Tacugama

The Sierra Leone National Chimpanzee Census Project team has just returned from an intensive 26 days of surveying Moyamba District in the south west of Sierra Leone. This district is close to Freetown, with many villages throughout that depend on slash and burn subsistance farming for survival. There is very little standing forest remaining. Dr Terry Brncic, the Scientific Project Manager gives her report:

We travelled over 1125 miles in search of wild chimpanzees… usually in first or second gear due to the road conditions!

Another makeshift bridge safely crossed…
.

Every day we interviewed communities about the presence or absence of chimpanzees around their villages.

Asking permission from the local chief
.

We then followed up on foot any leads about chimpanzee signs in the area.

Spotting nests
.

Chimpanzee dung in a burnt plantation
.

After introducing ourselves and explaining the purpose of our visit, we usually ended up answering many questions about chimpanzees and why it is important to conserve them. People would often ask us if we were there to catch them and take them away. When we reassured them that we were not, they asked “Why not?! They are destroying all our pineapples!” This message of human-chimpanzee conflict was told to us all over Moyamba district and is one of the serious issues that will have to be dealt with if we are to persuade people not to kill or capture chimpanzees.

Talking about chimpanzees with the local communities
.

We were very surprised as time went on to find more and more chimpanzee nests in fallow farmland, occasionally hundreds of nests in one small area. We finally counted over 2000 nests during our trip, almost all were on the tops of palm trees, and found much more evidence of chimpanzees across Moyamba district than we were expecting.

The palm tree on the right contains a chimp nest
.

How many nests can you see in this picture?
.

These are very interesting results for several reasons. One, it could mean that there are probably more chimpanzees across Sierra Leone than have been previously estimated. Secondly, it shows that chimpanzees are surviving close to human presence and in deforested areas, primarily by crop-raiding. Finally, it helps us understand better what needs to be done to protect chimpanzees in Sierra Leone. The most important thing immediately is to educate people not just about the law protecting chimpanzees, but also to help them appreciate chimpanzees for their intelligence and similarity to ourselves. Longer term conservation will have to look at restoring forest habitat. Efforts to protect chimpanzees in Sierra Leone will have to address the conflict between chimpanzees and communities. Farmers will set snares to protect their plantations from crop raiding by wildlife and chimpanzees are at high risk of being caught in the snares.

Campbells (l) and Spot Nose (r) monkeys killed in farmers’ snares
.

Towards the end of our trip we encountered a baby chimp that had been caught this way. It is unclear whether her mother had been caught in a snare and killed, or whether she herself was caught. When we first saw her, she was being kept as a pet in Yoyema village.

Finding Yoyema
.

She is very underweight and is probably almost three years old. She wasn’t using her left arm and has a small wound above her eye. She also had her fingernails and toenails manicured and painted blue! Fortunately we were finally able to persuade the owners to give her up and she rode back to Tacugama with the census team after we had finished our work.

Arriving at Tacugama with Terry and Samba
.

After one day she has already bonded with Mama Posseh and has even shown signs of beginning to use her left arm. Her original name was Mary but we have re-named her Yoyema after her village home.

Yoyema brings the number of chimps at Tacugama to 94…!
.

With another 11 districts still to survey the field teams are going to be busy for the rest of this year but we will have a great set of information when we finish. The Tacugama team are still busy looking for funds to be certain that we can finish our work and if we continue to find more captive chimps then the pressure to get the new enclosures funded will be even greater. We really have no more space for new chimps but it’s also impossible to leave chimps like Yoyema behind.

The map below shows the Sierra Leone map divided by district. The striped area on the far left is the Western Area where Freetown in located, the census team have covered most of this area but some additional surveying will be done before the end of the project. The dark green solid area is Moyamba District that has just been completed. The pale green areas to the top are Bombali district (l) where Sierra Leone’s only national park – Outamba-Kilimi – is located and the team will be here next. They will then go to Koinadugu (r) which is one of the most remote areas of the country where its highest mountain – Bintumani or Loma Mansa (1947 metres) – is located.