Our camp has garnered two permanent residents in the last month.  It’s uncommon for any  baboon to live outside a group for any amount of time, but Shirati and Shamba both have found a home here (perhaps for slightly different reasons) and they have certainly made camp life more interesting.

We’ve discussed Shirati before: old, gangly dude, kind of shriveled, kind of pathetic.  Well Shirati, seemingly finished with the itinerant wanderings of your typical baboon troop, showed up one day and never left.  No matter what group is in camp Shirati pretends to be part of it, and if there is no group he just sits forlornly by himself picking at the grass.  I see him out my window every morning, sloping by in his bedraggled way and I offer him a sunny, “Good morning!” which he invariably ignores.  At lunch time he likes to sit outside Shukuru’s house (Shukuru cleans up around the offices and lives in the main part of camp with her adorable daughter, Shamila, who is my best friend) watching her dish up food and grunting softly.  In baboon speak, these are affiliative grunts, sweet little “aren’t we buddies?” grunts.  It’s like Shirati’s begging.  It makes me want to give him a hamburger and a hug.

Every day I see Shirati, he looks more and more unkempt.  His hair, already thin, has completely evacuated his right shoulder, causing most people to wonder if he’s sick.  But the fact that he’s looked more or less like this since I met him in January suggests it’s all part of his old man decline.  He’s balding and retired and if he were a human, he’d play shuffleboard on the weekends and nap during reruns on the GameShow Channel.  But for now he’s a sad little fixture in camp, pitied by most, ignored by the rest, patiently waiting to die.

Not so for Shamba.  Shamba was born in DC (the main camp troop) but transferred next door to DA, where he wreaked general havoc for several years.  He’s the first baboon I heard horror stories about from the guys as we traipsed past DA on our way to find BA, swinging a wide arc around him because, in the past, he’d been known to pick fights with researchers.  Well, for some reason Shamba has decided to return to his roots, group living be damned.

Our first encounter with him was about three weeks ago when Ashura bustled inside quickly to get some eggs.  Thinking she’d be out of the kitchen for 20 seconds at most, she didn’t latch the door (our kitchen is a separately little building next to our house).  But then, opening the flat of eggs, she cut herself and while I was fetching a bandaid, Shamba snuck into the kitchen and started to go to town.  Ashura rushed out to confront him, swinging the door wide and chucking a stone.  Shamba lunged at her and I was pretty sure she was a goner, but she managed to leap back.  Then she grabbed a broom and actually went into the kitchen WITH him.  I stood in the window, frozen in awe of what I saw as blatant stupidity.  But Ashura, luckily, succeeded in sweeping Shamba out of the kitchen, an avocado clamped in his jaws and we all high-fived over the fact that no one died.  Half an hour later Shamba charged Carson (another researcher) as she came out of the bathroom (also a separate building) and she locked herself inside, calling my name for several minutes (I was watching TV).  But this was a fluke we decided.  When he came around again we made sure the doors were latched and he eventually moved on.

Then this last week stories began surfacing of a big male baboon who was charging children and adults when no food was in sight.  In general, baboons don’t do this.  If you have food on you, your chances of escaping are indirectly proportional to how gutsy the baboon is (females aren’t really a concern…they rely on wits rather than brute strength), but foodless, you shouldn’t be a target.  Well, no one told Shamba.  TANAPA (Tanzania National Parks) wanted to have a meeting about what to do about this baboon and how to determine who it was (my expertise was called on).  While decisions were being made, Kara (another fellow researcher) was given a good ol’ fashioned stiff-arm threat my Shamba and then, just yesterday, he charged me while I was brushing my teeth (we had a great western standoff where I walked outside to spit, saw him, and we both stared at each other for a solid second or two before he started barreling towards me…I ducked inside quickly and slammed the door…I felt like I was in Jurassic Park).

Then, yesterday afternoon Anton (head baboon researcher) talked with the park warden and she matter-of-factly said, “We’re going to shoot it.”  Anton suggested we dart it and move it instead.  She didn’t see the point.  He argued and explained and finally she told him that it would be shot tomorrow evening so we were welcome to try what we liked before then.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I think Shamba is a total prick.  But shooting him for behavior that is partially learned from people being careless with their food hardly seems fair.  So, a bit wary of what the park warden meant by tomorrow evening (the baboon easily could be shot the next morning or the next week…timelines are tricky here), we hatched a plan to meet at 7:30 this morning to dart Shamba, wrap him in a burlap sack, and boat him as far away as possible before the drugs wore off.  I tossed and turned all night thinking about how this might not go well.

The next morning I got to our meeting spot at 7:28 to find Faridu waiting to tell me, “He’s already gone.”  I thought they’d shot him.  After a bit of conversation, though, it became clear that the vet, Idi, had seen Shamba early, darted him, and zoomed off in a boat to deliver him to his new home far away.  It was very anti-climatic.  I was disappointed.  To comfort myself, though, I chose to believe that a conspiracy was afoot and that they had actually shot him and only pretended to have relocated him.  Or that they had gotten the wrong baboon (none of us baboon people were there to see who they actually darted and carted off).  It might be minorly hilarious if Shamba shows up this afternoon to steal my dinner and some other poor, confused soul is now wandering a distant beach with no idea what hit him.  Minorly hilarious, that is, until Shamba tries to eat my face off again.