The Knuckle-Walking Wounded

Natural History, Oct, 2000 by Martin N. Muller

In Uganda, chimpanzees are sometimes caught in poachers' snares.

Climbing a steep trail in Kibale Forest National Park, I stopped briefly to listen for chimpanzees. The forest was quiet, save for the squabbling of red colobus monkeys in the valley below. Occasionally the tumult was punctuated by the shrill cry of East Africa's ubiquitous red-chested cuckoo: Wip wip weeoo, "it will rain." Clear skies contradicted the bird's gloomy forecast as I continued up the slope toward a huge fruiting Mimusops tree, where there was evidence the apes had been feeding.

I discovered three of them eating the immature fruits in the tree's spreading crown. With my binoculars, I identified middle-aged Kabarole and her twelve-year-old son, Kakama. The third individual was harder to distinguish, although she was clearly a juvenile female. "Do we have a female that has a wire snare on her right hand?" I asked Christopher Katongole, one of the Ugandan field assistants from Kibale. "No. The snare must be new," replied Christopher, "and it's wrapped around all four of her fingers below the knuckles." I could also see where the thick, multistranded wire had cut her right hand, creating an open, raw wound. Suddenly she turned, and we saw that her left hand was missing at the wrist. It was Nectar.

I had come to this 300-square-mile equatorial forest in southwestern Uganda to conduct research for my doctoral dissertation on the behavior of wild chimpanzees. When I first arrived in January 1996, Nectar was a precocious and independent seven-year-old whose elfin countenance belied a rather sober disposition. Her mother, Finger, had given birth days before my arrival, so Nectar had a baby brother, Pollen, to occupy her attention. Nectar herself, however, was disabled. Nine months earlier, a poacher's snare had caught her left hand, and although she tore free from the wooden pole to which the snare was anchored, the loop of wire remained firmly embedded in her wrist. For three months, it worked its way deeper and deeper into the flesh, causing her hand to swell, rot, and eventually fall off. A human sustaining such a ghastly wound would probably have died without medical intervention. Wild chimpanzees, though, are amazingly tough, and Nectar was tougher than most. She survived the ordeal and learned to cope with her handicap. Her stump couldn't bear much weight, but she was able to limp through the forest on three limbs. She fed and groomed herself with her unimpaired right hand. If her right arm itched, she scratched it by rubbing against a tree.

Now, two years later, Nectar had stumbled into another snare, and the wire had already started to cut into the fingers of her right hand. As we headed back to camp with the grim news, I wondered whether she would lose this hand too--and, without it, whether she had much chance of surviving. It seemed unlikely. To feed, she was obliged to pull branches toward her with her stump and to pluck fruit with her lips. She couldn't use her hands to walk, so she shuffled awkwardly on two legs. It was harrowing to watch her negotiate the canopy while wobbling like a drunken tightrope walker. Removing the snare, however, would require shooting Nectar with a tranquilizer dart, a complicated and risky procedure.

Wild animals are protected throughout Uganda--not just in the national parks. So all hunting is, in fact, poaching. Most of the poachers in Kibale are subsistence farmers who cultivate maize, cassava, millet, bananas, and plantains in the fertile hills just north of the equator and east of the Ruwenzori Mountains. Few are dependent on bushmeat to feed their families, and they set snares only for bushpigs, bushbucks, and duikers. Unfortunately, the snares are just as likely to catch humans, elephants, or chimpanzees. To humans wandering in the park, snares are mere irritants (albeit alarming ones) to be untangled from one's boot. To elephants, they are trifles to be crushed with impunity. But to chimpanzees, they are land mines in the forest. Striking without warning, they cause terror and suffering, and frequently leave their victims mutilated or dead.

The snares are exquisitely simple devices that take poachers less than half an hour to construct. One end of a strong, flexible pole is anchored in the ground; the other end is bowed down to a shallow, camouflaged pit, where it is connected to a loop of wire or nylon rope. When an animal steps on the camouflage, its foot lands in the pit, triggering the release of the bent pole, which causes the snare to tighten around the foot. Humans who unwittingly step into a snare are sometimes wrenched off their feet; most animals panic, pulling the wire tighter as they try to escape. Poachers may wait ten days or more before checking their traps; in the meantime some animals die.

Chimpanzees are tremendously strong and, if ensnared, generally tear the loop of wire from the pole or rip the pole from the ground. In 1996 a made chimpanzee we called Big Brown (the former alpha male in our study group) carried a six-foot pole tucked under his arm for more than fifteen days before it separated from the wire, which to this day binds two of his fingers together. Such wires commonly stay put for months or years, invariably causing pain and regularly producing amputees like Nectar.