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Four films in a day!

Working with famous people is quite interesting. I mean sure, we aren’t filming Brad Pitt or Julia Roberts or anything, but to me, Dr. Birute Galdikas is somewhat of an icon. I’ve read her books and wanted to meet her for decades. But famous people are just like everyone else- full of opinions, have busy schedules, and they do things like share their coffee with wild orangutans. I was a bit nervous around Dr. Birute at first because I wanted to sound like someone who knows about primates, has a passion for the subject, but isn’t too gushy and brown-nosey, or worse- come across as just one of “those film-maker types”. (Often film crews can come across as really pushy and so obsessed with their own agenda that they don’t exactly get the people they’re working with to warm to them). But she was welcoming with us and we spent some time talking and I think we grew on her a little bit.

But it was definitely stressful. She’s a pinnacle part of the film since we’re featuring “Leakey’s Angels” and she’s one of the two surviving ones, and so we had some complex sequences planned to film with her. Now you might think having a cup of coffee with a world-famous scientist on her veranda in a National Park should be a simple thing to shoot- but not so! We’d gotten rushed because Dr. Birute’s time with us got very much shortened by her busy schedule and then the day we did have to film with her in Camp Leakey, there was also a small Lithuanian film crew there trying to do a documentary on her as well. Now bear in mind, this didn’t phase Dr. Birute in the least, she’s made dozens of documentaries, and this isn’t even her first 3D film! Just last year they released “Born to Be Wild” a 3D IMAX movie about Bornean orangutan and Kenyan elephant orphans. (I recommend it highly!) But she did also point out that that 3D crew was huge and they were filming with her for a month. So once again, it reminded us that we’re trying to do a huge task with less people, less time, and less resources, so things do tend to get hectic.

Our filming with Dr. Birute was going really well, we did a beautiful but complicated sequence of me arriving in a boat and walking with her on the long boardwalk into the park. But that involved working around some wild orangutans who were irritated with us because we wanted to park our boat right where they were trying to bathe. Dr. Birute was shocked at how aggressive they were being- even with her. All of this shooting was taking place in the midday sun, at about 100 degrees F, with almost 100% humidity, so I was bathed in sweat for most of it. (So I will NOT be looking fresh as a daisy in this film- no one will wonder whether or not I had a hair and makeup trailer- that’s for sure!) When it came time to film the ‘having tea on the veranda’ sequence, we were losing light fast, the 3D crew were trying to film as fast as they could, Mike was filming for the television series and also his “The Making Of’’ movie because lots of funny and annoying things were going on while we were filming, and the Lithuanians were also filming. So I’m not sure if it’s a world record or not, but in this one hour, 4 films were being made simultaneously of Dr. Birute!

The funniest thing was, Siswi of course had to be part of the action, and many other orangutans also like to gather close when Dr. Birute is there, so at any moment during filming, there was all sorts of orangutan action in the trees around us. But Siswi has plonked herself right in front of us, and when Mark and Ben were trying to film on the dolly, she just kept grabbing the tripod and stopping it from moving back and forth! So the rangers tried to lure her away with a sweet, milky cup of coffee. But that didn’t’ work because she slurped it down in a few seconds and went right back to being a key grip. So then they decided to give her TWO cups of coffee at once, which did work because she wandered away to drink them. So we filmed for a few minutes, free of the extra hands on the tripod and dolly, but then the same irate wild female whose bath we’d interrupted, came down out of the tree and onto the porch and was kiss-squeaking with outrage at Dr. Birute for not giving HER a cup of coffee. Meanwhile the standard slew of bush pigs were milling around hoping to get in on some snacks…Honestly, the whole thing was somewhat farcical. For me, it was fun because I sat there chatting on the porch with Dr. Birute about her life, about the orangutans, and having a good laugh. It felt a bit like I was sitting with St. Francis of Assisi, you know, the statue of the calm-placid saint, with all the animals just flocking to him… that’s how Dr. Birute is. So whether or not that particular ‘tea on the veranda’ sequence ends up in the film, it’ll be a real GEM for the “Making Of”.

A few days later, when it was time to leave and head on to Sumatra, Dr. Birute gave us the most incredible compliment. She said “I’m actually sad to see you guys go, and I NEVER say that to people”…. to which her assistant laughed and said “That’s true, she DOESN’T ever say that”. And then Dr. Birute continued to Jeremy “you know, you guys said you were different to other film crews and I didn’t believe you, but you really ARE different, and it’s been a pleasure to have you.” That was the most wonderful thing to hear. Now I just hope that our film will do justice to her character, her work, her orangutans and her legacy.

Holly meets Dr Birute Galdikas at Camp Leakey

Filming can be quite boring and these guys made that clear

Filming from the boat

Holly looks at Tut and Thor through the dining room window

Yes you're cute but you still can’t come in

Tut and Thor would like to join us for Lunch

Two orangutans watch the show

The new key grip lacks training

The veranda scene with Siswi as key grip

Touched by an orangutan… and not with her teeth

We were wandering around Camp Leakey, looking for animals in trees to film, and just as we’d finished shooting a nice sequence and were going to carry our gear back to the boat we spotted a female with an infant quite far down the boardwalk. I knelt down and started to photograph her with my long lens and the guys got the 3D camera in position to film her. We were hoping to get a cool ‘two shot’…or ‘three shot’ as it were since there were two orangutans and myself. As I sat there, she got closer and closer, we had a guide with us and he told us it was Akmad. This was so special for me because I remembered reading about Akmad and she’s one of my favorites from Dr. Birute Galdikas’ book Reflections of Eden so I was glad to even be seeing her on my visit. Akmad was the first ex-captive that Dr. Birute had rescued in 1971 and re-released to the wild and she is one of the oldest females there now, likely in her late 40’s or early 50’s. Dr. Birute described Akmad as a young orangutan this way: “Akmad was a lady. She had a gentle way about her. She never ran, she always walked. She never grabbed, she always reached. Even her squeal had a daintiness that the vocalizations of other orangutans lacked. How human she appeared, like an orange gnome, with her intelligent, quietly inquisitive face.”

