I suppose I should take a moment to talk about chimpanzees, seeing as they are the real reason anyone comes to Gombe in the first place.  Starting with my first sighting mere hours after I arrived, I have seen a fair number of chimps out in the field and, occasionally, in camp.  They’re somehow bigger than I expected them to be, and seemingly a freaky combination of human and monkey (especially the young ones).  They walk on their knuckles and make all sorts of simian sounds, but they also lounge like fat men at the beach, legs crossed, arms splayed haphazardly.  Their faces convey complex expressions, well beyond the scope of your typical baboon, and their arms look like they were hacked off off a slightly hairier version of your typical muscled Mediterranean man and reattached to a weirdly broad, short torso.  They can also be total pricks.

Usually when we bump into chimpanzees in the forest, it’s a lone female and one or two of her juvenile offspring.  They lumber by us while we give them a wide berth and then continue on their way.  Occasionally, I see them on my own when I have been deposited somewhere by one of the baboon guys and told to wait.  I’ll sit there, idly glancing from tree to tree, as if I might see something, and then a lumbering black thing will appear, and, just like that old superman catch phrase, I’ll think, “It’s a person!  It’s a baboon!  It’s a CHIMP!”  (I never get it on the first go).  Just yesterday I met three males like this, one of whom stopped nearby and sort of stared listlessly off down the path, mouth hanging open, as if he might just be a little bit simple.  I don’t really know any of their names (except Frodo), but their faces are so unique (ranging from intelligent to mean to downright stupid) I can’t help but feel they would be easy to learn (WAAAAY easier than baboons).

More often than not, though, we don’t see them in the forest, instead only hearing them bantering amongst themselves.  Baboons have a range of calls, but they tend to be short and sweet: a bark, a geck (which sounds just like you read it), a “wahoo”, a grunt.  The males do have a slightly longer call that sort of sounds like they are trying to plumb the depths of their vocal register, their voices going deeper and deeper and deeper with each grunt, the grunts themselves spreading out like they’re being projected by a dying tape player.  But baboons are basically no frills.  Chimps, on the other hand, spend a lot of time screaming and hooting, one call in particular sounding nothing short of orgasmic (my juvenile self still finds these incredibly amusing when I hear them…hearing Jane Goodall do one only makes me twitter more).  The males also punctuate their screams with occasionally tree pounding that we can hear over a kilometer away.  It’s all very dramatic.

My most recent run in with chimps though has been Frodo.  Frodo is kind of famous worldwide (any Jane-o-phile will know his name and his stats) and the jerk seems to know it.  He was the alpha some time back and apparently quite a brute, attacking females viciously and even going after researchers and tourists when the mood struck.  When he approached us in the forest the other day, Faridu plucked at my elbow and pulled me to higher ground to steer very, very clear of his highness.  “Yeye ni mbaya sana, ” he said.  (“He is very bad.”)  Well, today he passed my laundry drying on the beach where Ashura left it.  One researcher came to my door to warn me while another stood guard, trying to create a barrier between my clothes and the passing chimps (there were about 20…kind of a rare sight).  I got down there in what seemed the nick of time and began collecting my socks and pants and shirts, when Frodo saunters by and, without breaking stride, non-challantly cranes his neck downward ever so slightly and grabs one of my shirts in his mouth.  Of course, I expect the researchers to do something.  A baboon would have been more surreptitious.  A baboon also would likely have had a stone thrown at it.  But Frodo just saunters away, trailing my shirt like a blanky, clearly having taken it just because he can.  I follow him and the other researchers for a bit and watch him suck and chew on my shirt (one of the new ones my mother sent me…sorry, Mom), hoping he’ll lose interest.  Eventually, he does and drops the shirt.  Of course, then another chimps picks it up and over the course of the next fifteen minutes I see various chimps take a turn with my shirt, sucking and chewing it.  Soon I decide that maybe I don’t want my shirt back anyway and trudge home.  Stupid chimps.