IPPL Advisor Vernon Reynolds' New Book

"The Chimpanzees of the Budongo Forest"
August 2005

In the introduction to his new book The Chimpanzees of the Budongo Forest (2005, Oxford University Press), Vernon Reynolds credits IPPL’s Shirley McGreal as the inspiration for his returning to the wilds of Africa in 1990, 27 years after his initial one-year study of Budongo’s wild chimps. Dr. Reynolds, a primatologist and retired professor of biological anthropology at Oxford University, also encouraged Shirley to establish IPPL in 1973 and has been on IPPL’s Board of Advisors ever since.

Dr. Reynolds’ book focuses on the lives of the chimpanzees that comprise the Sonso community (now numbering about 60) in the southern part of the Budongo Forest Reserve in western Uganda. Often an academic primatologist will necessarily concentrate on one particular aspect of the lives of the animals under study: their diet, for instance, or their social behavior. But this book draws on the work of a host of visiting students and researchers at the field site over the past 15 years (including people like Dr. Gladys Kalema, the Ugandan wildlife veterinarian who spoke at IPPL’s 2002 Members’ Meeting) and generates a more complete profile of the animals’ existence.

The chimpanzees of Budongo have never been supplied with food by the researchers, unlike wild chimps at some other field sites. Provisioning, of course, affects the animals’ natural diet, but may also lead to changes in social behavior, as well (higher rates of competitive aggression, for example). So apart from being trailed by various scientists for the last 15 years the Budongo chimps have been able to interact with their natural environment unimpeded. This environment includes selectively logged forest (mahoganies and other valuable timber species had been removed from Budongo for decades), prey animals that are occasionally hunted and eaten by the chimps (including small forest antelopes and various monkeys), and also the native people living nearby, who often unintentionally snag chimps in wire snares that have been set for other animals, like antelopes and pigs (about a quarter of Sonso’s chimps have unfortunately been maimed by these snares, despite the chimps’ residence in a Forest Reserve and the protection afforded them by the constant presence of researchers).

The text is geared toward an intelligent layperson, forgoes academic jargon, and takes care to explain useful concepts like "habituation" and "forest succession." Dr. Reynolds skillfully combines solid research data with many anecdotes from the field, including his own reflections as well as personal communications by others who have made unique observations of rare occurrences. For example, he writes, "I felt sorry for each of our old individuals at Sonso as they got less active. I recall seeing Magosi (who had once been the alpha male) in his latter years, sitting on the trail and looking up into the trees where there was [a] ... female [in heat] with a number of males ... The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak" [p.49]. Or the episode, witnessed by one of the field assistants, of a female chimp who, despite having only one functional hand, successfully gave birth to her first infant, alone and 30 meters high up in a tree. Interestingly, "...her own mother...was not present either during the birth or on the following days. Perhaps she disapproved?" [p. 91]. In addition, each chapter begins with a transcript of some field notes or a personal journal, which give a flavor of daily life in the research camp.

So don’t be alarmed by the academic-sounding name of the publishing house: for people with a serious interest in chimpanzees, the stories will draw you in.

The Chimpanzees of the Budongo Forest is available in the United States from www.amazon.com or in Europe from Oxford University Press (http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-851546-4).