Nick and Nora just killed Juliet’s infant baby about 20 minutes ago. Reminds you of how brutal the life of a wild chimp can be. Apparently Juliet left the family for about 2 ½ months (very common) and just resurfaced with an infant, about 4 days old. I guess Nick didn’t get the memo that the gestation period is 9 months for a chimp, so he assumed that the child was not his and therefore should not be part of the group. Nora, a younger female who is currently in estrus, is supposedly the one who initially took the baby away from its mother, then Nick began to kill it, and, to the surprise of all of the primatologists here, Nora took it back and finished it off, hitting it against a tree trunk and tearing it apart. Juliet is understandably completely devastated and supremely angry, and the entire troop is super stressed – I havent heard this much vocalization since I arrived. We tried to recover the carcass but some of the other females apparently are attempting to keep it safe and have taken it with them. It seems different than when this kind of thing usually happens in nature, more personal because the chimps are like children to the people here. They live about as long as us, gestate as long as us, and the people here spend years following and studying them – they are all known by name and each one as a story. It sad to think that this little guy wont.
(the photo is one of Nick that Cat took when the family went off grid to raid the mango orchard in the village)On to a more positive subject, anyone reading this who knows me well at all knows I sleep like a rock. Last night, however, I had a large cup of super yummy coffee after dinner (beans and rice – you would think it gets old but it really doesn’t…) which a year ago would have done nothing to alter my sleep patterns but I guess I just haven’t had caffeine in so long… anyway I was up most of the night and it was actually a really cool experience to listen to the sounds of the forest as the night unfolded. Of course there are the tree hyrax (would you call them dassies here?), whose calls I cannot begin to explain. It sounds like something out of a creepy Steven King novel turned movie. Maybe you can look it up on youtube or something. I’ve actually gotten completely used to them, which I didn’t really think was possible, and I think I’ll be somewhat saddened when I can’t hear them at night. Then of course there are all the bugs, mostly crickets I suppose, but there are so many that it creates a soothing background music to the screams of the hyrax. If I had to pick the genre I would have to say jazz, somewhat erratic with lots of solos. Then every few hours the baboons would wake up for some reason or another and have a little tiff which inevitably ends up with an assumingly large male ‘waoo’ing, kind of like a ‘don’t make me come over there!’, which generally shuts them up. At about 5 am the colobus start, which is what I definitely would have missed if I hadn’t been wide awake wondering what the scratching sound was that was coming from the corner of my room (it was a bat, removed it this morning). Once again, I cant explain it, but it is amazing and Im hoping to record the sound before I leave. It’s a low guttural growlish sound, only it goes up a few notes over the course of about 45 seconds, and whenever one starts, all of the colobus in the forest seem to follow suit, creating this awesome growling orchestra that you can hear from every direction and every distance. I sat in bed smiling to myself at my amazing luck to be where I am for 2 hours listening to this. Towards the end they were joined by the birds, the only one of which I can identify based on its call being the red breasted cuckoo. As the sun started to rise I could hear the children next door laughing and calling to one another as they began collecting water from the rainwater barrels for the day’s use. I really cant think of a better alarm call than laughing children. I wish I could record the whole night of sounds and listen to it every day.
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