By Kakae Saiteu, Guide - Greystoke Mahale.
From January all through to April is a time when chimpanzees’ foods, mostly fruits, are quite scarce. At this time of the year they tend not to vocalize, unlike from June through to December when food is in abundance. This sort of behaviour ensures that individuals, and their close relatives, have enough food before attracting the attention of other distantly related individuals. At this time of the year chimpanzees tend to live and walk in smaller groups of family members or few friends.
Vocalizing normally is a sign for alerting and summoning individuals. It is considered a lucky day, at this time of the year, to hear them vocalizing - there could be a female in estrus accompanied by several males; or several families or friends may have coincidently met and got excited. Since vocalization (normally an easy way for locating chimpanzees) is not reliable at this time of year, trackers and guides more than ever use animal’s signs such as tracks, feces and fruit peels or freshly eaten fruits to locate the chimpanzees.
To increase the chances of picking up some of these signs involves visiting sites, named ‘gardens’, where there are plants in fruit or whose leaves are eaten as food by chimpanzees. At these sites there is a chance of finding individuals grooming, if it is late morning, and others relishing on the fruits and leaves available such as the fruits
of the Cordia plant, the wild grapeand so forth, which are less favoured from June through to December when fruits are in abundance.
Picture by Giselle Lucches.
Acadia, a sub-adult female, on a tree’s branch at one of the “Garden sites” feeding on mature wild grape fruits, while a few other individuals are grooming on the ground nearby.
