The Chimpanzees of the Budongo Forest

Unlike humans who came down from the trees and developed bipedal locomotion chimpanzees have remained in the original habitat of our ancestors: the tropical rainforests of Africa. In this book Vernon Reynolds describes in detail the work of a large number of students and senior researchers on the wild chimpanzees of the Budongo Forest Reserve in Western Uganda. He presents a coherent and in-depth account of one chimpanzee community of more than 60 individuals living in the Sonso area in the middle of the Budongo Forest which he and his colleagues have studied intensively over the last 15 years. The chimpanzees have never been provisioned and live in an entirely natural state. Reynolds describes their forest habitat their diet and culture their social organization and behaviour their diseases and the threats to them that derive from the actions of people in the surrounding villages the most serious of these being the presence of snares set by hunters to catch small antelopes and pigs. As founder and head of the Budongo Forest Project Professor Reynolds has been responsible for compiling the numerous publications reports and dissertations written about these chimpanzees. In this book he combines these new and often unpublished studies with past publications about Budongo Forest. Where appropriate he also compares the Budongo chimpanzees with wild chimpanzees studied at other sites across Africa. The result is the most comprehensive account of the Budongo chimpanzees ever published with a wealth of referenced material that will serve as a source of information for many years to come.

Alternative names:

• ISBN The Chimpanzees of the Budongo Forest ( Ecology Behaviour and Conservation ) English