My Life with the Chimpanzees by Jane Goodall

Author:Jane Goodall [Goodall, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1-588-24031-2
Publisher: ibooks, Inc.

Grub taking a bath in the forest. Photograph © Hugo van Lawick.

Hyenas are actually very interesting creatures. Like chimps, they wander around in little groups of friendly individuals. Like chimps, they have very distinct personalities and fascinating behavior. Like chimps, they are territorial and may kill hyenas from neighboring clans. The biggest difference in their social behavior is that females are dominant in hyena society, whereas males are dominant in the world of the chimp.

I loved studying those Ngorongoro hyenas. At night, when there was a moon, I would drive our VW camper to a hyena den where there were one or two tiny black cubs. Grub was usually asleep in the back of the car. As dusk settled, other, older cubs would begin to appear. They were coming to play with the little ones, the ones who were not old enough to go visiting.

What wonderful games went on around those dens in the moonlight! Sometimes the cubs played tag with an ostrich feather or an old bone. They had mock battles and tumbled over and over, wrestling and biting.

After hunting, late at night, the hyena mothers would visit the dens. They would suckle their cubs and sometimes bring back a large bone or a whole head from a kill. And there were times when even the biggest and fattest of the mothers, Mrs. Stink and Baggage, for example, would start to play, chasing each other and the cubs around in circles, their fat bellies almost touching the ground.

During the months I spent in the crater and afterward, on the Serengeti when Hugo was filming the wild dogs, there were other people at Gombe watching the chimpanzees. I used to talk to them on a two-way radio almost every day. And quite often, we went to Gombe to spend some time there ourselves.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.