23 June 2012

On Saturday, it was time to leave Guassa for the next leg of my journey: Gombe National Park, Tanzania. After breakfast (pancakes with canned peaches and molasses) and packing my bags, I sat with Peter and Tyler in the kitchen tent, asking them about the names of monkeys in my photos, and wondering if the driver would really show up. The project doesn’t have a car in Guassa, so if the car we had hired in Addis failed to turn up, my only option would be to take a walk to the road and take a bus, or try hitching a ride, either of which would mean I would miss my flight to Dar-es-Salaam, and would also miss the two subsequent flights I needed to take to get to Kigoma, before taking the boat to Gombe.

Around 10:30 am, the car arrived. The driver had left Addis at 5:00 am to get to Guassa on time.

The drive down was basically terrifying. We rolled into Taitu at 3:18 pm. We left Guassa around 10:45 so that’s 5.5 hours, not bad time. The driver drove typical African style: as fast as possible, on whichever side of the road seemed better paved or reduced curves, honking to alert livestock, cars and pedestrians that he was coming through. The drive was almost entirely downhill, the first few hours especially steep. The road wound in hairpin turns, often with a steep cliff falling away to the side – usually the passenger side. My side.

For most of the way on the gravel road (the first third or so of the drive), there were no barriers at all on the edge of the road to keep a car from driving off into oblivion. On the paved road, several different kinds of barriers existed: stone and concrete rectangles built like castle fortifications, thick concrete posts, metal stakes, and the sort of metal ribbon we are used to in America. And almost every single one of these barriers showed signs of having been run into at high speed. We passed one truck with a double trailer dangling off a bridge, and several other trucks in various states of damage along the side of the road, rocks under the tires to keep them from rolling further, and more rocks and tree branches placed around the disabled truck as a helpful barrier and warning sign to oncoming traffic.

We passed through Eucalyptus plantations growing on the steep hills. These exotic trees are planted widely in Africa, and valued because they grow quickly, and also sprout new shoots from the stump when you cut the tree down. The many small trunks growing from older stumps seem to be the main source of the scaffolding used in the many new buildings going up in Addis: spindly trunks of

young trees roughly lashed together to provide a rickety framework for new multi-story concrete office and apartment buildings. We passed trucks belching black exhaust and diesel fumes with bundles of Eucalyptus poles tied to the truck bed, the leafy treetops extending far over the cab of the truck.  Donkeys carried loads of smaller Eucalyptus branches, maybe for use in building the framework for wattle and daub houses.

In Addis, I took a long hot shower, my first since leaving the city on Monday. It was just too cold to bathe in Guassa. Then I had dinner. I ordered Special Tibs again. On previous nights, the mound of spicy meat and sauce and two rolls of injera seemed like more food than I could possibly manage, and I ended dinner stuffed and defeated before finishing it all. But now with a Guassa stomach, the meal looked disappointingly small. But with the addition of some extra njera the tibs proved highly satisfying.

22 June 2012

After a long and rewarding day with the monkeys, the sun began to dip towards the horizon. Tyler suggested we leave the monkeys early to go looking for wolves. Ethiopian wolves are one of the highlights of Guassa, and Tyler didn’t want me to leave without seeing one.

Ethiopian wolves, like gelada monkeys, are endemic to the Ethiopian highlands: they don’t occur anywhere else. The highlands are so different and isolated from the surrounding lands that all sorts of unusual things have evolved here.

They are small for a wolf. They don’t get much bigger than 40 pounds. They eat mainly rodents, which are abundant at Guassa. The wolves don’t seem to pose any sort of threat to gelada monkeys, despite being depicted as hunting geladas in at least one nature documentary.  They look more like a large fox or a coyote than a wolf, with a reddish coat. And indeed, when speaking English, Ethiopians seem to mainly call them “red foxes.”

But genetically, they are closely related to grey wolves, having diverged from them some 3-4 million years ago. And they are extremely rare. Only about 550 of them survive in the wild, of which something like 30 live at Guassa.

