What a day!

Today was incredible!

Years of dreaming finally came true when I saw my first ever wild chimpanzees, and it was even better than I had imagined.

While almost every account you will read of chimpanzee encounters will tell you that the easily distinguishable calls of the chimpanzees were heard long before the chimpanzees were seen this was not the case for my first chimpanzee sighting.

Our first sign that our quarry was close by came when Edson first spotted a chimpanzee nest in above the trail. Chimpanzees build leafy beds, or nests, each night and so fresh one indicated that a chimpanzee had slept nearby. When I scanned the trees around the nest I was delighted to find not one, but two bulky black shapes in the canopy above me. They were sat munching on fruit, the only sound they made being the crashes of discarded fruit parts falling to the forest floor.

My brilliant and much-treasured binoculars allowed me to get a closer view of the chimpanzees and as I focussed on the face of one I was struck by how human the gaze was that returned mine. Watching those chimpanzees eating and moving around in the tree-tops for the first time was an incredible experience and one that I am sure I will never forget.

Sadly our joy at being able to observe the chimpanzees was short-lived as some noisy tourists caused them to take fright and quickly move out of view with much screaming and hooting. Damn tourists!

What followed was a frantic and exhausting attempt to relocate the chimpanzees. This involoved a great deal of forcing through, often thorn-laden, vegetation, clambering over and under branches and scrabbling up steep slopes. Sadly this chase was not successful.

However, we did find other things of interest along the way as we followed the trail of the chimpanzees, which at least made our off-trail exertions of some use.

First we stumbled upon a chimpanzee skeleton. It was a massive stroke of luck to find such a complete skeleton in the niddle of the forest and we were immediately keen to collect all the bones we could find. It looks like Duncan and myself will spend much of our free time in the next few weeks getting a hands-on lesson in chimpanzee anatomy as we attempt to reassemble the skeleton.

We also happened upon an Acacia tree with large strips of back on the floor beneath it, these having been ripped from the branches above. The Semliki chimpanzees are know to strip bark and chew bark wadss on occasion, and as Duncan is working on a project that aims to find out why they do so, this was useful evidence.

Now that we’d found a tree that had clearly been subject to chimpanzee bark-stripping the problem was how to get clear photographic evidence of this and samples from close to the sites of stripping for later analysis.

It was here that a childhood spent terrifying my mum by climbing every climbing frame, tree and cliff available came in handy, as I took it upon myself to clamber up the tree and get the necessary photographs and samples.

The twenty foot or so high climb was strenuous but easily manageable providing I put my trust in what I hoped was a very strong vine hanging down beside it. It turned out that the vine was indeed strong and I got to the top branches without too much difficulty. Having collected the necessary data I had a moment to enjoy my amazing bird’s eye view before descending safely to the ground.

All in all, today was fantastic and I hope that there will be many more like it to come!

Written on Monday 12^th July