In October this year, I was out in the forest viewing chimpanzees. It was a tough day to initially locate chimpanzees and we waited in camp for several hours without hearing a word from our trackers who always go ahead earlier in the morning to find chimpanzees and radio through camp when they found them. Around ten in the morning when I was about to propose to do a different activity, I received a word from our trackers that a small group of chimpanzees was located.
We set out toward where they were, soon we received the news. We walked a pretty distance from camp before getting where they were. We found a group of four chimpanzees; Abi and her baby, Darwin and Kalunde. Abi and her baby were in one tree; Darwin and Kalunde were in another tree some distance away. In that same area, there was a small troop of red colobus up in the canopies of tall trees. Repeatedly the colobus gave sui-suiii alarm calls, warning one another of the danger around.
In a canopy of one tree, very close to where Abi was sitting—a red colobus was hiding with a tiny baby. We did not notice, that there was a colobus in that tree--until we saw her trying to escape when Abi was leaping to a canopy she was hiding in it. It appears that Abi had spotted that red colobus long before we got there, and it appeared that she was aiming to grab the baby red colobus clinging to her mother’s belly. Abi, leapt to that red colobus’s hiding site, and grabbed the adult colobus by her neck and tail—and moved her sideways to expose the tiny baby colobus clinging on her mother belly. In that position the baby colobus was grabbed by Abi easily and she ran away with it, leaving the mother red colobus screaming loudly.
That action was quick, well planned and very efficient. The screaming drew attention of Darwin and Kalunde who responded by running toward where the screaming was coming from. When Darwin and Kalunde got there it was too late, Abi had got the baby and had already ran away with it. The mother red colobus, seeing those adult males getting closer to her, she ran away screaming and join other colobus, who by then had started to flee away themselves.