As I sat on the boardwalk and she approached, she just started to walk right up to me. (Now at this point, I did not know what was happening to Jeremy with Siswi in another part of camp, and I’d only seen very docile orangutans here, but was still wary of getting too close to them).

Mark and Ben assured me they’d seen her earlier and she’d walked right up to them and gently touched their legs, so they told me to stay where I was (the camera had a beautiful view of us). So I did, and she got so close to me that in any other situation I would have moved away, but there was nowhere for me to go. At the very least I looked away as you do with the gorillas or chimps, so as not to threaten them. But orangutans are different, they don’t mind eye contact, and if anything they seem to want to look into your eyes so that they can make a decision about who and what kind of person you are. Ben whispered for me to look at her, assuring me that it was okay. When I did I could see her tiny infant (one of the littlest we’d seen so far) just peeking around her at me. They were both leaning towards me, Akmad looking right at my face as if she was trying to smell my breath. She was so close to me that I could have turned my head and kissed her without moving my body! (Which of course, I DID NOT do). They stayed like that for a moment and then walked past the camera and down the boardwalk.

What an incredible experience, Akmad had basically just greeted me and moved on. It’s a moment I won’t ever forget… and that you will get to see if you go watch The Last of the Great Apes.

Akmad and her infant approach at Camp Leakey

Akmad and her infant come closer

and closer still

Beautiful old Akmad

holding hands

juvenile plays in the reeds

Jeremy takes one for the team

Siswe, as it turns out is spelled Siswi. And another fact I got wrong in the first Camp Leakey blog, is that Siswi is not a wild-born ex-captive, she’s in fact totally wild, born in the wild, but her mother was an ex-captive that used to come to Camp Leakey and bring her along, so Siswi growing up with a familiarity of humans, and at some point decided she’d rather spend lots of time in Camp, than in the forest. I’m telling you this because it’s relevant to this next story. You see, as you wander around Camp Leakey, with animals everywhere you look, it’s easy to become complacent, to drop your guard, and to forget these are wild animals. I mean, Siswi was playing in a rain poncho for 15 minutes for crying out loud! What I didn’t tell you about that was that when Mike and I filmed Siswi performing this way, Jeremy was quite stressed about the 3D team getting the shots they needed, and he just didn’t want to stop and watch her and it was clear that he wasn’t interested. And she very much noticed this. Honestly, you can watch that animal for just a short time to know that she is perceptive and she really does get annoyed if you are not making her the center of your attention. And I’ve been told by various people who work with orangutans- they hold grudges.

Much later in the day we’d been filming out by where the boat docks, and Jeremy headed back to Camp to let Craig know we were going to have lunch on the boat, and he walked back along the boardwalks on his own instead of taking one of the guides. He saw Siswi on the boardwalk and went to walk past her. (This in itself shows the level of complacency we’d gotten to, because you’d NEVER try that with any of the other great apes, but these guys are just so docile, you sort of forget the basics of primate manners: never supplant a dominant animal (i.e. you don’t move an animal out of it’s place by advancing on it, you wait for it to move off). So Siswi grabbed Jeremy’s hand. He thought that was sweet and he held her hand for a second, but if I know Jeremy it was with an air of (“oh Siswi this is lovely, but I really need to walk a long distance just to tell Craig that it’s lunch time and we have so much to do today!”) And after just a second of holding hands she bit his calf- HARD - and didn’t let go. At first he thought she’d stop, but she didn’t let go so he started screaming for help. After an entire minute some rangers came running, and just their advancing presence shooed her off. Jeremy was fine, thankfully the teeth hadn’t pierced the fabric of his pants but he was bruised and the skin abraded from the force.

He arrived back at the boat and calmly told us what happened and was quite stoic about the whole thing, you know, no big deal, as if you get bitten by wild orangutans all the time. It was a pretty nasty looking wound and I was shocked and asked him to replay every detail, how he approached her, how he moved, trying to assess WHY she did it. And I found myself trying to think through her thoughts sometimes from a basic primate behavior perspective (supplanting, feeling threatened on the narrow dock, etc.) but the fact that she gently held his hand first was really throwing me off. And I couldn’t help but feel it was something else. Why him? Why now? We’d all been around her a lot, why on the boardwalk? But when I told Dr. Birute about it, I said that I had this crazy anthropomorphic theory that because she seemed to really thrive on attention, and he’d been clearly dismissive of her antics earlier in the day, that she somehow didn’t like him for it and was lashing out. She asked a few questions and had me describe how he wasn’t interested in us filming her (which he was expressing verbally and of course non-verbally with body language) and then she asked a bit more detail about when she bit him and when Dr. Birute heard she was alone on the boardwalk with none of the (dominant) Indonesian rangers around, she said she thought I was absolutely right, that she was annoyed with him from earlier and was just expressing that. Although she added that the bite probably wasn’t quite meant to be as damaging as it turned out, Dr. Birute felt that it was a ‘gnaw’ rather than a bite, something orangutans do to one another that doesn’t hurt and pointed out that she didn’t even break the skin- whereas what’s she’s capable of would have ripped his calf muscle off. She reiterated that these are wild animals, and bites happen and that it’s something to be aware of…

