The wild chimpanzees of the Budongo Forest Uganda

Vernon Reynolds

Readers will know me (Vernon Reynolds) as the Hon. Treasurer of PACE. Here I’m wearing my other hat, as head of the Budongo Forest Project.

My wife Frankie and I first studied the Budongo chimps in 1962! We spent a year in Uganda and having found a good forest site we tracked and watched wild chimps every day we could find them. After that experience, the thought of returning was always at the back of my mind. In 1998 I had a letter from Shirley McGreal of IPPL in which she enclosed a cutting from the New Vision, the Ugandan newspaper. This cutting described how chimpanzee mothers in Budongo Forest were being shot and their infants taken off to the airport at Entebbe, put on planes and sold to rich people in Dubai and other places. Almost immediately I decided to make a big effort to return to Budongo and set up a project to protect these, ‘our’ chimps.

So, in 1990 I finally got back to Budongo together with a Ugandan zoologist Chris Bakuneeta who helped me find my way around. At that time Uganda was still in a dreadful state after two civil wars. We went looking for chimps in the forest. Within a few days we heard and got a glimpse of a female with her young. When I got back to England I started writing begging letters for funds. I was lucky. The Jane Goodall Institute gave me a grant which enabled me to pay Chris a small salary and so in late 1990 he immediately set to work. We took on six trail cutters to make it easier to move through the forest, and six field assistants whose job was to go into the forest every day, find chimps, follow them, and try to identify them by any special characteristics they might have, such as a cut ear, or a spot on the face, or – in some cases – by an injured hand or foot caused by an encounter with a snare. Once our guys had identified a chimp they gave it a name and very soon we had a dozen named chimps.

Over the years our project, the Budongo Forest Project, has gone from strength to strength. We got additional funding, we were joined by Andy Plumptre as co-director, and we started to attract students who came out to Budongo for six months or a year, usually doing research for masters or doctoral degrees. My wife, son and daughter all came out to see what was going on, and each of them helped develop the project.

The chimps

By 1992 we had named 8 adult males (Kikunku, Maani, Magosi, Bwoya, Mukono, Muga, Nkojo and Tinka) and 12 adult females (Kutu, Kwera, Mukwano, Bwera, Matoke, Kalema, Kewaya, Kigere, Zana, Ruda, Ruhara and Zimba). Also we had named three young chimps (Zesta, Vita and Jogo). 23 chimps in all. By 1995 the number of chimps we had named and recognised had risen to 50, including the female Nambi (see photo). Then it tailed off and we didn’t find any new ones for several years. We had therefore recognised all the members of our community. We decided to call our community the Sonso community after the local river.

Nambi

After 2000 our community started to increase in size as a result of immigration from other communities. Today we have 83 individuals in the Sonso community, the largest it’s ever been. We think the reason for the immigration is at least partly that we offer protection from the poachers who come into the forest. These consist of illegal loggers who cut down valuable mahogany trees, damaging the forest and disturbing the chimps.

Our director these days is Fred Babweteera, a Ugandan with degrees from Makerere University in Kampala and Oxford University here in the UK. He is a forester and takes a major interest in conservation of the forest and its chimps, education of the local population, removal of snares from the forest, liaison with the National Forest Authority in Kampala and with local forest officers. We also have an excellent director of research, Klaus Zuberbuhler, who is based at St Andrews University in Scotland and visits the project whenever he can. We continue to get students from all over the world. Our funding, which has come from various sources over the years, today comes mainly from Edinburgh Zoo, with some additional funding from Oakland Zoo and other sources including the village of Alfriston in East Sussex where I now live. We are constantly grateful to all these good people for their support.

The future

What does the future hold for Budongo and for its chimpanzees? I wish I could be entirely positive but such is not the case. There has been a human population explosion in our part of Uganda, brought about by the presence of a large sugarcane plantation just to the south of Budongo. People come from far and wide seeking work there, and when they arrive they look for a patch of land to plant crops and build a mud and straw house. Suitable land is mostly occupied already, so they often chip away at the forest edge, a process known as encroachment. Second, they see the forest as a source of meat, so they set snares hoping to catch a duiker or a pig. Unfortunately, some of our chimpanzees have got their hands or feet caught in these snares and have suffered serious injuries, or death, as a result. We do remove snares from the forest and we explain to people we are trying to conserve the chimps, not deny them their meat. It’s a tough battle to convince them, and snares are still placed in the forest where people hope we won’t find them.

I myself go out to Budongo each year and my favourite activity is walking in the forest behind a group of chimps, feeling that they are safer because of our project. Indeed it seems they are coming to realise this themselves. Long live the chimps!

Vernon Reynolds

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