Angela Angela!

It occurs to me that in three weeks of blogging I’ve told very few chimp stories.  This is somewhat strange because I talk incessantly about monkeys at home, and plenty of awesome things happens at chimps while I’m here.

Baby Angela!!

Part of the reason I haven’t been telling stories is the “surprise” that was waiting for me at chimps when I first arrived.  Meet Angela, second born daughter of Mwanzo who was the first accidental baby in the Sweetwaters sanctuary.  Angela was a well kept secret (at least from the internet) for a while as the caregivers wanted to wait until she was definitely strong enough to survive and they could get some good photos of her.  The fascinating thing about Angela’s birth is that Mwanzo has an older daughter, Ajabu, who is just about three.  Most chimps have an interbirth interval of 6-7 years because they typically don’t wean their offspring until 4-5.  Ajabu was completely weaned before Angela was born and Mwanzo was pushing her to become independent in the weeks preceding the birth.  However, Mwanzo was almost definitely breastfeeding when Angela was conceived, which defies the hypothesis that breastfeeding females can’t conceive.

Ajabu tries to get some lovin' from Mwanzo, with Angela

Ajabu is the only chimp who has taken offense at the presence of her younger sister. Most of the time she’s fine, but every once in a while, especially when it’s around naptime, she gets quite cranky that she isn’t allowed to nurse while she goes to sleep.  To her credit, Mwanzo does a great job of dealing with Ajabu when she wants to start nursing.  Usually Mwanzo starts to play with Ajabu to distract her, and after a few minutes Ajabu often gives up.  When Ajabu is being really determined, Mwanzo occasionally lets her get just a few minutes of nursing before pushing her away, or even carries her around for a bit to calm her down.  Ajabu has tried numerous tactics to stay on Mwanzo, most recently including basically trying to pull Angela off of Mwanzo’s back before being rejected, but for the most part is happy to ride around on one of the many other willing backs available in the group.

Ezo playing with Angela

Everyone else wants a piece of the baby, including some of the big males.  If you think baby chimps are cute, just imagine how cute it is when a fully grown male is trying to get the baby to interact with him.  Two adults have tried pretty hard to get baby Angela on their good side.  One was Cheetah, a good friend of Mwanzo’s and Ajabu’s main allo-mother these days, who couldn’t get Mwanzo to let her touch the baby directly, so instead played with Angela a little with her foot.  Ezo, the beta male in the group, had a different tactic and was alternating between grooming Mwanzo and grooming the baby.  He would lie down next to Mwanzo and groom her within view of Angela, and every once in a while Angela would reach out a hand and try to play with him a bit too.

Roi

A couple of days ago it was pretty warm in the afternoon, and George and Roi independently decided that it was time to take a little swim in the water trough.  Roi was adorable, rolling around and splashing, encouraging his group-mates to play with him.  Romeo was the only one who took the bait, and splashed around with Roi for a little bit before screaming, splashing Roi right in the face, and running off.  Roi took it all in stride and kept playing with himself.

George also decided to go swimming, but halfway through his swim decided that the cool bath would be a nice place to masturbate.  Working with primates has made me pretty good at taking these things in stride, but visitors are often confused by primate socio-sexual behavior (mounting in a sexual and non sexual way, anal-genital inspection) and their willingness to do things in public that we never would (say, masturbating).  I’ve explained to plenty of visitors that when a chimp mounts little Ajabu it is less like child molesting and more like a strong huge, but sometimes I still feel awkward watching chimps in their private moments. I usually choose to observe someone else at that point.

I had thought that I was basically a boring but frequent visitor in the chimps’ eyes, as all but the most human-oriented will completely ignore me. This does change around lunch time, when I suddenly become pretty popular, or at least an object of some interest. I have tried to keep it this way, because I don’t want my presence to change the chimps’ behaviors; I don’t want them to think of me as a source of food and then beg me for food instead of paying attention to their social relationships.  Today though, the young chimps were getting pretty riled up as the bananas came out.  Niyonkuru and Uruhara, the alpha and beta respectively, were in particularly fine form today and were swaggering around all piloerect.  Kisa, a low-ish ranking male (it’s hard to not be low ranking out of 5 males), gets very nervous around Niyon when he’s posturing.  He displays all the right submissive behaviors, but Niyon makes him very nervous regardless.  Today while Niyon and Uru were posturing Kisa ran over to me and presented his hand to me, a submissive behavior (one that I think of as being given to equals as opposed to someone higher in rank).  He did this twice and grimaced at him, and I presented my hand back to him to try and comfort him, but obviously there was nothing that I could directly do.

Angela!