Two CRES scientists based in San Diego, Fred Bercovitch (associate director of CRES and head of Behavioral Biology) and Matt Anderson (scientist in Behavioral Biology) recently visited our project in Cameroon for three weeks, specifically to investigate if it might be possible to record and understand the calls, or vocalizations, of the primates in the Ebo forest.

We trekked in together from the remote village of Iboti, after introducing Fred and Matt to the Chief and his councilors. I organized the five porters needed to carry the food and recording equipment on the seven-hour trek to the research station, deep in the heart of the forest, and we set off from Iboti at 6 a.m., just as the sun was climbing over the tree-carpeted mountains. We arrived late in the day after negotiating the narrow log bridge over the Nouye River, the now-abandoned hunting camps with their ancient iron cooking pots, and the mountains and valleys that characterize this forest and give it some protection from the intense hunting that affects other forests in this part of Cameroon.

Matt and Fred were welcomed at our research station by our research team, who helped set up their tents and prepared food before we all fell into out tents to sleep. Noises throughout the night can seem unfamiliar and disconcerting to visitors: it is not unusual to be woken by footsteps of an inquisitive duiker (small forest antelope) or by the heart-stopping screams of tree hyraxes in the adjacent valley. Matt and Fred also experienced the joy of being woken at night by army ants moving though the camp. At their worst, I have been woken by what I thought was the sound of raindrops on my tent, but soon realized my mistake when turning on the torch to find everything covered by ants and having to run out of the tent, yelling in pain. Nevertheless, the joy of being woken in the early morning by the cries of chimpanzees and putty-nosed monkeys more than makes up for the occasional ant attacks.

On the first morning, we set off to try to record monkeys. Within 500 meters (550 yards) of the station we encountered a mixed-species group of putty-nosed monkeys, mona monkeys, crowned guenons, and Preuss' guenons. Fred and Matt (pictured) were amazed; they hadn't dreamed of having such success within the first hour! Furthermore, another few hundred meters along the trail we heard the unmistakable calls of drills. Over the subsequent days, Matt and Fred managed to record and see almost all the species of primates in the Ebo forest. One particular day towards the end of their trip was outstanding: we saw and recorded two separate drill groups and recorded the buttress-beating and screams of two groups of chimpanzees at close range during an inter-community encounter. I could not have hoped for our visitors to have a more successful trip.

Back at the research station, Zacharie Bekokon, one of our locally recruited field assistants who used to be a prolific hunter in the Ebo forest, sat down with Fred and Matt and listened to the recordings, matching calls to species. On our return to our base in the coastal town of Limbe, we sat down together to listen to some of the recordings and to plan the next step in analyzing the vocalization data to see if there is the potential to conduct an in-depth study of the associations between species and how the vocalizations are used to cohere the groups, what they may "mean', and how they might be modified under different circumstances. All this information has the potential to revolutionize the way that mixed species groups are kept in captivity and how to make their lives as complete and fulfilling as possible.

Matt and Fred left Cameroon on Thursday. Everyone in the Ebo Forest Research Team received a San Diego Zoo baseball cap, which they are now wearing proudly, having learned new skills and gained a deeper understanding of another facet to their daily work in the forest. We hope that Matt and Fred will return to Cameroon, and in the meantime, we will be continuing our work surveying the primates of the Ebo forest and thinking a little bit more about the calls that they make to communicate with each other.

Dr. Bethan Morgan is a Conservation Research Fellow for the San Diego Zoo's CRES.

Here's more information about Bethan's project in Cameroon.
Read Bethan's previous blog, Cameroon: Teaching Hunters about Conservation

On Monday, April 16, at 3 p.m., a special FREE seminar will be presented by Fred Bercovitch and Matt Anderson at the Beckman Center for Conservation Research on the topic " The CRES Ebo Forest Research Station and Primate Bioacoustics." Come hear about fieldwork in the rain forest of Cameroon and listen to the sounds of the local wildlife. This seminar is open to all. Here's more information…

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