Scientific American
Maureen McCarthy
September 9, 2013 8:58 AM
This is our last week of data collection. It was supposed to be a laid-back week to collect a few more samples and enjoy a few final days tracking chimpanzees, a fieldwork victory lap of sorts. It didn’t turn out as I’d hoped, though. Instead, things went very, very wrong.
On Tuesday, we ventured back to a forest reserve south of the Budongo Forest. It’s one we’ve visited numerous times before…a much larger forest than most we visit, one which helps functionally connect the fragmented forests of this corridor region to the much larger Budongo Forest to the north. On the surface, chimpanzees here have a good habitat compared to our friends to the south in most forest fragments I’ve been studying. A closer look, however, reveals an abundance of illegal logging and snare hunting sites within the forest. Though snare hunting is illegal, it is a leading cause of injury and death among chimpanzees in Uganda. Up to one third of chimpanzees in forests of Western Uganda have sustained snare injuries (Reynolds, 2005; Wrangham and Goldberg, 1997; Wrangham and Mugume, 2000).
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