Tacugama

Zeelie on the operating table.

Earlier this year, one of our adolescent male chimps, Zeelie, developed a swelling above his right testicle. A few years ago, he had already had an issue with bladder stones, so care staff members are always alert to any changes in his genital area. This turned out to be an unrelated issue, an inguinal hernia. A bit of abdominal fat had passed through the inguinal canal, causing the swelling in the groin. With the risk of intestinal loops passing through the same widened canal, an operation was indicated. We were very fortunate to get the help of Dr. Kamara, the urogenital surgeon from the Connaught hospital in Freetown. He had helped us with the bladder stone before and came with three assistants to operate on Zeelie at Tacugama. The wound has healed up nicely and Zeelie should be able to join the rest of the group in the outdoor enclosure within a week. Many thanks to Dr. Kamara and his team!

Zeelie with his surgical team (Dr. Kamara in grey) after the op.

Zeelie enjoying some pineapple (3 weeks post op)

Primate behaviourist Caroline Griffis with Tacugama staff members Daniel Jawara and Murray Lamin

Here at Tacugama we’ve been very lucky to have had the help of volunteers with special skills. Most recently, primate behaviourist Caroline has been with us for the last two months, focusing on enrichment and positive reinforcement training (more on that in a future post). An example of enrichment was placing mirrors within view of the enclosures. The youngest chimps do not always understand, and appear afraid of this ‘unknown chimp’ they are seeing for the first time. If they can reach the mirror, they often try to look behind it or move their hand behind it, to try to find out where this new chimp is actually located. The older chimps can recognize themselves and have fun pulling faces or jumping up and down in front of the mirror. See photos below of Alex’s group.

Animal care staff member Murray Lamin preparing the permanent set up while the chimps enjoy the temporary set up, inspecting themselves en masse.

Close up of the chimps in Alex’s group inspecting themselves in the mirror. Alpha male Spana is in prime position (visible just left of the mirror).

Jumping up and down in front of the mirror.

Curious looks on the first day the mirror was placed.

On his way to work at Tacugama, one of our team was recently approached and told that a very small chimpanzee had been seen close to one of Freetown’s few supermarkets within the last few hours.  Following up with a few more questions and discussions we were luckily able to quickly locate where the chimp had been taken.

We were pleasantly surprised to see that the person holding the chimp was equally happy to see us as he was trying to also contact Tacugama to hand her over. It turned out that he had previously helped to hand over another chimp, Salleh, to Tacugama almost exactly eleven years ago.  He had spotted Molly being offered for sale by people who had brought her from Koinadugu district in the north-east of Sierra Leone and persuaded them to hand her over so that he could bring her to the sanctuary.

A tired Molly on her way to the sanctuary

Molly looking a bit happier on arrival at Tacugama with Bala

Safely wrapped up in the care of Mama Posseh

Sadly we know little about Molly’s history or experiences. She was suffering from a heavy cold and chest infection when we found her.  With the close care from our resident vet Dr Rupak and Mama Posseh, Molly is responding well to treatment and making a good recovery.  Although only about a year old, she’s quite used to being with people and a strong little personality is emerging.  She has a BIG appetite and is eating hard to catch up – she’s stunted for her age (which we can estimate from her teeth).  Molly loves taking her blankets and bundling them into her hammock to make a lovely warm place to sleep.

Molly enjoying her hammock

Once she’s safely through quarantine Molly should make a great playmate and companion for little Perry who is also growing bigger and bolder every day!  They’ll need each other’s support as they grow up without the nurture of their natural family.

We were very excited to welcome Eva Mendes and colleagues to Tacugama last Saturday who were in Sierra Leone filming for the forthcoming documentary ‘Half the Sky’.

Here are a few pictures from their tour of Tacugama led by sanctuary founder, Bala.

Trying to spot some of the chimps from our treetop viewing platform

Bala and Eva Mendes at the viewing platform

The 'Half the Sky' crew after their tour of Tacugama

Bala and Eva Mendes at the end of the tour

We’re looking forward to watching the documentary when it comes out next year! We recommend taking a few moments to look at the Half the Sky movement website, inspired by the original bestselling book by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn.

Also, we’re pleased to let you know that the 2012 calendars are now available to order. You can order yours via the Tacugama website.

Finally, we’ll leave you with this picture of Perry who we introduced you to in our catch-up posts a couple of weeks ago. As you can see, he’s coming on in leaps and bounds and has started to walk around. He’s even started to climb a little bit!

