha male Nick, a chorus of calls echos through the canopy. Chimpanzee communities are rarely all in the same place at the same time, and different groups can be spread out over kilometers of their range. Pant hoots are the long distance vocalisations that the different parties can use to keep track of who is where in the forest and perhaps communicate information about things like where a particularly tasty fig is in fruit. The calls are also group specific, pant hoots from one community sound quite different to those of their neighbours – a useful way for them to keep tabs on each other.

When the Sonso pant hoots are ringing through the trees, as often as not there is one very squeaky little addition: Frank; definitely not doing much for his ‘big-man’ image. Still as he’s growing he’s getting more lung power and this morning when we thought we heard Fred calling it turned out to be Frank. With the last pieces of the puzzle coming together he’s well on his way into adulthood and one of our field-assistants’ top picks for the future alpha male – knowing Frank it’ll be an eventful journey; watch this space..

Kwezi: King for a day.. well for five minutes.. sort of..

No matter how you look at it Kwezi is a mummy’s boy. At 16-years old he should be a fully fledged young adult male and at the point where most chimpanzees have been independent from their mothers for 6-7 years – not Kwezi though, on the rare occasion that he strays out of Kwera’s sight he’s clearly quite anxious to be back lounging about with mum. It’s not as though Kwera is overly protective, if it were up to her the apron strings would have been cut a long time ago! Her other two daughters are bright, active, independent young things, but for some reason Kwezi’s just not ready to fly the family nest. Despite this he’s clearly very keen on trying to act the part of the ‘big man’ in the family, and a couple of days ago when all the bigger boys (and some of the smaller ones that have just decided to grown up a little faster!) were off in the swamp he found himself surrounded by a veritable harem of females. Janie, Kalema, Kutu and Kwera had all decided it was far too hot to travel and they were going to hang out in the shady Mulberry trees around camp – the only other boys around were Kasigwa and Klaus, both little infants more interested in the possibilities for play than in the group social dynamics. Seeing a prize opportunity to strut his stuff Kwezi puffs out his chest, puffs up his hair and stretches out on the path to be groomed by his ‘adoring’ audience of ladies…

Initially fairly tolerant the girls give him the once over but he decides that he’s not getting his full dues and starts to display – slapping the ground, dragging branches, and generally making a nuisance of himself. That, unfortunately for him, is about as far as he got – while all adult and some sub-adult males are normally dominant to the adult females, no-one was convinced by his attempts to pass himself off as a contender. Janie (who’s been known on occasion to send our alpha male packing and certainly wasn’t going to take any nonsense from this upstart teen) promptly turns around, stands her ground and shouts right back at him. Kwera realizes something’s about to go rather wrong for her son and steps in, shaking a sapling and moving between Kwezi and Janie.

Kwera (center) grabs a sapling and intervenes (despite having baby Karibu on her back) - Kwezi is already out of shot...

At this point Kwezi could have a) stepped up and asserted himself with Janie, or b) at least supported his mother who’s doing his job for him, but unfortunately, and true to form, he chooses option c) run away as fast as you can and wait until your mum has it all sorted out for you..

One of these days he’ll make the break from mum but at this point it’s looking more likely that his baby sister Karo is going to leave the family unit first!

DNA collection starts with the Waibira group

Although less glamourous than many people’s idea of what working with wild chimpanzees entails we’re all very excited that we now have our first fecal samples from the Waibira chimpanzees. These samples will allow us to run DNA analysis which will start to let us know, not only how the Waibira chimps fit into the overall scheme of chimpanzee distribution in East Africa, but also how they are related to our Sonso chimpanzees. From the start of the project we’ve seen some very familiar characteristics cropping up – Waibira’s Hamish is the spitting image of Sonso’s Simon, and the Waibira females’ little white beards are very reminiscent of Sonso chimp Rachel’s. Now we have our first sample from the adult Waibira female Arua (mother to the curious little Andrua); she bears a striking resemblance to the recently immigrated Sonso female Oakland – could this be her daughter? sister? Questions about female immigration are notoriously hard to unravel, and while it will take time to get the results through we’re all really looking forward to starting to be able to tease apart the tangle of family relationships that weave their way through our two communities.

