Tacugama

Hello and sorry for our prolonged blogging absence since Christmas.  We’ve been extremely busy preparing for the Sierra Leone National Chimpanzee Census.  We hope you forgive us for not keeping in touch so well and we’ll try to make up for it with lots more news in 2009.

So the most important news first – an update on our newest quarantine resident, Jessica.  She arrived with us in December and was very wild and distrusting.  As usual Mama Posseh has worked wonders and Jessica now trusts her totally.  She’ll even let Posseh give her a good wash…

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Fortunately Jessica has remained in good health and will hopefully successfully finish her period in quarantine in March.

Bai Nyaa has just finished her time in quarantine, which was great news for Mac.  We’ve tried a couple of times to introduce Mac to Gaura and Tombo, the three of them would play happily together in the forest on their daily walks with Mama Posseh, but Gaura is just too strong and energetic for Mac for them to spend all day together!  So last week we introduced Bai Nyaa and Mac under Mama Posseh’s watchful eye and after a little hesitation they’ve really made good friends.  Bai Nyaa is a little bigger than Mac and loves playing so he’s learning to keep up.  They now happily share their forest walks and den together all the time.

Making acquaintances – Bai Nyaa (left) and Mac
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Don’t just sit there Mac, come and play!
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So you can play!

Race you to the top…..
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Bai Nyaa at home in the trees
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Once Mac and Bai Nyaa are well settled we’ll introduce them as a pair to Gaura and Tombo so that we can gradually prepare them for becoming a bigger family group. We still have the challenge of finding funding for the new enclosures we need to give all of our young chimps the space they need to grow, but hopefully that will be one of the successes we can report for 2009.

We mentioned the national census at the beginning of this blog and we’ll very soon be giving you lots more information about it as the programme kicks off in earnest. In the meantime we’d like to say a BIG thank you to several people in the UK who teamed up to help us fly out the equipment that we’ll be using in the field and also collect a large amount of donated clothing, books and toys (more than a tonne in weight!).

 The equipment and donations waiting to be checked in

The donations will be used as part of our education, community development and support programmes and we’ll keep you in touch with our news as these are distributed. Our special thanks go to:

Kevin McPhillips Travel (www.sierraleonetravel.com) who made all the flight and baggage arrangements and also collected donated items for us
Monarch Airlines for kindly agreeing to fly the donations back to Freetown
The Excess Baggage Company (www.excess-baggage.com)at Gatwick for allowing Joe Sabharwal to assist with our baggage and to Joe himself for helping to organise donations we received
Ann Barrett and Steve Trigg for helping us to transport much of the equipment and donations to the airport
The Lee family (with help from the Devines, Logans and Yiapanis) for an amazing effort to “tidy up” and add to the donations!

We continue to receive and appreciate your donations through Wildlife Direct, they continue to make a big difference to Tacugama. Thanks to Brigitte, Joanne, Christine, Lucia, Brett and Tara for your recent contributions.