Visiting The Relatives

Continuing from the previous post... Why was I going to Gombe?

Well I wanted to pay a visit to some relatives of mine... and yours too for that matter. Gombe is a world renowned site for Chimpanzee research and I wanted to see Chimps "doing their thing" in the wild :)

 

Apparently we share about 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees … which sounds like they are very closely related indeed… until those same geneticists tell you that we also share about 50% of our DNA with one of the Chimps favorite foods… Bananas!... and about 75% with reptiles...So I guess there is quite a bit of room for variation in that 2% difference between us and them J

Gombe national park is the second smallest national park in Tanzania and it is the most expensive entry fee by far… And the reason is that its “market priced”… This is the site of the renowned Chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall who came here in the early 1960s as more or less a naïve researcher and whose observations changed the way we think about primate abilities and how we research them. She still visits the park every year more than 50 years later and there is still valuable Chimp research being conducted at the site. In between there have been ups and downs like the first observations of primates other than humans using tools, and later the collapse of the Chimp population due to human introduced diseases like polio etc.

I stayed at the park two days and had the privilege of seeing the Chimps doing their “tool using” at very close quarters while being pretty much completely ignored by the Chimps… The family group that Ms Goodall researched is still very much intact and some of the young Chimps that she studied in the 70s are still alive today, but there are also 2-3 later generations of their offspring that have never know a world that didn’t have humans constantly following them around and taking notes and pictures and doing other human things. But for the last several decades those human activities have been very non-interactive with the chimps… There is absolutely no feeding or touching or communicating with or manipulating of the Chimps at all and as a result, the Chimps pretty much ignore the humans altogether (quite remarkable when you experience it).

And so the morning after I arrived, I set off up the hill into the jungle with two other tourists and a park guide… And when I say up the hill Im not kidding!  It was a very steep trail and we just kept climbing for about an hour and a half… I was definitely panting pretty hard when we had a couple of short rest breaks J

 

But then the guide, who had been chatting occasionally on his handheld radio, made a couple of load hooting noises and a few seconds later an answering hoot came back from a couple of hundred meters away… There are other people who constantly track the chimps and we were now pretty close to our target. After about another 10 minutes of off-path jungle walking (its dry season now so that means its more like scrub bashing than jungle hiking) we seemingly at random came across a couple of chimps just sitting there quietly in the dry grass in the middle of the hillside. 

 

 

 We tourists deployed cameras of course and took our pictures but the guide seemed to want to move us along and we were told that the main group of Chimps was a little further ahead… So off we trotted and indeed there were about a dozen more chimps nearby and also a couple of the field researches too. As we got to them though the chimps moved slowly off so all the people moved off too and we just followed along.

 

 

 

 

We moved along for another 10 or 15 minutes (thankfully mostly across and down rather than up!) And the chimps sometimes went through the bush and other times on the path we were using, and they were not at all a tight group but rather were randomly spread out in all directions. To the point where you would be walking along the narrow trail trying to not slip over as you followed the person ahead and then someone a few people back behind you would say “stand aside” as one of the chimps toward the rear would decide to use the path and would brush quietly by all of us people as he moved forward.

 

Anyway, after a while the chimps found a brown ant nest and proceeded to demonstrate their use of tools :)

 

The whole group stopped and we sat a few meters away and watched for the next hour or so as half a dozen of them used sticks to poke into the ant hole and repeatedly pulled out big loads of ants clinging to the sticks and gobbled them up happily. Each chimp had a slightly different technique and it was very interesting to see the differences… and I felt very privileged to be sitting so close at hand while or nearest relatives demonstrated their cognitive powers! J

 

 Chimp "using a tool" ... cool .

Angry brown ants... not to be trifled with... They have a very nasty bite.

 

 

  

mmm delicious... Apparently the ants have the equivalent nutritional value as wild meat (low fat)... So ant fishing is well worth while from the energy budget point of view. 

And after an hour or so we had spent enough time with the chimps and we headed off down the hill to the lake shore and back home… all of us tourists really feeling quite pooped from the heat and the hard climb… Our exertions were thence compensated by a very pleasant swim in then warm waters of the lake and a couple of beers while we lay and sunned our pallid bodies on the pebble beach ... very civilized :)

 

The next day I decided to stay at the park again and went for a hike to a very nice little waterfall a couple of Km away, But the guide just didn’t seem happy unless we went to look at the chimps again, so another hour of bush bashing ensued before the chimps were located again… This time we found them during a rest period and so chimps, researchers, trackers, guides and tourists all lay scattered about the scrubby bush and snoozed in various poses for an hour or so… The only activity was from the baby chimps who cavorted about and tussled with each other seemingly with boundless energy… just like human kids J

Other than their location though the chimps didn’t seem to have made much progress… you know, they hadn’t invented sliced bread or a rocket ship or a preferential voting system, or laws of thermodynamics or anything really… I was a bit disappointed tho I suppose I shouldn’t be… they are entitled to take their time I suppose… by all accounts, we humans are taking our own sweet time to work out how to “get along”, and North Americans are still horrifically scared of the preferential voting system for no reason that I can fathom!  J

And on that note, I think its very interesting to note a few things about chimps that I don’t think most people know… Point one is that even though the chimps are very social and affectionate within their family groups, they do NOT share with each other (except for mothers with their babies). And though they are mostly very non-violent within their group, they are extremely violent toward other groups of chimpanzees. And we like to think of them as vegetarian but they are in fact actively omnivorous and are very frequent and effective hunters of animals… In dry season here they hunt and eat other monkeys (tear them limb from limb!) every other day or so… They hunt in a group to trap the monkeys and catch small groups (not just singular animals) and they will hunt wild pigs (the piglets) and other animals too… And it may just be me but on the whole, that sounds amazingly like humans to me… friendly to their own group and very violent to externals as well as very poor sharing skills …and ruthless hunting/foraging… Interesting!

  

 

 

 

 

 

They really did get close enough to pet, but that is strictly forbidden... no "interaction" allowed!

 

Picture of a chimp "nest"... They often build a nest of leaves in the canopy for their mid day snooze. 

 

And after the mid-day snooze, the chimps slowly awakened and moved off into the bush to go hunting for more food… We followed for a while but then decided wed had enough and headed back home once again (for more swimming and beers and sun bathing).

And the next morning I headed back to Kigoma… Though I decided that Id had enough of the slow boat and I paid my share of the ride for the Parks boat back to town… money well spent I felt, though Im still left with a very unpleasant ride through the dust to get back to Moshi!

Oh well I guess that’s what I bought in on when I decided to go moto-touring through Africa…

Bring it on !  J