Siswi relaxes on the boardwalk

When we need to pass, our guides shoo off Siswi and she gets down and wades in the swamp

This is just a harmless yawn, but Jeremy experienced a less adorable moment with those teeth

Good thing Siswi only gnawed on Jeremy, a real bite could have been worse

Orangutan in a bag

Many of us have seen funny behaviors from apes in zoos, and they’re doing it because they’re bored out of their minds, and giving them toys and foreign objects to play with is a form of enrichment. But here at Camp Leakey in Borneo, these orangutans are wild-born EX-captive animals that have been rehabilitated and released into a protected forest. So they can spend as much time as they want in the forest, but choose to be around humans for entertainment occasionally.

So when we arrived outside the main dining room building at Camp Leakey today, Siswi arrived shortly thereafter. (Many of the orangutans here will similarly head thru the forest to the long boardwalks leading to the boat docks to see the visitors when they arrive, once that excitement is over they tend to go back to feeding and other ‘wild’ behaviors in the forest.) She was sitting there watching us, but because we were prepping to film, we soon had our attention elsewhere. Then I saw her wander into an outdoor cooking area, so Mike and I returned to take photos of her, and she got into seemingly one of her favorite positions- prostrate on her back, legs akimbo, but each hand holding a foot, completed with a totally relaxed upside-down look into our eyes. It looked like some sort of orange ape yoga pose. We photographed her a bit but then wandered off to go get the gear ready. Then Siswi decided to up the ante, so she grabbed a thin plastic rain poncho, walked around the front of the dining hall, and began putting it on, and playing around inside it. That was too good to resist, so we filmed that for a bit. She really seemed to enjoy just playing in it, sometimes getting entirely inside it and then rolling on the ground, sometimes poking her face through the arm holes. (The perfectionist humans of course were waiting for her to put it on ‘properly’ with her head poking out of the hood, so we kept waiting for that. But this was not a human, it was an orangutan playing with an article of clothing she’d seen humans wear, and often I had this feeling that her intentions oscillated between general enjoyment and manipulation of us through our reactions.) I was amazed again at how gentle she was, stretching and playing inside this thin film of plastic, but never destroying it, though I myself find it hard to get into those things without ruining them. She did her yoga pose inside the rain poncho and we eventually had to wander back to our preparations. We were off to film the orangutans at the feeding station.

The ex-captive now wild orangutans that live here in Tanjung Puting National Park need to have their diet augmented by a feeding station, but that’s because sadly, the acreage in the park does not provide enough wild food to support the hundreds of animals that have been released here. So each day at the same time, bananas and milk are brought to a platform in the forest and any orangutans in the area can come to eat. Seasonally, when fruits are more plentiful in the forest, attendance at these feedings is lower, showing that it may not necessarily affect their ‘wild’ behavior unless they need or want the food supplement. This feeding is also a great opportunity for tourists to see many orangutans together and interacting (which is quite rare in the wild for these mostly solitary apes). Today the film crew and about 60 Indonesian visitors had come to see the spectacle!

Camp Leakey definitely makes for a unique tourist destination. There are not many places in the world where you’d have this kind of access to wild endangered animals. Unlike other parks where there are rangers there to protect the animals and keep the tourists to strict rules, here, there are only the ‘rangers’ hired by Dr. Birute at Camp Leakey, and for the most part they let the apes do as they please, and the visitors too for that matter. It’s all very laid back.

The purist in me struggled with the fact that I was coming into closer contact with these orangutans than I would if I were with wild apes in National Parks elsewhere. And there are wild orangutans in this park, but those rarely come to Camp Leakey. Wild apes that have never been captive, even when habituated to human presence for research or tourism, usually keep their distance and tend not to interact with people very often. For the wild-born ex-captive orangutans that frequent camp, I worried about their medical health, coming so close to humans. But I guess since they’ve been fostered by people for so many years, they’ve probably been exposed to our diseases and developed immunity to them, much like human children do. And honestly, the animal-hugger in me was enjoying the prospect of having an orangutan just stroll past me and whether they decided to dress up in a poncho, or just walk very close to me, I knew it was because they chose to.

Mike Dillon films Siswi and her poncho:

siswi and those meaningful looks

Siswi in her poncho sleeve

Siswi plays inside a poncho

Siswi looks to make sure we're still interested

More Photos from Camp Leakey

Camp Leakey photo grab bag

Perhaps some of you have noticed that my photos have gotten just a bit better, if so, thanks! But it's because Craig brought his digital SLR camera with a nice long lens and he's been letting me use it on this trip, so here's some random photos of cool stuff from Borneo and Camp Leakey- enjoy!

Camp Leakey

It was great to see the crew again, even though it was 5 am at the Melbourne airport. We arrived near Tanjung Puting National Park about two days after setting off. The travel was pretty seamless and again, miraculously, our 57 cases made it too!