Perry exploring the veterinary clinic

Hello everyone – sorry for our extended absence from blogging – we’ve been through some significant downs and ups in recent months and unfortunately with everything that’s been going on we’ve not been able to keep you up to date with the blog.  However we are back on line now and planning to stay that way and keep you all in touch with all our news.  It will take us a few posts to catch back up with you….

Kouze reflects on recent news…

Most importantly for today is to give you an update on the chimps at Tacugama and tomorrow on our activities over recent months. In our last blog post we mentioned our concern that a possible seasonal recurrence of EMCV was giving us cause for concern; we’d lost Urgent unexpectedly in February. Sadly four more chimps died by the end of April: Bo, Baba, Jetti and Small Lucy. All of these deaths have been completely heartbreaking as there was no opportunity for veterinary intervention to save these incredible chimps. We were also very concerned in April with the condition of Babes, mother to Bintu and Basma, but she regained her strength and was apparently back to normal when in August she was tragically found dead in the enclosure. We have been liaising with PASA and advisors from overseas labs to try to clearly identify what we can do to fully identify and protect against the cause of these mortalities and are very grateful for the support that we have received. Given that our strongest suspicion is still EMCV, we have also embarked on re-vaccinating all of our chimps with vaccines sent to us by Taronga Zoo in Australia. Following the vaccination programme in 2009, we had no new occurrences in 2010. It’s an extremely challenging, stressful and expensive process to anaesthetise so many chimpanzees but with the best understanding currently available it’s our best defence.

The most amazing thing that we’ve been able to observe emerging from the tragedies is the importance of the chimpanzees’ social group. With the death of Babes we were extremely concerned for the well-being of the youngest of her two daughters, Basma, who is just two years old. It has been incredibly heart-warming to see how her “aunts and uncles” (who are completely unrelated) have stepped in and taken this infant under their care. We are carefully documenting what is unfolding before our eyes and so far feel very happy that young Basma will continue to thrive with the care that she is receiving from the group. At seven years of age, big sister Bintu is coping well and also ensures that her little sister gets some extra special hugs.

Basma with Uncles Philip and Kafoe

Basma in the centre with Aunties Julie (r) and Susie (l) and Uncles Kafoe (behind) and Sulleh (in front)

We’ve also squeezed in three new chimps even though we are struggling for enclosure space. Two were confiscated with the support of mining companies who had been offered the chimps on sale. We’ve been working closely with these organisations to break the historical expectation that employees at the mining sites would be happy to buy exotic pets and we’ve been getting good support so Eglo joined us in April and Bingo in July. Eglo has sailed through his quarantine and has now joined in our youngest group of chimps with Chippie, Benita, Samson, Delilah, Tompey and Kangari. Bingo still has a month left in quarantine and is progressing well now we’ve moved him on from his previous diet which included plenty of beer, biscuits and sweets!

Eglo on arrival

Bingo on arrival

Our most challenging of the new arrivals has been tiny Perry. Only around 10 weeks old on arrival he was found at the end of May in Port Loko by one of the few vets in Sierra Leone, Dr Gudush Jalloh. He was visiting the area with a World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA) ambassador, Stuart Lindsay, a judge from Australia. They were informed about Perry being held and immediately followed up to locate and confiscate him – it was a tough challenge but they finally succeeded and rushed him to Tacugama as he was in a very poor state of health, dehydrated, emaciated and with a bad respiratory infection. We were really not sure if Perry would survive – he was far too young to have been separated from his mother (we understand that she was hunted and killed) – and for several weeks it was touch and go. Fortunately with dedicated care from our resident vet and Mama Posseh and extra support from IMATT, (the international military advisory training team) who loaned us a ventilator, young Perry has undergone an amazing transformation and is now a cheeky, noisy and lively character.

Perry on arrival

Perry showing a marked improvement after 6 weeks at Tacugama!

And even more so by early September!!

We also have a 4th new chimp since we last blogged. Early in the year we became increasingly suspicious of Mama Lucy’s increasing appetite and girth and realised that her contraceptive implant must have failed! On 27 March her son was born late in the afternoon to a very happy and relaxed Mama Lucy. He’s very close in age to young Perry so it will be fascinating to compare their development. Already we can see that Mama Lucy’s son is more mobile and physically confident than Perry and clearly has the advantage of starting his life within an existing social group of chimpanzees. It will be some time before we can introduce Perry to his own social group but we are trying as hard as we can to do as good a job as Mama Lucy is doing – she has turned out to be a great mum! We’ll soon be asking you to help us find a name for her baby.

