Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Good News, Bad News in Uganda

2006; Wiley; Volume: 20; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1523-1739.2006.00549_4.x

1523-1739

Michael P. Ghiglieri,

Primate Behavior and Ecology

The Chimpanzees of the Budongo Forest. Ecology, Behavior, and Conservation . V. Reynolds 2005 . Oxford University Press , Oxford , United Kingdom . 310 ( 297 + xiii ) pp . $59.50 (paperback) . ISBN 0-19-851546-4 . It should not come as news to anyone these days that the surviving ecosystems (and partial ecosystems) of this planet have become small islands surrounded by vast oceans of anthropogenic habitat. But the exemplary job Vernon Reynolds has done with his The Chimpanzees of Budongo Forest: Ecology, Behavior, and Conservation seems to illustrate this reality as if for the first time. Reynolds, an anthropologist by training, spent almost a year in this western Ugandan forest reserve in 1962. He returned in 1990 to find it changed. The 435-km2 forest is now surrounded by people of several tribes, cultures, and language groups. Collectively the head count is doubling every 25 years. Their sheer numbers tend to bleed life out of the forest as people chip away at the Budongo Forest periphery. Newcomers have planted commercial crops right up against the forest boundary to create a monospecific and forbidden extension of the forest itself—but one highly attractive to many local mammals. These crops—sugar cane is the primary one—attract nearly every species of primate as well as duikers and bushpigs. All of these animals must run the gamut of snares and even waiting crop guards who have speared chimps and, in other cases, intentionally burned to death an entire matriarchial family by igniting an encircling fire to surround and kill feeding chimps. The 2000 elephants who seasonally used the forest in the 1960s, when Budongo had not yet been severed by crop lands from the Murchison Falls National Park ecological region, are all gone today. The ecosystem services these proboscidians once provided (e.g., seed dispersal, thinning of saplings, local fertilization, and so on) have yet to be replaced. But an estimated 584 to 639 chimps remain in this forest (of the 5000 or so in Uganda, the nation with the most chimpanzees). Budongo was once valued strictly for its stands of mahogany (which only regenerate naturally) to the point where forestry officials sanctioned shooting the elephants to prevent their damaging the trees and of conducting mass arboriciding of noncommercial trees as “weed” species to make more space for mahoganies. The apes are Reynolds' first love. His focus on 48 to 62 chimps of the Sonso Community, a group never provisioned with food to habituate them, is acute ecologically and socially. The Budongo apes exhibit many of the behaviors made famous by chimps in Gombe and Mahale Mountains in Tanzania, Kibale Forest in Uganda, and the Tai Forest in Cote de'Ivoire. These include intercommunity male–male battles, infanticide, hunting monkeys and duikers, social bonding, fusion–fission party sizes, patterns of female exogamy, alliance formation between males, feeding ecology, food calling, cultural transmission, and so on. A few of his more unique observations include a male scavenging an infant blue monkey killed by an adult male monkey and his investigations of the physiology of feeding and reproduction. Not only do the apes take from the forest, they also give back to it. One discovery Reynolds and his colleagues made is that apes may be the sole seed dispersers of some trees. Cordia millenii, a large, emergent tree whose wood makes the best dugout canoes. On the flip side of these natural behaviors, the apes must navigate wire poaching snares every day of their lives. “At any one time about one quarter of our Sonso chimpanzees are suffering from the effects of having been caught in snares. They have missing hands, feet, or are crippled and have to struggle to climb trees and feed themselves.” One of the conservation tools used in Budongo is the systematic sampling of local peoples' attitudes, values, beliefs, and practices regarding the forest and its denizens. The data from these surveys refines specific directions for educational programs and efforts at enforcing existing laws. They also yield a few surprises. For example, 90% of people surveyed want to keep the forest as a forest and destroy none of it. Sixty-five percent thought chimps were harmless and should be protected, 8.2% also considered them very promising potential servants to help with drudgery work. Reynolds offers us a “good news, bad news” set of contrasts on what is being done today in Budongo to rescue its integrity as a functioning ecosystem versus what is going wrong as the burgeoning multitudes of poverty-level villagers hunt, trap, pit saw, and otherwise harvest the forest's bounty. Although my review may paint too bleak a picture of the detrimental human impacts in Budongo, Reynolds' book actually delivers a message of hope. Nowhere is he accusatory or strident, even in the face of provocation. Instead he level-headedly illuminates the errors of the past and counters these with hopes for reversing their consequences in the future. These hopes are not mere emotional wishful thinking. Instead he chronicles systematically the various means employed in the “action plan” by which conservation has been and is being accomplished there despite daunting odds against it. Everyone interested in the conservation of natural ecosystems—be they tropical or not, primate habitats or not, or African or not—will find something in Chimpanzees of Budongo: useful tools, approaches, solutions, and even attitudes to help reverse the tide of destruction and to instead plant the seeds of local cooperation. I recommend the book wholeheartedly.