I have seen bush pigs before, but they are always running away, so I’ve never gotten a proper sense of just what it is that they are.  Then, a couple days ago while searching for baboons, I saw a fuzzy sort of thing in a jungly bit of forest and crept closer to see if it was a baboon.  It was not.  It was three bush pigs.  And I nearly soiled myself.  Bush pigs are *$%#ing enormous—terrifyingly so—and I was only 10 feet away from a little group snuffling around in the undergrowth.  I backed slowly away and they, being pretty darn blind, must have thought I too was a baboon because they didn’t startle and run the way they normally do.  Once I stopped thinking I was about to be killed (an irrational thought since these ones bolt rather than charge), I managed to get a picture of one.  So, for your slightly blurry viewing pleasure, I present:

Trust me, this sucker is huge. Up to my belly button. At least. Head the size of a small vehicle.

Posted in Tanzania 2012 | No Comments »

(Name that song?)

On occasion we go to town.  This occasion happened to be that Jessica, the other baboon researcher, was going home for a month and I thought I might escort her so we could have a rockin’ night out in the bright night lights of Kigoma.  There was no park boat going into town this time, so we caught the passenger boat.  The passenger boat is a large boat that functions like a city bus, only the stops are anywhere you want it to stop.  You just stand somewhere on a beach and flag it down and it wheels around and picks you up.  Then you climb over 800 other people and, if you are white and therefore clueless, they will usually clear a seat for you because you don’t know what you’re doing and they worry you might die if left to your own devices.  The seats are narrow slats of wood that line the boat and they have a lovely ridge that sits smack in the middle of your hamstring, meaning that not only will you lose all feeling in your legs, you will also likely get a bruise.  Then you settle in because the trip—which is typically 2 hours by park boat—can stretch between 3.5 to 5 hours.  While you sit on the boat, various cargo will be loaded including crates and crates of dead fish, which smell very nice.  Also, you will likely be seated next to a woman with a small child and when you look over at this small child (at least in Jessica’s case) you will find that it has one of your sweatshirt hood strings in its mouth, which it is chewing with great vigor.  Other people sitting around you will mostly stare and occasionally ask you for some of your belongings (and you will politely decline to gift them away), and the men in charge of the boat will all—inexplicably—be wearing 1990s women’s ski parkas.  Or trenchcoats.  Eventually, though, you will be deposited at the north side of town where you can catch a cab to the center.  This go around, the passenger boat took about 4.5 hours and only ran out of gas once.

Once in town, Jessica and I dropped our things at the Jane Goodall Institute office and made a beeline to our favorite sambusa restaurant.  This restaurant advertises itself as an air-conditioned pizzeria.  When you step inside, though, there is no air conditioning.  Ever.  Also, when you sit down you will be handed a menu with all sorts of items listed on it, including pizza, and when you will politely request the chicken and pepper pizza you will invariably be told that they don’t have it.  However, the woman serving you will hear the word “pizza”, say “peeza” back to you, you will nod, and then she will bring your this large fried pastry rectangle that contains a minimal amount of meat and, oddly, a boiled egg.  This, my friends, is pizza in Kigoma.  Of course, I know all of this will happen so I will also order all the sambusa they have left.  Sambusa are just samosas, only they are almost always filled entirely with meat.  And they are awesome.  I also ordered milky tea and accidentally ordered Jessica milky coffee, and we drank and chatted and had a lovely time.

Later, we stopped at one of the resident swanky hotels and ordered a gin and tonic.  The waitress delivered us two bottles of tonic and smiled politely as she walked away.  “Umm, could we have some gin too?” I asked.  Eventually it was delivered (for some reason, we routinely only get half our order, no matter where we go).  We then went and checked in at the High-Tech Hotel, a hotel that is hardly high-tech, but at least they seem to launder the towels between guests (not so much at my past favorite, Aqualodge).  Staying there at the same time were approximately 8 Tanzanian albinos.  For those of you who do not know the plight of people with albinism in Tanzania, prepare yourself for something horrid.  Several people here have gotten it into their minds that the appendages of albinos contain magic and thus these poor people are hunted and quartered by some of their crazed countrymen, intent on getting rich.  These particular albinos were traveling the country as part of an organization called Under the Same Sun to spread awareness and educate people about albinism.

We finished up our town visit with a dinner back at the swanky hotel and ran into a herd of zebras on the way.  I’ve heard people mention these zebras, but I can’t quite recall the story.  I do know, though, that they used to be contained on someone’s property and now they are not, so you can see them roaming around town from time to time, nibbling grass and looking as domesticated as a wild zebra can.  Excited by our encounter, we passed a lovely dinner, drinking cold beer and eating mashed potatoes made with margarine.  Our waiter, who seemed very intent on doing everything correctly (serving from my right side etc.), threw caution to the wind after we paid our bill and suggested one of us might like to marry him.  I told him we were both engaged.  He was skeptical.  I told him everyone our age was engaged in America.  “But perhaps you have other friends that you can tell about me and they will not be engaged?”  I told him I didn’t know anyone of that sort, but that I would do my best to tell all my friends back home that there is a young Tanzanian man named Enock (with a “k”) who is keen to marry a white lady and that they should seriously consider taking him up on his offer.  Then Enock suggested it might be nice if he could come to my wedding.  I told him he was more than welcome if he found himself in the States.  Enock informed me that it would be very expensive, but maybe God would help him find a way.  He then looked at me meaningfully.  I told him I would pray to God to give me a lot of money so that I could fly Enock to the United States so he could come to my wedding and meet my friends and find himself a wife.  Enock gave a high whinny of a giggle at this suggestion and then Jessica and I faked a meeting back at our hotel and said our adieus.

