This is the fourth in a series of posts featuring photographs
taken during our trip to Botswana and Uganda in August 2021. 

Chimpanzee habituation

Kibale National Park in western Uganda is home to a large population of chimpanzees, and they offer guided chimpanzee experiences to tourists. When I made our booking, there were two options: tracking, which allows you one hour with the chimps, and habituation, which allows you two hours. The habituation experience was twice as long and only slightly more expensive, so naturally I opted for that. Mistake.

Our chimpanzee habituation guide was Prossy, who has worked in the park for six years. It was just the three of us — Craig and Prossy and me — so she gave us a brief orientation and then led us off into the jungle. We walked and walked, listening in vain for the chimpanzees. Early on, I slipped on the stick that was serving as a makeshift bridge over a stream, stepped into water above my ankles, and thus ensured that my socks and shoes would be wet and squelchy for the rest of the day. (Happily, I was wearing my wool socks, so it wasn’t too bad.)

We heard lots of birds as we walked, and Prossy identified a few of their songs for us. I was excited to spot a great blue turaco high in the canopy, though not nearly close enough for a photo, alas. (I took this picture at our lodge in Kibale.)

After perhaps an hour of walking, we — and by “we” I mean Prossy — finally discovered three chimpanzees high up in the trees. And that’s when my mistake became obvious. The habituation process is designed to accustom groups of chimps to the presence of humans, so we never got at all close to the animals, who remained high in their trees, eating palm fruits, grooming one another, and occasionally shrieking to others farther off. Take a listen:

Our job was to stand under the trees, craning our necks and listening to the chimps, while they ignored us. On the plus side, Prossy was great at showing me where to stand to get the best shots of the chimps.

After about two hours of this, our feet hurt and it had started to rain, so Craig petitioned to head back — and I didn’t take much persuading. On the return walk, Prossy noted disapprovingly that we hadn’t asked any questions about the chimps. (We thought we were supposed to keep quiet!) But when we showed interest, she proceeded to tell us quite a lot about their daily activities (call, eat, groom, rest, move, repeat…), their fierce behavior to babies not born of their group (kill and eat), and their diet (leaves, fruit, and sometimes meat — chiefly black-and-white colobus monkeys, see below).

Monkey business

Kibale National Park is home not only to chimpanzees but to twelve other primate species, including several rare monkeys. On that wet afternoon after our chimpanzee walk, we were scheduled for a “swamp walk,” but we were tired and didn’t feel like doing anything more that day. Hassan, however, insisted that this was an activity we shouldn’t miss — and he promised us monkeys — so we gave in to his persuasion.

Joann was our guide on this nature walk, which did in fact cross a bit of swamp. She has made a study of local medicinal plants, and she explained how they are used in traditional remedies for various common ailments. A lot of what she told us was intriguing, but I was dubious about some of her claims. For example, she said that to call back a wandering husband, you have only to cast a dried fern frond into the wind at sunrise. Hmm.

Joann was great at spotting monkeys as well as medicinal plants. All the monkeys were high up in the treetops, and it took a good eye to pick them out from the foliage. She pointed out several kinds — red-tailed monkeys, also known as white-nosed or heart-faced monkeys; black-and-white colobus; red colobus, which are dangerous when drunk from eating fermented fruit; and vervet monkeys, which we had also seen in Botswana.

Earlier in the trip, we saw quite a few pata monkeys in Murchison Falls National Park. In contrast to the rainforest in Kibale, the terrain there is open grassland with scattered trees and bushes, which pata monkeys prefer. They can run up to thirty-five miles an hour, making them the fastest primates and allowing them to make a quick escape when danger threatens.

This cheeky vervet monkey was hanging around the lodge at Camp Moremi (Botswana), while the staff set out an array of cakes and fruits for afternoon tea. Before anyone could shoo him away, he managed to jump down onto the table, steal a banana, and then scamper back up the tree to enjoy his prize.

Here he is plotting his caper. (Notice that his tail is so long I didn’t get all of it into the picture!)

And here he is again, after feasting on the fruit of his labor.

Brazen Baboons

We had two very different experiences with baboons. In Botswana, the lanky chacma baboons were quite timid, getting up and moving hastily away whenever they noticed us. As a consequence, most of my photographs are of their disappearing behinds! (The above is a composite made from two images, so that both mama and baby are looking in my direction.)

In Kibale National Park in Uganda, it was common to see olive baboons sitting in the roadway calmly grooming one another or perhaps enjoying a banana that had fallen off the back of a truck or just hanging out. They were lackadaisical in getting up to move out of the way of cars, which were frequently traveling quite fast, and I was anxious every time we spotted a troop, lest one of them be hit. But I never saw any evidence of that, so perhaps my fears were in vain.

I was trying to get some photos of these baboons, which were extra fluffy, due to the cool, damp climate in which they live. Hassan obligingly stopped the van, and this big fellow leapt onto the guardrail and came right up to my window, staring at me as I snapped this shot — and then hastily closed the window. I didn’t want him climbing into the van to join us, and he looked like he was considering it!

The greatest apes

I have already written at length about our days of gorilla tracking (link below). But here are a few individual pictures, all of which were taken in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park, in Uganda.

• Primate Watching in Uganda
• The 13 Primates of Kibale National Park
• Kate Wong: Tiny Genetic Differences between Humans and Other Primates Pervade the Genome (Scientific American, 1 September 2014; accessed 11/28/21)
• Uganda Gorilla Safaris – The Real Inside Story (Passport & Pixels Blog, 28 December 2018)

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• Tracking mountain gorillas in Uganda
• Gorilla tracking, day 2
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