Already, I’m amazed at how wonderful Indonesia is! I mean, I knew that this trip would be fun, and I was excited to see wild orangutans for the first time, but it’s as if I didn’t know just HOW cool it would be. The people here are so friendly, always smiling, helpful and they treat you very casually as if you are an old friend. To get to Rimba Lodge, which is outside the park we took a two-hour boat ride in one of the common Klotok boats which are essentially double-decker live-aboard river boats that pleasantly chug up the river. The lodge lies on the Sekonyer River, built on stilts with boardwalks connecting the buildings, right in the middle of essentially a swamp forest. It’s beautiful and had me in love right away because as we unloaded our gear I heard the distinct rustle of monkeys in the trees and a belch-like call- it was a group of proboscis monkeys just a few feet from me! These monkeys are pretty funny, the females have snooty little noses but the male has pretty much a phallus hanging from his face, but their fur looked soft as a rabbit’s, in colors of beautiful contrasting white, peachy orange and soft grey.

The next day we headed another two hours upriver to Camp Leakey. I was so excited to meet Dr. Birute Galdikas. What a unique lady! She’s one of the world’s most well-known primatologists because of her pioneering research on Bornean orangutans and her rehabilitation of hundreds of wild-born ex-captive individuals, many of whom now live free in Tanjung Puting National Park. She started this place over 40 years ago. Camp Leakey is named after Louis Leakey the paleoanthropologist who had the foresight to send three ‘untrained’ women to remote parts of the world to study our living cousins. He felt that being female and having a ‘fresh’ take on observations of these animals could lead us to a better understanding of not only the great apes, but ourselves, and he was so right! They’ve been called “Leakey’s angels”- Birute, Jane Goodall, and Dian Fossey, and each of them has left an indelible mark on primatology, anthropology and great ape conservation.

Dr. Birute (as she likes to be called) was a soft-spoken woman, had a very calm and peaceful demeanor, and invited us into the dining room and immediately began chatting with Jeremy and I. We talked about everything from filmmaking to politics, to Louis Leakey and her Baltic roots, and of course the sad state of affairs with palm oil plantations and how global demand is causing the demise of her precious apes! I wanted to hear every word she said, but right outside Siswe, a wild-born ex- captive female orangutan of surprising size and stature, and self-appointed camp ambassador, strolled up and wanted to greet us, or better yet- join us for lunch. When she didn’t get the attention she wanted, she climbed the fenced windows and looked in! I was so torn, having never seen a wild orangutan! I knew we’d get to see them here, but I didn’t know it would be this closely and within 10 minutes of walking into camp! As if to steal the limelight from Dr. Birute, she sat outside and started building a hat of leaves and throwing it on top of her head to shade her from the sun. (It is oppressively hot and humid here, the sweat drips down your face so much that your eyes burn from all the salt as if you’ve been swimming in the ocean- we’ve all been walking around red-eyed…)

As if a rotund red ape wasn’t fabulous enough, right outside the building, huge wild bush pigs with their piglets walked around camp as if they owned the place. Then an Asian civet strolled through the yard, just as a wild gibbon came to the kitchen and hung by his impossibly long arms, staring in at our lunch! I asked if he was a rehabilitant also, and Dr. Birute explained that Boswell was a wild-born gibbon, but his mother had been an ex-captive release that mated with a wild gibbon but then kept returning to Camp Leaky and bringing her son with her. So here was Boswell, a wild black-handed gibbon, just a few feet from my face, a gift to see one these guys so close because they’d usually be brachiating across the tree canopy in a blur of black. I hadn’t been there an hour, and it felt like being in the world’s most special zoo where the animals wander around freely and you get dizzy from swinging around trying to photograph them all.

Dr. Birute had a few special guests from Lithuania there visiting so we all went to her veranda and of course Siswe followed and managed to steal a few mangoes from inside her house (she’s very smart and hard to keep out of the buildings, and also I think she doesn’t have to try that hard to get Dr. Birute or the rangers to give her the fruit, as she’s clearly a camp favorite). As she lay outside eating her mangoes, you could see many of the other orangutans approaching in the trees but keeping a safe distance from her as she’s absolutely the alpha female at Camp Leakey. A cheeky juvenile walked right up onto the deck and took a mango she’d set down and she didn’t even bat an eye. Dr. Birute explained that Siswe’s incredibly tolerant of juveniles, despite the fact that the other adult females were clearly afraid of her and gave her a wide berth.

We were snapping photos and filming orangutans in trees and the wild bush piglets trying to steal mangoes from Siswe, and having a ball, totally distracted by the cool animal life all around us, but we’d foolishly set some of our stuff down. Siswe grabbed an umbrella before we realized it. Immediately one of the rangers tried to take it away from her but she was having none of it- she tried to beat him with it and then when he got hold of it, she played tug-of-war with him and won. (Duh, they have the strength of five men!) Then she proceeded to gently open it and hold it over her head as she ate her mango. Then she’d close it, and open it, close it and open it, all to the delight of the Lithuanians and our film crew! She was so funny, full of personality, and a whole lot of attitude (but with the slow, calm, calculating orangutan- sort of way). But then the head ranger strolled up and went to take the umbrella from her, and she instantly handed it over, and seemed almost penitent, as if she’d been a ‘bad girl’ and knew it. It was amazing how differently she responded to this man, who was clearly the alpha among the human rangers!

