I’ve recently returned to Cameroon from a two-week trip to Nigeria with our senior research assistant here, Ekwoge Abwe. Ekwoge and I had been planning to visit Gashaka Gumti National Park for some time, the largest national park in Nigeria, covering a wide variety of habitats including savanna, montane forest, and even lowland tropical forest, the latter where we hoped to see chimpanzees. We are hosted by the Gashaka Primate Project at their base in Kwano, a wonderfully comfortable research station run by Professor Volker Sommer of University College London.

The first thing that struck me about this area was the climate ““ we are currently in the middle of the dry season in Cameroon, where it hasn’t rained for almost three months, but in Gashaka it felt like it hadn’t rained for years. The roads were a corridor of dust and throughout the national park managed fires had been lit, a seasonal activity to reduce the risk of major fires later in the dry season.

It was fascinating to see the different species at Gashaka; baboons are the dominant primates, in more ways than one. The research team has habituated (so that they are not scared of human observers) two groups for detailed research, but it soon became clear to Ekwoge and me that many other baboons were becoming used to humans when we spent several hours being threatened by a pair of one-year-olds!

On the second day we saw the spectacular black-and-white colobus rapidly leaving a fruiting tree about 100 yards (meters) away from our vantage point; and then we saw a female chimpanzee and her youngster coming into view. A third young chimpanzee, likely her elder son or daughter, also came into view for a few minutes. We marveled, as we always do, at these incredible animals. Professor Sommer’s team has been trying to habituate chimpanzees to human observers for more than two years now, but with limited success. Barely two minutes passed until the mother noticed our presence and immediately left the tree with her two offspring. We later went to the tree and identified it as a member of the fig family, Antiaris toxicaria. We don’t have this tree in the Ebo forest (or at least we have not identified it there yet) but in the West African country of Guinea, chimpanzees are known to gorge on the plentiful yellow-red fruits. Later during our trip we saw putty-nosed monkeys, more black-and-white colobus, and hornbills feeding on this particular tree.

Our visit to the Gashaka Primate Project has given us lots of fresh ideas for our research at Ebo and we sincerely hope that Professor Sommer and his team will visit the Ebo Forest Research Station later this year. In particular, we know that the chimpanzees at Ebo are using many types of tools to extract insects and to crack open fruits that chimpanzees at Gashaka have not mastered; equally, the chimpanzees of Gashaka may be using tools unique to that area. This is interesting for several reasons: tool use is indicative of a “culture,’ and science knows almost nothing about tool use in the subspecies of chimpanzee in our region: the most endangered of all subspecies, Pan troglodytes vellerosus or the “Gulf of Guinea’ chimpanzee, with perhaps less than 6,500 individuals left in Africa.

After leaving Gashaka, we traveled by public taxi to Calabar, at the mouth of the Cross River, where we met with several organizations to hear about their work in the region, including the Wildlife Conservation Society, Pandrillus, and Cercopan. Our two-day journey to Calabar using public taxis was fascinating, although the scarcity of running water and electricity in most of the places that we stayed in Nigeria made traveling with small backpacks a bit of a challenge when it came to personal cleanliness ““ we were covered with a blanket of dust from dawn until dusk. I found the wide variety of people that we met to be incredibly friendly and welcoming, and many fellow travelers spent hours questioning us about Cameroon, America, the UK, our trip, and what we thought of Nigeria.

Our trip back to Cameroon was as much of an adventure as visiting Gashaka Gumti: we went by public taxi-canoe along the oil-rich Bakassi peninsula mangroves, through territory that was until recently the subject of an international border dispute between Nigeria and Cameroon. As the outboard motor hummed behind us we spotted egrets, kites, and hammerkops and saw the early-morning cooking smoke rising through the grass roofs of the fishermen’s houses. We wondered what is to become of this area and the manatees that still survive in these waters.

Dr. Bethan Morgan is a Conservation Research Fellow for the San Diego Zoo’s CRES.

Here’s more information about Bethan’s project in Cameroon.

Read Bethan’s previous blog, Soggy Research in Cameroon.

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