Tracking chimps

Each park has its own attraction and the main event at Kibale Forest National Park is tracking chimpanzees in the tropical rain forest. The rangers started habituating the chimps to humans in 1991 by finding them and standing ever closer to them. They don’t feed them or disturb them in any way, but the chimps have apparently come to realize that people are neither predator nor prey and ignore us. We got a late start from the guesthouse in Fort Portal. Despite arriving for breakfast at 6:45, breakfast did not get fully underway until 7:30. Then, after wolfing down pancakes and bacon, the rental 4 wheel drive from Kampala did not start. Thankfully, the people I was with were quite clever, knew to check the starter fuse, turned it upside down- and the car started! We then drove at a breakneck speed, despite all realizing that 8am here doesn’t really mean 8. And when we got there about 8:30, the park ranger told us we were right on time. (The British couple that accompanied our foursome and were well decked out in boots and rain gear did really get there on time, though). We then started walking with Ruth, our Chimpanzee tracker, through the rain forest. The park is almost 800 square kilometers and our goal was to find the trees with chimpanzees. How does one do that? The clues to follow are recent dung, recent nests (they make a nest of branches high up in trees to sleep in every night), knuckle prints in the mud, and- most helpful- their screeches and barks. We saw the dung, nests, and prints but walked for 3 hours without hearing many calls. Even without the chimpanzees, the rain forest is a beautiful and fascinating place. There are a lot of other primates and we saw groups of red-tailed monkeys, collobus, and mangabees. The red-tailed monkeys are the best to watch as they crash around, leaping and swinging from one treetop to the next. The floor of the forest is densely green and there are some flowering/fruit bearing trees (figs and an apple-like huge tree) that the primates feed from and lots of types of fungi. I kept my eyes on the ground while walking most of the time since there are also red ants that can crawl up your legs and bite. (The day before, on a walk between crater lakes, I paused to look at monkeys, and then realized I had a hundred black ants on my shoes, socks, and crawling up my legs. Black ants are horrifying enough and I had strong incentive to avoid the red ones, whose bite is more painful!) I had mentally prepared myself to accept happily that we would not find the chimps- but then we heard the calls! After another 15 minutes of walking we found a group of 7 chimpanzees in two trees- an old male who sat in the same place the entire time we were there, two adult females (one in heat), a younger adult male, and 3 babies. They initially stayed high up. The young male then started edging the female in heat down a tree trunk about 20 feet from us. Once on the ground, with leaps onto each other, shows of strength by the male as he grabbed trees and tried to uproot them, and cacophonous calls, they continued mating (started in the treetops). The babies then made their way to the branches just above us and swung around the vines with each other in the very cute way baby chimps do. The photos are of Ruth and chimps.