Chimpanzee no hair6/24/2023 ![]() The trees, I began to perceive two black silhouettes, then two more onĪn adjacent tree. My back began to ache, and I was losing heart, when Sunday abruptly Someone had flung handfuls of old French banknotes from the sky. Tree bark that seemed to shimmer in the half-light revealed itself, onĬloser inspection, to be covered with hundreds of caterpillars.Īstonishingly beautiful butterflies flitted through the air, as if Tiny frog, the exact color of the leaf on which it sat, hopped away. We stepped carefully over a platoon of army ants on the move. Killing them and turning them into supports for their own exuberant We went farther into the forest, pushing past vines, thorny brambles,Īnd the long, trailing air roots of the strangler figs-those strangeĮpiphytes that drop from above and surround the host trees, eventually New food, to evade the stealthy approach of predators, or to keep theirĭistance from competing chimpanzee groups with whom they are perpetuallyĪt war, they nest every night in a different place. In any case,Ĭhimpanzees have no fixed abode. The trees made it difficult for me to make out anything, and the sweatĭripping down into my eyes did not improve matters. I looked up for nests that they might have made on the top branches, but Over time, these apes had very slowly become accustomed to the presence They were comfortable on the ground with the scientists nearby. Weeks, Wrangham told me, he did not see them at all it was monthsīefore he began tentatively to name them and four years passed before ![]() Of scientists, led by the evolutionary biologist Richard Wrangham, hasīeen observing them intensively for almost thirty years. ![]() Would not run away from us, as apes in the wild ordinarily would. The localĬhimpanzees, called the Kanyawara group, after the nearest village, Sunday assured me, and we would almost certainly find them. Kibale Chimpanzee Project, had seen them nest near here last night, Researchers from the scientific field station where I was staying, the Lived somewhere in this part of Uganda’s enormous Kibale National Park. Had already walked for almost an hour in search of the chimpanzees that On an uncomfortably hot and humid February morning, the evolutionaryīiologist Melissa Emery Thompson, the field assistant John Sunday, and I
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