How I lost my hat

On Saturday my wife and I took a trip to see the Bonobo chimpanzees. There’s a reserve just outside Kinshasa called Lola Ya Bonobo that cares for orphaned Bonobos. These chimps can only be found in the DRC and are facing extinction. I remember reading a long article about the Bonobos in the New Yorker last year, and the article talked about how some researchers are questioning the Bonobo’s reputation as “hippie” chimps. They have this reputation due to their calm dispositions, peaceful ways, and proclivity for sexual relations. Not much is known about Bonobo behavior since they’re so rare, and what little published research there is was written up by a Dutch primatologist who observed captive, not wild, Bonobos in the 1980s. Current research is disputing his findings to say that wild Bonobos can be aggressive and kill each other; they don’t just lie around all day and eat bugs and have sex. The New Yorker article is a good read because it talks a little bit about Kinshasa and the rest of the DRC as well as profile the Bonobos. As a matter of fact, an article was just published yesterday reporting that Bonobos do hunt and kill other chimps – the researcher mentioned in this article is the same one who is extensively profiled in the New Yorker piece.

The reserve was pretty nice – it’s $5 per person to get in and a tour guide showed us around and talked about the Bonobos. They live on an enormous jungle reservation (30 hectares, or around 75 acres) and the reserve is split into three large sections that hold three groups of chimps of varying ages. The Bonobos like visitors and when we approached an open section of jungle, our tour guide called out and a group of seven or eight Bonobos ambled down out of the forest to the fence to see us. They were most excited about food (bananas, naturally – see, all those cartoons I watched as a kid didn’t fill my head with useless knowledge) and began to climb on the fence and stick their hands through for some food.

I went to take a picture of my wife with the Bonobos and took off my hat to get a better view through our camera. Not thinking, I set it down a foot or two away from the fence and when I finished taking the photo I noticed my hat was gone. Some thieving Bonobo had reached through and ganked my hat. Eyeing the suspects, I spied the culprit:

And so, my faded Detroit Tigers hat has become a Bonobo pacifier of some sort. The chimp spent a good twenty minutes tasting it, and would get into wrestling matches with other chimps over possession of the hat.

The tour guide was very apologetic but I told her it was okay and it wasn’t her fault. I shouldn’t have put my hat down near the fence. And hey, I can say a chimpanzee stole my hat. Wasn’t that the storyline of the book Curious George?

The rest of our tour of the reserve was nice. The last part of the tour brought us to a small section where the youngest Bonobos were kept and one was running around outside the pen under the watchful eye of a woman who worked there. The Bonobo was shy, but after a few minutes she warmed up to us.

As long as I'm posting pictures, here's a giant bug we saw later that day – it was probably about six inches long:

Oh, I should also mention that I had antelope meat last week. On Friday night we went to a restaurant not too far from our apartment and among the standard fare such as chicken, beef, salads, and sandwiches, they offered antelope. It was around the same price as a piece of beef, so I figured I would give it a shot. It wasn’t bad, but it didn’t taste like anything special. It reminded me of pot roast, really, but that might be because of the way it was cooked or the sauce and vegetables served with it.