Before we left the monkeys, Tyler talked to Tayler, who has been searching for wolves on his days off. Taylor recommended several spots, including the big valley close to camp. So we left the monkeys and walked back towards camp, stopping now and then to look for wolves. As we approached the valley, we left the road and climbed a hill that gave a broad view across the valley. Tyler scanned the valley with binoculars, and before too long, found a pair of wolves on a distant ridge. With some help, I eventually found them too.

We sat on the hillside and watched the wolves, which were far beyond camera range. After a few minutes, the wolves trotted up the hill and out of view. Tyler said the wolves were shy, and I wasn’t expecting get close enough to take pictures; I was excited just to have caught a glimpse of these rare creatures.

We sat and scanned the valley some more, and eventually Tyler spotted two more wolves, some six or seven hundred meters away, on the other side of the valley, close to the road. People herding cattle or driving down the road didn’t seem to notice the wolves at all. I wondered how many times we had walked past wolves without seeing them. Despite their reddish-orange and white coats, they blended easily into the green-grey heathland.  When I put the binoculars down to rest my eyes a bit, I couldn’t see the wolves at all with my naked eyes, and had trouble finding them again with the binoculars.

Peter commented that these four wolves represented nearly 1% of the entire population of the species. They are reasonably well protected on Guassa, but still face threats, such as rabies, which has killed hundreds of wolves, and cars, which occasionally kill wolves crossing the road.

Tyler speculated that these two wolves we were looking at now might be the grown offspring of the pair we had seen earlier. After watching the wolves through binoculars for a good long time, Tyler suggested we try moving closer to them. We walked slowly down the hill. Tyler suggested we walk towards a ridge that ran between us and the wolves, so we could get closer to them without them seeing us. The plan worked a little too well.  By the time we climbed the top of that ridge, we found that one of the wolves walking right past us, and it startled, running another hundred meters or so away from us before turning back to look at us. We watched it slowly walk away, then began making our way to camp.

I lagged behind to put my camera away and take a GPS reading. Tyler and Peter walked ahead to the road. Suddenly I heard them calling “Mike! Mike!” I wondered if they worried I was lost. I called out, “I’m here!” then saw why they were yelling: a wolf was running right toward me! I hurried to get my camera out. Putting the camera away seemed to be a sure way to attract wolves.

Peter and Tyler had caught this wolf by surprise, and it quickly ran away, off towards the same direction where the other wolf had gone. Now it got another surprise: me. But though it seemed startled to see me, it didn’t seem especially concerned. It trotted past me, then turned to look at me, letting me take some pictures.

 

It even sat down and scratched itself a bit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then it hunted in the heather for rats: peering into the heather and then making funny bouncing hops towards its prey. It failed to catch anything, then trotted away at a leisurely pace.

 

 

 

22 June 2012

I slept in the same clothes I’d been wearing for days: t-shirt, long-sleeved flannel shirt, long-sleeved field jacket, field pants and thick socks, huddled in a sleeping bag with a thick wool blanket on top. No mosquitos, no malaria, no snakes, no warmth – is this really Africa? Hardly feels like it.

Soon after breakfast, a thick fog rolled in. We started the hike down to Darjeeling Cliff where the geladas had spent the night. I wore the waterproof rainboots I had worn the previous two days, but found were killing my feet. It didn’t look like rain, so I returned to camp and put on the Kiboko soccer cleats that I had brought for Gombe. Much more comfortable.

We hiked several kilometers down to the cliffs, and found some of the geladas already up at the top, basking in the sun, grooming, and starting to feed. We followed them as they traveled in a long circuit through the open hills. This southern area looked strangely like the Great Basin in the American West: grassy hills and open plains studded with stark masses of rock, the bushy grey-leaved Helichrysum filling in for sagebrush.

The geladas ate and ate, sitting on their bottoms, plucking grass and herbs with their nimble hands and stuffing their mouths. So many monkeys plucking grass at once made a surprisingly loud munching sound, rather like a horde of locusts.

