DJOUROUTOU, Côte d’Ivoire — After a night of heavy rain, the chimpanzees of Taï Forest, in southwestern Côte d’Ivoire, like to sleep in. Early on a late May morning, chimpanzee guide Evariste Tere led a group of scientists and conservationists to a chimp group’s nesting site that he had marked with his GPS the previous evening. The humans set off at 4:30 a.m., then spent an hour and a half waiting for the chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes ssp. verus) to wake up. Eventually, one of them did. Moisture gathered in her nest from the night’s rain gushed down, and then the other trees began to bend and creak as their occupants — one male, four females and a baby — stirred. One of the females, with the baby clinging to her belly, moved through the treetops to a bigger tree, then used the handholds and footholds of a strangler fig snaking its way up the trunk to reach the canopy. This didn’t seem to impress the male, who was already on the ground and, noticing the humans, wanted to get his group moving. He screamed angrily and beat his hands on the buttress root of a large tree so that the sound echoed through the forest like a drum. “He’s angry that they didn’t follow,” Tere said, adding that while Taï’s chimpanzees are used to seeing tourists, a group of five was bigger than normal, and the male did not want to linger. Instead, he would keep his charges moving until…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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