A pleasant boat ride to Camp Leakey, Borneo. (Photo by Craig Carter)

Dr. Birute and Mr. Jeremy (Photo by Holly Carroll)

Siswe the self-appointed ambassador of Camp Leakey (Photo by Holly Carroll

Sisw builds a leaf hat (Photo by Holly Carroll)

…proud of her sun hat (Photo by Holly Carroll)

No one likes to get wet while eating their mango. (Photo by Holly Carroll)

Orangutan foot and cutest big toe I’ve ever seen (Photo by Holly Carroll)

…not so different from ours (Photo by Holly Carroll).

the handsome and anatomically correct black-handed gibbon (Photo by Holly Carroll)

Am I the only one that thinks bush piglets are adorable? (Photo by Holly Carroll)

Orangutan mother and infant (Photo by Holly Carroll)

“I got the mango! I got the mango!” (Photo by Holly Carroll)

I see you up there (Photo by Holly Carroll)

Off to Indonesia to film the orange apes!

So after what felt like a very brief break, we are starting shoot two in Borneo. I'm pretty excited about this as I'll get to meet one of Louis Leakey's other famous primatologist women- Dr. Birute Galdikas. She's been working with orang utans in Borneo about as long as Jane Goodall was in Gombe. After that we'll travel to Sumatra to meet Ian Singleton who is fighting to save wild Sumatran orang utans.

Then we head to Kyoto where Dr. Matsuzawa works with one of the smartest apes in the world- a chimpanzee named Ai who can memorize sequences of numbers better than many humans! This trip will be very different from Africa and among other things, I'm looking forward to lots of noodles! Stay tuned for updates when I get there....

Jane’s House

Now normally, it’s not recommended that you swim in fresh water in Africa because hippos and crocodiles are a serious hazard. But we were told this area of Lake Tanganyika was free from those animals. Which was good because it was SO hot in this part of western Tanzania that we’d spend much of the day sweating profusely, and the water was so perfectly cool and clean that to swim in there was irresistible.

But the very first day that Ben enjoyed a long morning swim, he saw a weird object only 50 meters in front of him. Not yet wearing his contacts and being unfamiliar with the shape, he watched it for a while, and could still hardly believe his eyes when a hippopotamus slowly emerged from the lake, walked across the narrow strip of beach and disappeared into the forest! Needless to say, Ben vacated the water very swiftly and did not swim again that day. We were all then assured by Anton that Ben’s sighting must have been the ‘once-per-year’ hippo and it would be perfectly safe for us to continue to bathe in the lake….

We had a wonderful and challenging few days of filming. Because the chimps were feeding on these tiny delicious berries called ‘monkey fruits’, they were very widely dispersed throughout the park. We were treated to much vigorous hiking but rewarded with some stellar chimpanzee moments. We’d gone from thinking we’d never get good footage, to getting some really beautiful sequences including fishing for termites!! But the highlight for me was filming at Jane’s house. It’s an incredibly humble home, nestled right in the forest just a few feet from the beach. It, like all the houses, has caged windows so the baboons and chimps can’t get inside. But it was filled with stacks of old books, bones, beach rocks, and other curious finds, that Jane and other researchers had accumulated over the years. To be there felt so special, and weirdly reverent, and the whole crew could feel it. We filmed a little sequence of me visiting the house and just as we finished, Ferdinand, the dominant male chimp in the community strolled right past the house! He didn’t seem particularly interested in us, just passing along the trail and going off into the forest. The sun was nearly setting, I was in the home of one of my all-time heroes, the cameras were rolling, and a chimp chose that moment to visit, and I thought: what did I ever do to get THIS lucky?!

The guys were definitely riding the high of such a great afternoon of filming, and we joked around on the beach as we waited for ideal light for the final shot of me walking down the beach at sunset. I was so grateful that after being together nearly every waking minute of 70 days, running back and forth across Africa, thru fun times and some pretty tough times, we were not only still talking to one another, but joking around, laughing and generally enjoying this lovely little crew of ours. These guys had so graciously put up with my idiosyncracies (and each other’s) like true gentleman! As the sun set that night on Lake Tanganyika, it was also setting on this first film shoot. We’d done it! Our little crew of seven had filmed each of the African apes in the wild in 3D! And though we have a long way to go to finish this film, we can congratulate ourselves on being the first team to do it!

Ben swims in Lake Tanganyika and then 50 meters away a hippo gets out of the water and walks up the beach and Ben nearly s#@ts himself. (Photo by Mike Dillon).

Mark and Stu luxuriate in the lake after a long day of filming, hippos be damned (Photo by Ben Cunningham)

Holly at Jane Goodall’s house in Gombe National Park (Mike Dillon).

Sometimes the chimps like to visit Jane’s house, this one just happened to be the highest ranking male in the community, Ferdinand. (Photo by Mike Dillon).

Even after 70 days together in the field we’re still having a good time. I LOVE these guys! (Photo by Mike Dillon).

A perfect ending to our first film shoot (Photo by Ben Cunningham).

Gombe Stream

For someone who’s been interested in primates and reading Jane Goodall’s books since I was young, visiting Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania is a bit like making a pilgrimage to a sacred place. For this reason, it is hard to write this blog. Mainly because I would need to write a dissertation on Jane Goodall’s entire body of work including her research, conservation education and her humanitarian and peace-making efforts if I wanted to do it justice. So I will do my best to keep this brief …

This national park is shockingly small, only about 35 square kilometers just a two-hour boat ride from Kigoma, in Western Tanzania and it is home to over 100 wild chimpanzees that have been studied for over 50 years. Gombe is stunningly beautiful- the forest trundles down the mountains to the edge of the lapping waves of Lake Tanganyika. This lake is SO BIG you forget it’s a lake and you keep thinking its an ocean. There’s olive baboons wandering all over the place, as well as many other monkeys, and of course the famous chimpanzee families of Jane’s books are there. Many of the individuals I remember reading about have passed away but you can still see Gremlin and her grandchildren, and the “F” brothers Freud, Frodo and Ferdinand (who have been ruling the group for over a decade, each in turn.)

