(RM) First bonobos

Bonobos

Upon arrival at camp, we were shown the calendar. The bonobos live in a group of almost 30 individuals, travelling generally cohesively throughout the forest that comprises our study site. The daily task of researchers at the camp is to go and find the bonobos, and to observe them throughout the day. In the evening, the bonobos generally make their way to a nesting spot, they make calls to gather the other bonobos, and they make their nests for the night around dusk. The researchers take note of where the nest is, and go home for the night with the knowledge of where to find the group the next morning. ‘Bonobos’ is then written in big red letters on the calendar, with a note numbering the nest site and the initials of who put them to bed in the evening. March had been a good month so far, with lot of red on the calendar.

The bonobos had been put to bed the evening before our arrival, so researchers were out following them around already that morning. They returned shortly after noon, however, because the bonobos had succeeded in evading them after the first hour or two. We all sat down together, discussing bonobos, their behaviour, their feeding habits, their travel routes, and so on. Andrew, the chimpanzee expert, was very interested and excited. He joined the afternoon outing to search for the group again. They were found and put to bed again that night. Andrew saw the bonobos on his first day here!

The days continued to proceed successfully, in terms of following the bonobos and following them to their evening nesting sites. It seemed that everyone in camp had spent at least half a day observing the bonobo group, with several people seeing them almost daily. I got increasingly frustrated that I was always at camp (I am the ‘camp manager,’ after all, and I was very busy learning and executing my various responsibilities.). Eventually, I determined an afternoon that I would be able to abandon camp for a number of hours, and at least go out into the forest. I joined Lambert on his outing to mark the previous night’s nest, which is a standard practice whenever the nest site is known. Lambert is a Congolese man from Lompole who went to university in Kinshasa, speaks very good French, and can identify the various tree species in the forest. He is our top Congolese bonobo worker.

Lambert and I started hiking on the main trail (‘B’) out of camp, with him pointing out the various other trails emanating from it. At the end of B-trail, at just over 6,000m, we checked out the Badzungu campsite, which had been cleaned up earlier that day by one of our workers. Nkuma trail starts there, and we took that in the direction of previous night’s nesting site. About 1,000m down Nkuma, shortly before our turnoff to the Meike-5 trail, Lambert heard a bonobo call. It was several hundred metres off of the trail, however, and we had work to do, marking the nest. We continued on.

Around 700m down the Meike-5 trail, we heard more bonobo calls, this time a larger group. Sensing my interest, Lambert led me off of the trail at around the point where the nesting site had been recorded a few nights before. A few hundred meters into the bush, we determined which tree they were in. The undergrowth was very dense, so it was actually pretty difficult to see the bonobos up there, but we got a few glimpses. We tried to be very quiet, and they didn’t even realise we were beneath them. At one point, though, we had made enough noise and cleared out enough vines and tall leafy things to have a clearer view up, and they saw us! Shriek!

Habituation of bonobos has been going on at this study site since 2002. This has been a very frustrating and laborious process, with the initial reactions to human presence simply being abrupt fleeing. For the first couple of years of habituation, I think the total observation time with the bonobos can be added up to a few hours. Slowly but surely, though, the bonobos have begun to get habituated to our presence. People show up, the bonobos take notice, and now they are less inclined to just hightail it outta there like they used to do. Real behavioural observations are now possible.

As soon as the bonobos noticed Lambert and me, Lambert started ripping the big harmania leaves that surrounded us. The leaves make a distinct tearing sound, and this signal has been used consistently by our research team to alert the bonobo group to our presence. A couple of the bonobos scurried around in the tree, looking intently down at us and making alarm shrieks, while we just stood there ripping leaves as we looked up. Apparently, their habituation level is pretty good, because they quickly went back to what they were doing and let us observe in peace. We switched spots to get a better view, though our distance from them was still about the same: close enough to hear every fart, but just far enough to not get peed on.

My favourite moment of this bonobo habituation day was early on in the observations, when the other group we had heard earlier made its way to join this one. We heard the bonobos approaching in the forest behind us, and Lambert and I got all quiet. We heard the footsteps in the leaves, and soon saw silhouettes. The bonobos approached slowly, and made their way around us. They walked upright through the woods; all I really saw were black silhouettes moving beyond rows of trees. It reminded me of Bigfoot.

