2/9/2024 0 Comments Chimpanzee native habitatEventually the chimps grew sufficiently inured to his and Sabiiti’s presence that they tolerated it without responding aggressively, and the pair gathered data for two years. One day they chased McLennan 250 yards but left him unhurt when he fell. Which they did very effectively.” The big males especially: They hooted, drummed on the ground, thrashed vegetation. “Their strategy was to try to intimidate us. “We found out pretty quickly that they didn’t like people inside the forest,” McLennan told me. Some individual chimps-young females, for instance, escaping their fathers and brothers to find new mating possibilities-would move from one small group to another, or even from an isolated group into Budongo or Bugoma, providing some gene flow but as the forest patches shrank and isolation increased, even that modest degree of intermixing became difficult. A total of about 300 chimps lived within that middle zone, finding refuge in the forest patches, venturing out onto croplands for food. Between those two refuges, Budongo and Bugoma, was a mixed landscape of small farms and large sugarcane plantations, with a growing human population and shrinking strips and patches of forest, which had once represented a connecting zone for the two reserve-protected populations and latterly sheltered small resident groups mostly isolated in remnant patches of habitat. He knew that the Budongo Forest Reserve was good habitat containing about 600 chimps and that another forest reserve 50 miles to the southwest, Bugoma, harbored roughly the same number. Why? Because he foresaw the challenges to come for chimpanzees everywhere. McLennan came to Uganda in 2006, as a doctoral student at Oxford Brookes University, in England, to study how chimpanzees adapt their behaviour to living in a human-modified landscape. This phenomenon is not confined to Uganda: It has happened elsewhere in chimp range across Africa, most notoriously at Gombe Stream National Park, famed primatologist Jane Goodall’s study site in Tanzania, where in 2002 an adult male chimp snatched and killed a human baby. Most cases are more ambiguous, involving chimps that are reckless at one fateful moment, not repeated killers. That male, further demonised with the name Saddam, was hunted down and killed soon after his seventh child killing. Of those victims, three children were eviscerated, and some were partly eaten. The police reported that in addition to this survivor with serious injuries, six young children had been killed in the area by chimps.įrom elsewhere in western Uganda come accounts of the same gruesome pattern, played out with variations: one child killed by a chimp on the sugarcane plantation at Kasongoire, in 2005 four chimpanzee attacks on children, with one fatality, near the Budongo Forest Reserve, farther north eight attacks, back in the 1990s, seven of which were probably by a single rogue male chimp, on children from villages bordering Kibale National Park. A posse of local villagers pursued the chimps until they dropped the boy, who had a deep cut on his left leg but was alive. Five weeks later, chimps (maybe the same group, but that’s hard to know) took a one-year-old boy from another garden plot, with his mother nearby, and again retreated to a patch of forest. A crowd of local people, soon joined by police, tracked the chimps to a patch of forest, where the little girl lay dead in a pool of blood and intestines, her gut torn open by chimp fingernails. The mother chased the chimps but then backed off, terrified, and ran to get help. On May 18, a toddler named Maculate Rukundo was seized in a cornfield while her mother worked the crop. Police reports from the town of Muhororo (of which Kyamajaka is a satellite village, containing a few hundred families) describe two chimp-on-child attacks during 2017. The death of Mujuni Semata was no isolated event.
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