This community of chimpanzees and the work of Jane Goodall have taught us so much about the great apes, and about ourselves. Here is where Jane first documented chimps using tools, (which meant that we had to redefine the living primate known as ‘human’ since we’d distinguished ourselves from other animals with our ‘tool-use’). It’s also pertinent to point out that there are many long-term great ape studies that are less well-known and very much under-publicized compared to Jane Goodall’s research, but Gombe just feels like where it all started. Where we became enlightened about the fact that there are other sentient beings out there, and they’re smart, complicated, have personalities, and engage in war- just like us. And it was JANE that found that out, and shared it with the world. Just a young English woman, much younger than I am now, who went to this crazy, wild forest, set up shop and started walking every day looking for chimpanzees just hoping to get a glimpse of them so she could learn something.

To put this in perspective, on my first day out in the park, a guide met up with us at 8 am and we set out walking. Now Gombe may be small, but it makes up for it in vertical area! The hills are incredibly steep and the forest quite dense. We hiked on relatively good paths for hours and never caught up with any of the chimpanzees. Despite having guides who had radio contact with other park staff and researchers, we would contact someone who had a chimp in sight, but by the time we hiked up to the ridge they were on, the chimps would have moved quickly off in dense foliage and would be too hard to catch up with! And these are habituated chimps, which means that they don’t mind human presence at all, they allow themselves to be observed and their usual behavior isn’t affected by the observations. Yet, we couldn’t find any chimpanzees! So I was hiking up these hills (and so was the film crew with tons of gear) and we were getting skunked with no showings of chimps! So I couldn’t help but think back to 1960, when Jane was there pretty much by herself, in the forest with no guides, no pre-cut trails, just slogging through the hills and valleys, hoping to catch a view of the chimps, who would undoubtedly scream and run when they saw her, even from a mile away! And yet she persevered for months and even years until they would accept her presence. That’s the kind of determination that I can’t even fathom. I mean, I would love to be that cool, but I’m such a hedonist- I want some sort of pay-off and the fact that I was a bit frustrated after hiking for ONE afternoon without getting our allotted hour with the chimps seems ridiculous when you consider Jane spent weeks traipsing thru that forest and up those mountains looking for just signs of them! She found a great ridge with a view across two valleys (later named Jane’s Peak) where she’d camp out at night and because she could see or hear the chimps and figure out where they were nesting, she could then try to anticipate the direction they were going and hike across and intercept them the next morning!

We hiked to Jane’s Peak with Anton Collins, the head of the baboon research (one of the under-appreciated longest running primate studies in the world). He’s a lovely person with such a humble, quiet demeanor, and very sharp, dry humor. After 40 years here, he still loves walking through the park, and sharing the wonders of the plants and the animals with guests. Standing there with Anton and the film crew, sweating like a faucet, and looking out over the steep ridges and valleys to the ocean-like lake was just magnificent! And it just gave me even more respect for Jane, knowing that she hiked up there by herself, and slept there at night! (I’m a bit afraid of the dark so the thought of that terrifies me!)

I considered how I’ve been so spoiled on this trip, getting to experience all these wild apes after others have come before me and done years of grueling work to habituate, study and protect them, so I can have a perfect ‘tourist’ experience with them. So as I hiked down the hill without seeing a chimpanzee I was still happy for the good work-out and content knowing I’d be here nearly a week and just needed to be patient.

But as we walked along the beach and through the small park village, which consists of a few houses with caged verandas (so the staff and their families can eat their meals and hang their clothes without getting raided by baboons and chimps), we saw Gremlin and her daughter Golden with a baby and a juvenile named Gizmo! There they were, just walking through the buildings! We hurriedly got cameras ready and started filming, and we got a completely unanticipated ‘two shot’ (with me and the chimps in frame!) I was so overjoyed by this, just standing there a few feet from our accomodation, getting such a good look at three wild chimps. And for it to be Gremlin who’s nearly 40, and her daughter and the infant, was just wonderful! Then out of the bushes came the cheeky Gizmo, and he threw a rock at my feet and then stared at me as if to say “I just threw a rock at you- you got a problem with that?!” Instantly my primatology training kicked in and I did the necessary thing: I started scratching myself and looking intently at nothing in particular. This tactic was effective; he got bored and wandered off back to his family. It was a pre-meditated move on Gizmo’s part because he had the rock in his hand before he emerged from the brush and onto the path. He may have just been showing off, but more likely he was communicating with me that, perhaps I was standing too close to his family, because there was a reason he chose to throw a rock at me, and not the other people standing much further away. So though I felt a pang of guilt, it was a magic moment to have an interaction with a wild chimpanzee. That kind of connection is something Jane worked years for and I was blessed with on my first day at Gombe. Thank you SO much Jane Goodall, for giving a total stranger one of the greatest moments of her life.

The beautiful boat ride on Lake Tanganyika to Gombe Stream National Park (Photo by Mike Dillon)

The chimpanzees were hard to find because they were feeding on ‘monkey fruit’ which causes them to disperse widely throughout the park (Photo by Ben Cunningham).

A wild chimpanzee at Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania (Photo by Holly Carroll)

Gremlin strolls along, her mouth filled with a ‘food wadge’ of delicious monkey fruit seeds (photo by Ben Cunningham)

Are we there yet? (Photo by Mike Dillon).

