Tacugama

Category: Tacugama | Date: Aug 12 2008 | By: tacugama

The rainy season brings us lots of challenges at the Sanctuary, making sure that the younger chimps don’t catch a chill, fixing endless leaks in staff and chimpanzee accommodation, navigating roads as they wash away so that we can bring supplies to camp and just trying to get anything to dry out. Strangely enough we still quite enjoy the rain, maybe it’s because of the antics that the chimpanzees get up to in the wet!

A few blogs ago we told you about the rain dances that the chimps enjoy. The latest craze that’s now setting in with Baba’s small group of juniors is rope sliding! Before the rainy season, thanks to the ropes donated from the the visiting British Navy ships, we rigged a lot more ropes for the introductory enclosure to make life more interesting for Baba’s group. With the coming of the rains, the ropes are regularly soaked and the chimpanzees have decided that sliding down at high speed is good fun. Today we managed to capture Joko on film as he demonstrated his own special freestyle descent. The film quality’s not great but we thought you might enjoy it… Tacugama’s YouTube debut by Joko:  

Back to the less fun side of the rains, Aruna - our driver, had a lucky escape last week when rain contributed to what could have been a really nasty accident that left our main camp vehicle precariously wedged on the edge of a steep drop into one of the river valleys below Tacugama. Fortunately no-one was injured and IMATT, the International Military Advisory Training Team (international support for the Sierra Leone armed forces) came to our aid and recovered the vehicle. It’s now undergoing repairs and we hope to have it back on the road soon.

IMATT to the rescue…
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We’re busy at camp looking at lots of ways to raise funds both for the census we mentioned in the last blog and also, importantly, to cover our running costs.  We’ve been joined by a new volunteer thanks to Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO), Anita McKenna (aka Frankie) who’ll be with us for the next six months.  She’s busy working her way through our big to-do list that includes fundraising, expanding our links with our local communities (to see how we can support them in developing secure livelihoods that don’t threaten the forest reserve) and promoting eco-tourism.

Frankie head buried in our to-do list!
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Meanwhile Tombo, Urgent and Mac are settling well, Boyze is making steady progress in meeting Philip’s group and the rest of the Tacugama family are doing ok. We would all like to say a big thanks to Mills and Theresa for their recent generous donations towards our running costs.

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Tags: Chimpanzee, IMATT, sanctuary, Sierra Leone, Tacugama, VSO, wildlife