Mama Lucy and baby son at an hour old

Our resident veterinary position saw a change of faces in April. Simona Papa returned to her native Italy after twelve months of dedicated work and we welcomed Rupak Khadka from Nepal. He joins us after completing a masters programme in Germany. We were also very happy to welcome back Rosa Garriga from Spain for a month at the end of May. Rosa was Tacugama’s resident vet for 5 years before handing over the reins to Simona. Rosa has been supporting our camera trapping project and visited to work with Bernie for some time as well as assisting Rupak with our EMCV vaccination programme.

Dr Rupak (l) checking on Zak with Dr Rosa as part of the vaccination programme

We’ll gradually bring you back up to date with news and pictures on how all of six of the chimp groups plus the new arrivals are faring at Tacugama. We’ve got some more great photos that we look forward to sharing with you.  More news follows tomorrow on some more of our activities but for today we’ll leave you with a recent, sweet photo of Gaura who many of you have been asking about!

Gaura

Thank you to all of you for sharing your kind sentiments on the sudden death of our beloved “Lady Urgent”.

It is very difficult to come to terms with it, but life must go on. Tacugama is busy as ever!

This week we made further progress with the ‘Community Clean-up Project’. We were able to engage 30 youth from the Morthaim Village (about 2 km away from Tacugama) to clean their village and a 2 kilometer stretch of road between Charlotte and Morthaim. It was great satisfaction to see all more happy faces taking pride in taking care of their environment.

Ansu, our inhouse artist is always active between painting batik shirts and decorating what is around here in Tacugama. He has just finished beautifying our new lodge Christo and we are happy to share his talent with you.

And what about the chimps?
Jack the second ranking male in Yoko’s Group with support of a youngster, gave Pastor, Willie and Moses new work inside the Juvenile’s enclosure. It seemed that Jack was not happy any longer with the ‘playground interieur’ and dismantled the part he thought would need a change. We caught him red-handed …

As lifting the stem did not seem to be good enough to losen it – Jack engaged into full power mode and leverage.

Success!!!

Hello everybody, this is Bernd or Bernie, like everybody calls me, writing. I arrived recently and will help out at Tacugama as a volunteer for some time. I am a geographer and am working mostly in the field of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), so I am doing maps and cartography. Surely that will be only one of the tasks I can chip in to help here.

Bernie in the field

About 3 years ago I ended a 3 ½ year period working in Sierra Leone. During that time I got to know Tacugama and Bala and since then followed periodically what was going on. Then about a year ago when Tacugama announced on the blog that they had received the chimp orphan No. 100 and Bala had to decide that he could not take more new arrivals in the future without a new enclosure being built, I was thinking that I could help Tacugama when the time came for construction.

The good news is that means we are getting closer to starting the construction of the new enclosures to get the younger chimps into better and more natural environments. I will try to keep you updated on the progress. In the meantime I just thought I say hello and let you know what I am busy with.

Greetings from the peaceful forest to all of you,    Bernd

PS: Miss Congo, a wild chimp, continues to visit Tacugama with her two daughters who are growing in size and curiosity. While it continues to be almost impossible to take photos of Miss Congo, we managed to get these great photos of the two sisters (who are very similar in age to our own chimp sisters at Tacugama, Bintu and Basma).

It’s not always easy to share our sad news…. two weeks ago one of our more vulnerable chimps, Bobbie, succumbed to a heart failure caused by a virus and passed away.

Bobbie

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Chippe and Thulani finished quarantine a while ago, but due to lack of enclosure space are still in the dens. Mama Posseh has been  taking them to the forest regularly  to let them play in the trees.  We are happy to say they spend most of their time exploring in the trees rather than wanting to play with Posseh! They stick to each other whilst exploring, where one goes the other always follows!

Chippe and Thulani’s first trip to the forest

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Thanks a lot to all for your support. We have raised over $3000 so far. Many of you have sent appeals to friends and family and the word is spreading. As soon as we get to 50% of our target, we will order the materials needed to build the enclosures.

We really believe we can do this together and your support will be recognized. We will hang a board with the names of each person and organization once the enclosures are built.

Meanwhile work continues at Tacugama. Tompey is doing very well. Last week, Dr. Fiona, a pediatrician volunteering at a local children hospital, came to assist Dr. Rosa at Tacugama. She brought a portable ultrasound machine to check out Tompey.

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