Holly and Anton Collins at Jane’s Peak (Photo by Ben Cunningham).

The ‘G’ family of chimpanzees (Photo by Holly Carroll)

Not easy to film when they’re in the trees….(Photo by Holly Carroll)

Brazzaville market selling bushmeat

Brazzaville, Republic of Congo

Brazzaville is quite a nice city, MUCH nicer than Kinshasa, its neighbor just across the Congo river. We stayed in a quirky hotel that had vegas-like blinking lights outside and an inordinate number of paintings of semi-nude women, but it was pretty comfortable- had air con and cold drinks, AND was walking distance from a divine patisserie. So for breakfast we gorged on espresso, pan au chocolate and ham and cheese croissants! (You gotta love that French influence.) I even got a much-needed massage, though you get what you pay for and for 40 bucks, the lady brings her own cheezy Congolese music videos on a small player, and is not afraid to argue with a family member on the phone while working out the kinks in your back.

But the REAL reason we were here, other than the lovely amenities that the bustling city provided, was to meet Naftali Honig. He helps the local government to enforce the wildlife protection laws by doing undercover investigations and collecting evidence to help put poachers and people selling live apes behind bars. He had been given some of our 3D Go-pro cameras for his team to use on undercover operations, too dangerous for us to film ourselves. So we met up with him to pick up the cameras. On the day we met he’d just heard they were openly selling bush meat out of season in a big local market. He suggested I go with him to check it out. We brought cameras that looked like tourist cameras, but could record video on the sly, and just pretended to be a travelling couple. What we saw wasn’t too disturbing thankfully, but there were definitely some bush pigs and monkeys that were out of season. Some animals such as monkeys are legal to kill, but because the meat is usually smoked it’s hard to tell what species it is, and when it was killed, i.e. it can be hard to prosecute for selling bush meat out of season.

Naftali did not pursue these cases, but while we were there his team showed us some very troubling footage of a man keeping a baby chimp in a crate and trying to sell him. (After leaving Naftali sent us an update, and thankfully the man was arrested and the chimp confiscated.)

When a chimp is confiscated, Naftali explained that it isn’t the good news. It actually means the conservation system has failed. Yes, the chimp is no longer in the hands of some illegal dealer, but it also has a very small chance of ever returning to the wild, so is essentially ecologically dead to it’s species. If it survives, it goes into a sanctuary or zoo, where it will cost at minimum $350 per month to care for, for the rest of its life, which can be more than 50 years! To drive the point home, he took me to meet a tiny chimp who’d been confiscated that week. She was being cared for by a vet named Virginia who was making sure she was healthy enough to travel to Tchimpounga, the sanctuary she was headed to. The first thing I noticed was how tiny she was for her age, and how big and pleading her eyes were. She was actually quite calm but who knows what tragedy she’d seen in her short life.

One of her arms was a stump from the elbow down, the vets didn’t know what would have caused an injury like that, and she seemed to be used to it, but it wouldn’t help her chances for ever being reintroduced to the wild. (Later I found out from Debby Cox, who runs Tchimpounga that she arrived at the sanctuary on an Anzac Day, an Australian holiday commemorating it’s war veterans, and being an amputee and a survivor, they named this little chimp Anzac.)

She was so cute I wanted to pick her up and hold her forever and never let her go. Unfortunately, that’s the problem. That’s why people want them as pets, but they don’t stay cute and sweet for long, they’re wild animals, and when we incarcerate them, and separate them from their species, they mature, become incredibly strong, mentally unstable animals that can hurt us. That’s what makes it so hard to care for them in captivity, those loving babies, once older cannot be safely handled by humans anymore.

When it was time to say goodbye to little Anzac, the vet went to put her in a small kennel for the night, and as she was pulling her off her body, Anzac screamed and cried trying desperately to keep a hold of this surrogate mama, rather than go in the cage by herself at night. The crying lasted only a few minutes, but it’s burned in my brain for a lifetime. It was painful because I knew her wild chimpanzee mother would never put her down at that age, never make her sleep alone, she’d be allowed to cling to her mom and be in contact with her for years, until she was more independent. But she doesn’t have a real mom. She has human care-givers now, and we can do our best to give her a healthy life, but we can’t ever give her the life she’d experience in the wild. So as Naftali says, it’s ever important to make sure the wild habitats are protected, that wildlife laws are observed, and that people who break those laws are punished as a dis-incentive to others who consider illegal activities. So I’m glad he’s there doing his job, because though I liked meeting Anzac, I hope to never meet another orphaned ape in her circumstance ever again.

Confiscated chimpanzee Anzac just before she travelled to Tchimpounga Chimpanzee Sanctuary, Republic of Congo (Photo by Mike Dillon):

On our way to Brazzaville, Republic of Congo, on a fuel stop in the small town of Ouesso, we were able to photograph some bush meat for sale. (Photo by Ben Cunningham).

I’m not familiar enough with wildlife laws to know if these particular monkeys were harvested legally for bush meat, but it was very hard for me to see that people eat these. (Photo by Ben Cunningham).

#brazzaville #congo #bushmeat #illegal pet trade #chimpanzee

Mark and the Itchy Elephant

After being at Mondika for a week, we started the long trek back to Brazzaville. We had to overnight at a camp in Bomassa, which was an idyllic spot along the river, and just as we were waiting to go on a guided walk to a local lake where we’d possibly see an elephant, we were treated to a visit by a big bull right in camp. This guy was pretty used to people, obviously a frequenter of camp, and though he looks big, he’s a forest elephant- so much smaller than his savannah counterparts.

