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Gombe Stream National Park
An excited whoop erupts from deep in the forest,
boosted immediately by a dozen other voices, rising in volume and
tempo and pitch to a frenzied shrieking crescendo. It is the famous
‘pant-hoot’ call: a bonding ritual that allows the participants to
identify each other through their individual vocal stylisations. To
the human listener, walking through the ancient forests of Gombe
Stream, this spine-chilling outburst is also an indicator of
imminent visual contact with man’s closest genetic relative: the
chimpanzee.
Gombe is the smallest of Tanzania's national
parks: a fragile strip of chimpanzee habitat straddling the steep
slopes and river valleys that hem in the sandy northern shore of
Lake Tanganyika. Its chimpanzees – habituated to human visitors –
were made famous by the pioneering work of Jane Goodall, who in 1960
founded a behavioural research program that now stands as the
longest-running study of its kind in the world. The matriarch Fifi,
the last surviving member of the original community, only
three-years old when Goodall first set foot in Gombe, is still
regularly seen by visitors.
Chimpanzees share about 98% of their genes with
humans, and no scientific expertise is required to distinguish
between the individual repertoires of pants, hoots and screams that
define the celebrities, the powerbrokers, and the supporting
characters. Perhaps you will see a flicker of understanding when you
look into a chimp's eyes, assessing you in return - a look of
apparent recognition across the narrowest of species barriers.
The most visible of Gombe’s other mammals are
also primates. A troop of beachcomber olive baboons, under study
since the 1960s, is exceptionally habituated, while red-tailed and
red colobus monkeys - the latter regularly hunted by chimps – stick
to the forest canopy.
The park’s 200-odd bird species range from the
iconic fish eagle to the jewel-like Peter’s twinspots that hop
tamely around the visitors’ centre.
After dusk, a dazzling night sky is complemented
by the lanterns of hundreds of small wooden boats, bobbing on the
lake like a sprawling city.
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