It's hard to pose glamourously while holding a tube of chimp feces but Joe does his best..

Ups and downs of Cordia season

We had an amazing start to our new habituation project, with the team making great progress and the chimps becoming more used to and more tolerant of the odd people following them through the trees (and swamps) each day. But it’s been a tough few weeks recently, even the well habituated Sonso community have been in stealth mode, flitting elusively through the forest searching for feeding trees. It should be the Cordia season, with the ripe sticky yellow fruits a chimp favourite, but it seems as though after last years bumper crop the trees left little energy for the next season and the fruits have been pretty sparse. At Sonso the chimps can always turn to their perennial favourite Brusinettia (the Paper Mulberry), planted all around our camp during the sawmill days, but the Waibira South group don’t have that luxury and have been leading our team far and wide chasing after calls that disappear quickly off into the distance. There are other challenges cropping up too, as we start to regularly cover more and more of the new grid the sheer scale of the snare and pit-sawing problems in the areas outside of our main research zone become more and more apparent. Diiro and Biruhanni our hardworking trail cutters and snare removers have been taking up to 60 wires out a day, many of them new, and we regularly encounter new illegal pit-sawing sites – almost all of them Cordia trees which are prized for boat building and taken over to the lake-side villages. It may be no coincidence that the Waibira chimps are struggling to find food in Cordia season.

The human pressure on the forest increases with each year and it’s only through keeping an open and honest dialog with local communities that we can try to instigate programs that will ensure the long-term sustainment of the forest both as a conservation area and a valuable part of the local ecosystem which benefits everyone. Our education team is spreading the word in the villages about the expansion of the research zone and the reasons for why we’re removing the snares we come across, and next week a huge mop up operation is planned with both the entire Sonso snare removal team and many of the members of the ex-hunters group to try and make serious impact on the trap numbers in the forest. We’re hopeful that in the long term, as we’ve seen at Sonso, the number of snare injuries will start to drop in the Waibira community. To end on a positive note we thought we’d introduce a few of the boys to you: the size and scale of the new community still astounds us with new large adult males seen on a regular basis we’re now up to at least 15 independent boys in just a few months! To put it in perspective Sonso has at the most 10, many of which are young adult males just starting to establish themselves. We’ve opted for a Scottish-Ugandan theme with most of the boys being given Scottish names and the girls and their children Ugandan ones, so to start us off here are a few new faces:

Douglas: always easy to spot with his impressive set of whiskers

Tallisker: A huge dominant but calm male - our bet for the alpha

Fiddich - a young male who hangs out with the big boys, possibly orphaned but doing just fine - he's nicknamed Chubby for his sizable belly

Count us in for conservation!

At Sonso we are all too aware of the devastating problem caused by the snares and traps hunters leave in the forest, and the long term disabilities and pain they inflict on individuals ‘lucky’ enough to survive the experience of being snared.

One in three of our adult chimpanzees has a permanent disability caused by snare wires, and for many years now we have run an intensive program of education in the local schools and employed ex-hunters to take snares back out of the forest (see our team page here). This seems to be working and we are seeing fewer and fewer injuries in our community – but we are only one family in one tiny area of forest and there are so many more areas which suffer ever increasing pressure.

The Jane Goodall Institute has launched a new campaign to raise awareness and funding to address the problem of bush-meat hunting in Africa. It’s called ‘Count me in for Conservation‘ and you can read all about it and donate to this great cause at their website here.

Kwezi being groomed by his family, his right hand now fully recovered

In fact if you scroll down to the bottom of their web page you’ll see a familiar Sonso face: Kwezi! One of the first chimpanzees ever to have a snare removed in the wild; it’s thanks to the efforts of the vets from JGI that Kwezi is now a happy and healthy 16 year old male working his way up the ranks of the chimpanzee hierarchy.

So Count us in for Conservation!