What was so great, is that here’ s Mark, the seasoned wildlife cameraman, who after 8 weeks of filming had provoked not a single bit of ire in all the apes we filmed, but on this particular morning, he happened to get in the way of a particularly itchy elephant… (Thanks to Ian Redmond for posting this funny youtube video. Well, Mark may not find it that funny).

Western Lowland Silverback, fireman style!

#western lowland gorilla

Western Lowland Gorillas

By the time we got to Mondika, the crew was looking pretty ragged, ready for a day off, some of us were sick, and we might have been getting just a little tired of each other.

It was a great place to have some rest time, with tents nestled right in the forest, and a cool, clean stream to bathe in. (We also had the most clean, odorless and bug-free drop toilets I’ve ever experienced, which means a lot when recovering from food poisoning.) The site manager, Mike Stucker, and his crew took great care of us! Despite being so far from the nearest town, we were well fed! I never knew how good you could make Spam taste, or how creative you could get with it! They threw a party in honor of Ian’s 58th birthday, complete with a homemade cake and we proceeded to drink pretty much ALL of the camp’s alcoholic rations.

Once we were all renewed, it was time to film some wild gorillas, and man, was that a daunting task! Somehow this felt like the hottest place we’d been, with temps in the 100’s and so humid you were constantly dripping sweat. The vegetation in the forest was dry, and the trails were wide, flat and easy to walk to from camp, but the gorillas would travel into dense thickets of vines that made it hard to get any direct visibility. Then there were the sweat bees! These are tiny, non-stinging bees the size of small flies, but what makes them unbearable is the densities with which they swarm you, and that they fly into your eyelashes and get stuck in your eyeballs! They crawl into your ears and buzz around, tickling your ear canals, and are absolutely maddening! I longed for my Alaskan head net! There would be times when we’d be filming, when I’d have to run away to another area, flagellating myself the whole time with a wad of branches, and then come back in front of the camera and hope they could get the shot they needed of me in two seconds because I couldn’t stay still without swearing longer than that! The funny thing is they’d be filming ‘cut-aways’ of me- which is when they show my face reacting to the beauty and wonder of these magnificent apes (that by this time have long since moved on). And yes, they are amazing to watch, but when they’re now gone and bees are crawling under my eyelashes, trying look’ blissfully in awe’ takes slightly better acting skills than I possess. The upside is we got some gems for the gag reel.

Sweat bees aside, Western Lowland gorillas are absolutely charming! To me, the females and juveniles look a bit more like people than their eastern relations. Possibly just because their shorter hair reveals quite a human-like physique, but their faces were also so expressive! I also particularly like that the western lowland gorillas have rich red hair on their heads! They climb trees more often (going after fruits), and then descend fireman-style down the trunks, which was fun to watch!

After a week of filming and perseverance, we ended up with possibly some of our best gorilla footage yet! The guys were working so hard, and we’d been through a lot, but it had paid off, and the look of elation and relief on Mark’s dripping, bee-covered face as he said “I think we just got the movie’s opening sequence!” made it all worth it!

Cozy tent in the forest (Photo by Holly Carroll)

The crew in the dining room at Wildlife Conservation Society’s Mondika camp (photo by Mike Dillon)

…sometimes it’s the little things in life…(Photo by Ben Cunningham)

Birthday boy Ian Redmond in Mondika (Photo by Mike Dillon)

Sweat bees on your back are so much better than in your eyeballs, which is where they prefer to be.

Because Mike Stucker with Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) isn’t just a great camp manager and gorilla researcher, but also a skilled photographer, I’ll include his photos here instead of my rubbish ones.

Sadly Salumbi, a juvenile Western Lowland Gorilla, died of natural causes (back injury) just after the crew left Mondika. R.I.P, Salumbi.

Three Days to Mondika

From Rwanda it was time to head to the Republic of the Congo, to a very remote research site called Mondika near the border with Cameroon and Central African Republic. There we’d get to film western lowland gorillas, the most numerous of the gorilla species, and the kind you most commonly see in zoos. I was pretty excited, but had to try to sustain that through three full days of travel to get there!

It was long and mostly boring (which for me and travel is actually the GOOD news). I know how lucky I am to be doing this job- seeing so many rare animals in far away corners of the world, but the price we pay for that is LOTS of travel time, and lots of shifting of gear. So once again, I tried to find the small wonderful moments in those long, hot days (and also tried to find the refreshing cold beverages.)

One last charter with our good friends Kin Avia Air. Excellent food and service, and an uneventful series of landings- what more could you want? (Photo by Craig Carter):

We were so bored waiting all day at a hotel in Ouesso that we actually tried to do some yoga…wish I’d get this bored MORE often! (Photo by Mike Dillon).

All this stuff AND this man has to fit in a CANOE? (Photo by Mike Dillon).

All the gear DID fit and Mark had a lovely ride to Bomassa (Photo by Mike Dillon).

… as good a place as any for a flat tire….(Photo by Mike Dillon)

As we wait for a car ferry, we assume the standard travel positions (Photo by Mike Dillon)

A photography pit stop along the Sangha river (Photo by Holly Carroll)

It was so nice to finally see some massive trees! (Photo by Mike Dillon)

The three-hour hike through the forest was actually really refreshing after all that travel…until my food poisoning kicked in…(Photo by Mike Dillon).

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