By Vianney Jacob, Guide - Greystoke MahaleTracking chimpanzees in the forest is a unique experience - waiting to hear their calls so that you know the direction to take to.follow them. Sometimes they will tend to be quiet, but that does not mean that they don’t want to disturb the forest….. but that they are busy doing something.
On 15th of March 2009 around 8:00 am, I talked to our trackers in Greystoke and they told me that they have found the chimpanzees and we should start our hike up the mountain. The forest was calm; we could only hear the songs of birds and not the strong voices of chimpanzees. We walked for sometime without hearing their voices, and then saw a group of red colobus moving from branch to branch and from one tree to another. We took our time with them for about 10 minutes watching their abilities of jumping. Then from nowhere a group of chimpanzees came past us and started a hunting technique that was amazing to watch.
We watched a group of big males together - Pimu, Darwin, Alofu and Kalunde with other females who were on the ground trying to make some noise so that they could scare the red colobus while another group of males - Primus, Cadmus, Carter and Fanana and others were hiding on the branches where the red colobus were jumping to. This group ambushed the red colobus and started jumping with them from tree to tree for almost 5 minutes. At this point Pimu thought that they didn’t get any colobus and he started to charge towards other chimps and slapping them.
A few trees from where Pimu was is where Cadmus was hiding, holding a young red colobus in his hand. Quietly he started eating the colobus. Bonobo joined him and he shared a piece of meat with him. Bonobo ate the portion that Cadmus gave him and he started begging for another one. After sometime Cadmus started fighting with Bonobo and he used the tail of the red colobus as a stick to hit Bonobo. Unfortunately then our one hour with them was over and we started our way back down the mountain.