(Our meeting?  Watching Speed while admiring Keanu Reeves acting prowess and eating gummy bears)

Posted in Tanzania 2012 | 2 Comments »

The baboons are always a little knackered in the dry season.

Posted in Tanzania 2012 | No Comments »

Gimli is a cheeky little punk.  Rather small, he trails after his mother, Gremlin, a decrepit old chimp, chronically bored.  To pass the time, then, he has had to create his own fun and his own fun mostly entails harassing baboons.  My baboons.  On several occasions Gimli has chased my target female off into a clump of machaka (thick vines) or up a tree, where I can no longer see her very well.  In the trees, he will hang from one arm, taunting her, shaking branches, and she will scream and fear grin and eventually run away.  If his behavior weren’t so counterproductive, I might actually find it cute.

The other day we had a particular active interaction with Gimli in which he took to harassing various baboons and, when screaming ensued, the males got involved.  Suddenly, the whole baboon troop wasn’t terribly keen on the gregarious little chimp and a kerfuffle rippled through the crowd.  Soon males were giving out aggressive RBGs (rapid broken grunts) with the females punctuating the noise with their own calls, eyebrows were flashing, and hands were sweeping the ground and shaking leaves.  Everybody was running around as if the forest was on fire.  Eventually mayhem ensued in which I could here Gremlin screaming and baboons grunting and a whole lot of running back and forth through thick leaves and I knew that a throw-down was in progress.  Below us a cadre of chimps pant-hooted and beat tree trunks and I worried that a whole slough of male chimps would beeline our way and then a real reckoning would take place.  However, eventually things quieted down and the chimps and baboons seemed to occupy a similar space in relative harmony.  Except for Gimli.

I was following Ulaya at the time.  Ulaya is a recent convert to the ways of womanhood, having started receiving her “monthly visit” (which actually happens every 38 days or so), and thus is all hormones with not a lot of men willing to pay attention (a newly cycling female is not a sexy thing in the baboon world, except maybe to the teenage boys, but mostly because they’ll hump anything).  At the time I hadn’t formed a lot of opinions of Ulaya, but when she was chased by Gimli for the third time, screamed, and then returned back to the spot near him, I began to think she might be a little stupid.  In fact, for half an hour I watched her get chased, freak out, circle around, see Gimli (always with the slight air of surprise), get chased again, and repeat.  I kind of want to kick her by the fourth go-around.

But that’s not the real issue.  The real issue is, what’s up with Gimli?  What’s with all the baboon hullabaloo, the chasing and taunting and incessant pestering?  The short answer is he’s bored.  I mean, he doesn’t have a lot of playmates to be sure.  His little brother Gizmo is a viable candidate, but perhaps not quite as mobile as he’d like.  Also, the baboons just respond so theatrically, screaming and bounding around trees with their tails in the air.  Though his little displays are certainly frustrating from a data standpoint—I lose my baboons for several minutes after he runs them off—Gimli has a thoroughly entertaining gimmick going.  He’s very straight-faced as he approaches his quarry, his brow practically furrowed.  It’s almost as if what he is doing is work, work that requires great concentration.  He does a good job of employing implements around him—tree branches, the railing of a bridge, dry leaves—making the whole chase a serious study in the best way to herd baboons.  In fact, in some ways his repertoire is almost compulsive, like he simply can’t help himself, yet derives little pleasure from the pursuit.  It’s very strange.

My favorite episode, though, occurred in camp a few days ago.  After chasing away all the baboons, Gimli decide to take on a colobus monkey.  Typically, these guys are smaller than baboons and considerably more skittish.  Also, adult male chimps eat their babies, so I can’t see them being super thrilled about hanging around when chimps are present.  Spotting one in a tree, though, Gimli ambled his way over, eventually swinging himself up onto a nearby branch.  And the colobus monkey did the most miraculous thing.  He stood his ground.  Gimli clearly didn’t expect this.  He swung in front of the colobus, all feet and leaves, trying to scare it off.  The colobus swatted back at him, not giving an inch.  Gimli tried again.  The colobus met him tit for tat.  Eventually, Gimli had to admit defeat and parade off after his mother and the colobus, smaller by far, sat silently in his tree watching Gimli go.  I wanted to climb up and give him a high five.

Posted in Tanzania 2012 | No Comments »

Unfortunately, all of you who have diligently studied the recent baboon family trees I published will need to make some alterations.  Yei, a rather nice older baboon, and her little 5-month daughter, Yoani, have died.  It’s not entirely clear what happened to Yei, but I noticed one day that she was very sick, walking with her back arched, a possible symptom of having eaten something bad (i.e. trash, metal, etc.).  We worried about her, but unfortunately there’s not much we could do.  The next day, she was nowhere to be seen.  It was particularly depressing to think about her little baby, still very dependent, stuck with her dead/dying mother.  No matter what, we knew Yoani would not survive without her mother, but it’s a bummer to think about the specifics of it all.  But there is a hero of this story.  Yalimu, Yei’s teenage son, clearly found the distressed infant with his mother’s body and, rather than leaving her, picked her up and carried her for days.  We found him holding Yoani constantly–grooming her, grunting at her–making every effort to protect and care for her.  But, alas, he can’t lactate, and that’s really what Yoani needed most, so she too died.  A sad end for Yei and her clan, but it was nice  to see yet another example of how baboon families–like human families–take care of their own.

Yalimu grooming the weak Yoani

Posted in Tanzania 2012 | No Comments »