We spent the next two hours or so under the bonobo-filled tree. It was a maku tree in fruit, and they bonobos were munching away. The makus look sort of hard, about the size of a big red grape, and in sparse clumps at the end of branches. Not too exciting for the bonobos, as far as food goes, but at least the fruits are plentiful.

For the most part, each of the bonobos remained in their own little spot of the tree, usually in groups of two or three, munching away and interacting with the bonobos they were congregating with. Many of the groups had infants or juveniles, who played around the groups with each other or just with the branches. Some of the juveniles explored the tree in pairs, away from the adults. Every once in a while, some commotion would erupt, of course obscured from view, and a bonobo or two would scamper up or down a branch to a new spot.

After about an hour and a half, some of the bonobos decided that it was time to move on. Mostly, this appeared to be the mature males, or at least the individuals without infants under their charge. They climbed down the tree and prepared to leave, but Lambert insisted that we stay put. The moms remained in the tree for a while with the young, continuing to munch maku fruits and allowing their kids to play some more.

It was another half hour or so by the time the remaining bonobos decided to climb down. That was our cue. We waited until the last mother with infant climbed down, and then we began our chase. Snippers are the tool of choice for clipping through the underbrush and the vines, so we passed swiftly under the maku tree. Bonobos walk very quietly, so it was fairly difficult to follow them; we stopped frequently to listen. Fortunately, they call each other in order to stick together, so we are given regular clues around bedtime as to their whereabouts. We hacked through a few hundred metres of underbrush on the heels of the last few bonobos, and then waited for their calls. Lambert finally snuck closer to the nesting site to take a GPS reading and start marking a path back to a main trail. We had successfully put the bonobo group to bed for the night, and we broke enough branches through the brush so that the location could be found again in the morning.

Upon returning to camp, we spoke with the researchers who had been following the bonobos in the early afternoon. They described when and where the bonobos had evaded them, which was not too far from where we picked them back up. It was fortunate that we had two groups of researchers in the right area of the forest at the time, so that the bonobos’ whereabouts was quickly redetermined.

And so the cycle goes at the LuiKotal research camp, with bonobo nests being visited by researchers first thing in the morning, with bonobos being followed by researchers as much as possible throughout the day, and with researchers putting the bonobos to bed at new nesting sites each evening. The bonobo group is currently moving around in a part of the forest some 8-10km from our camp, so the commute to and from work in the morning is around 1.5 hours of brisk hiking. Average workdays around here see each person who goes into the field walking some 15 to 20 kilometres through the forest.

The routine has been to leave sometime between 3:30 and 4am, in order to be at the nesting site when the bonobos first begin to stir. Nesting sites that are far from established trails take much longer to get to and from. In the evenings, the researchers putting the bonobos to bed often get home between 8 and 8:30pm. Often it is the same person or people with the bonobo group from sunup to sundown, although we have begun taking shifts to make the routine more manageable. The bonobos are also frequently lost during the day, so the afternoon shift gets the dubious task of trying to relocate the group by sundown. It is not always a successful mission, but at least nobody is obliged to leave at 3:30 the next morning in such instances!

Since I am the camp manager, and others within the research team have a lot of experience tracking and observing bonobos, they are generally the ones to seek out the bonobos each day. I have actually only been out on one other bonobo excursion so far, on an afternoon when the group had been lost, in the vain hope of hearing the calls and locating them by sundown. Fortunately, another pair of researchers were doing the same thing a kilometre or two away, and did indeed succeed in nesting the bonobos in the evening. That meant a fairly uneventful evening for us, though, 7km from camp, sitting in the forest attempting to hear bonobo calls in the distance. When the bonobos’ location is unknown, though, this is the method of finding them again. I imagine I’ll be enlisted to do more of this over the coming months as our research team size shrinks and it becomes more difficult to continually monitor the bonobo group’s whereabouts. I’m looking forward to it.

In the meantime, I have learned an incredible amount about the species. Dinner conversation invariably revolves around group dynamics, identifying marks of individuals, feeding habits, evolutionary cost-benefit analyses, fruiting patterns of feeding trees, variations in group size or nesting group size, and so on. I read a book, which I highly recommend, called “Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape,” by Frans de Waal and Frans Lanting. It has excellent photographs of wild and captive bonobos, and discusses much of their behavioural ecology. We continue to learn more about them, here at LuiKotal camp.

I’m glad to be able to contribute to the world’s knowledge of the bonobo.