Geladas have such an interesting social system – one with some interesting parallels with human society. Like humans, geladas live in a multi-level society with strong bonds between males and females. They travel in herds made up of one-male units (OMU’s). Each OMU has a leader male, a ‘harem’ of females, their offspring, and sometimes one or more follower males. Each leader male tries to keep all the females in his harem to himself. But because the OMUs travel together in herds that may have hundreds of monkeys, there are always other males around, particularly the bachelor males, who hang around the periphery in menacing groups of unattached males.

In my own research, I focus on chimpanzees, which are much more closely related to humans than are gelada monkeys. The last common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans lived something like five to six million years ago, whereas the last common ancestor of humans and Old World Monkeys such as geladas lived perhaps 30 million years ago. But social structure can evolve quickly in response to ecological conditions and other factors. And in some ways, geladas, living in open country, may face ecological circumstances that are rather similar to those faced by our hominin ancestors, who also lived in the more open habitats of East Africa, compared to chimpanzees, which live in forests and woodlands.

In chimpanzees, males and females don’t have strong social bonds or anything like marriage. Instead, females attempt to mate with many different males. Males may try to keep other males from mating with a particular fertile female, but unless the male is especially intimidating, or manages to sneak off on consort with a female, the female usually mates with multiple males. The result is that chimpanzee males don’t know for sure who their children are, and no chimpanzee knows for sure who his or her father is. Even the researchers studying chimpanzees, keeping close tabs on every mating, couldn’t be sure who the fathers were before the advent of genetic paternity tests.

In contrast, in gelada monkeys, males and females do have strong social bonds. Each leader male grooms and herds and mates with and jealously guards the females in his harem. As a result, gelada monkeys likely do know who their daddies are.

There are other primates, like gibbons and titi monkeys, in which males and females live in monogamous pairs, with strong male-female social bonds. And there are other species, like gorillas and blue monkeys, where groups usually have a single male and harem of females. What is unusual about geladas is that they, like humans and a few other species, live in societies with strong bonds between males and females, not as isolated family units, but as members of complex multi-level societies.

Because competition for mates is intense, males are big and showy, nearly twice the size of females, with massive canines and flowing manes of hair. With their big hair and strutting posture, they look like heavy metal rockers, and they have been giving fitting names: Lars, Danzig, Ulver, Mustaine.

In the mid-afternoon, the geladas plucked short grasses from a meadow strewn with yellow flowers. Around 120 monkeys foraged together. We were closest to a one male unit led by Ptolomy. Though he was clearly the leader male, he still had to contend with two follower males: Cthulu, who had briefly reigned before Ptolomy deposed him, and Tony, who had enjoyed a long reign before being overthrown by Cthulu.

A female with a full red chest, Tatanga, presented to Ptolomy. He started to mate with her, but then he looked over and saw Tony, some thirty yards away, flashing his eyelids at him. How dare he! Though Ptolomy had just begun mating, he dismounted Tatanga and strode threateningly to Tony, who flipped his upper lip over his teeth, staring back at Ptolomy. Cthulu stood behind Tony, lending his support. Tony carried a baby on his back – probably one of his own babies, since he had enjoyed a long tenure as leader male. Males often use infants in fights with other males, though nobody really knows why they do this.

Ptolomy walked right up to Tony and stared into his face. Tony kept his lip flipped up and opened his jaws, showing off his huge canines. Cthulu flipped his lip and showed off his own fangs. This was the last straw for Ptolomy, who lunged right at both of them – and soon ran off into the hills, with the other two males chasing right behind him. To me, it looked like Ptolomy had been chased off by the other, lower ranking males, which surprised me. Peter explained, though, that such interactions often ended up that way. The leader males often ran ahead, letting the lower ranking male chase them. Maybe the leader males do this to show off their stamina.

So Tony, despite being an old deposed former leader male, could still get away with interrupting the new leader male’s mating efforts. And Tony seemed always to be surrounded with little kids, who were almost certainly his.