Inside Science: Stories From the Field in Human and Animal Science by Robert E. Kohler

Author:Robert E. Kohler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2019-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

FOREST WALKING AND WATCHING

What Goodall saw upon arriving at Gombe was not what Leakey had led her to expect (he never did see the place firsthand). Leakey conjured up a forest parkland with chimps living by the lake and in open country, where they could be easily observed. In reality, as Goodall quickly learned, they lived mainly in the dense forest understory of ravines and avoided open places, where there was little for them to eat. Living among them would not be as straightforward as Leakey had imagined.

Observing chimps at home in their own world meant being close yet unobtrusive, so the animals would carry on as if observers were not there at all. One way was to stay hidden in camouflaged blinds—the common method of hunters or ethologists, like the zoologist and early chimp watcher Adriaan Kortlandt. The disadvantage of stealth was that it was how predators stalked their prey, and chimps were quick to spot and flee from what was hidden. Another method was to stay in plain sight, keeping distance at first and slowly getting closer until animals became accustomed to observers’ presence and went about their lives as if at home alone. But habituating had the disadvantage of being slow, unpredictable, and low yield when animals didn’t show up where expected or were stubbornly shy. On the other extreme was the method of provisioning: putting out food to attract free-living animals and keep them where they could be observed. However, provisioning disturbed normal foraging behavior, and provisioning sites were as much human as animal ground, thus subverting the point of observing animals in residence.23 The advantage of predictable and efficient production of data by provisioning was thus offset by epistemic doubts of the meaning of the data thus obtained.

Habituation, the most intimately residential of these options, was the one least used by professional ethologists at the time. Yet it was the one that Goodall adopted from her first days in the field, on Lolui Island in Lake Victoria, where Leakey arranged for her and Vanne to spend several weeks observing a colony of vervet monkeys, as a warm-up for Gombe. It was an easy apprenticeship. Moving about as a whole community, the vervets were easy to locate and approach; and when their alarm calls signaled to Jane that she was too close, she curled up and pretended to sleep, thereby putting the animals at ease. Within days she had begun to recognize individuals and was getting data of individual and group behavior.24

Habituation proved more difficult with chimps. They did not move about conspicuously in whole troops, but foraged in small groups over large forest territories. Just finding them was a challenge. Goodall had beginner’s luck when her two African minders noticed chimp activity at a large msulula tree coming into fruit in the northernmost valley of the reserve. From a vantage on a distant hillside, she could just make out chimps in the dense foliage stuffing themselves, but little more; and when she moved down into the valley to get a closer look, the chimps fled.

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