Portraits VIII: Gola, the first chimp I ever saw*

This portrait of Gola from 2013 is still my best chimpanzee portrait.

Nearly five years after I started my first pilot season, Gola still holds a very very special place in my heart for a few reasons. First, she's the first wild, live, juvenile chimpanzee* that I ever met.

On our first day in the field after Drew and I finished our pilot season quarantine,  we followed the field assistants into the forest before dawn. As we trudged along the muddy trail, contemplating how amazing and hard core our day was going to be, there was a cough. Barely a mile into the forest, along the main trail into the forest, the chimps had climbed from their nests to feed on a small, fuzzy fig called Ficus exasperata. The community was recovering from a respiratory outbreak that had hit them hard in March, killing three adults and an infant. Gola was one of the last coughing chimps. While the others ate, Gold continued resting for most of the morning. Though she remained in her nest, which was about 8 m up from the ground, I could see her head poking out from the edge of the her leafy bed. From the bank of the road where I stood below her, I watched her through my binoculars as she watched the other chimps start their day. After such a long while gazing at her, studying her face and noting her features, she was the first chimpanzee that I could readily identify without help from our expert field assistants.  

Secondly, the portrait that I snapped of Gola during my first field season (the first photograph at the start of this post) is, to this day, the best chimpanzee photograph that I have ever captured. She is so soft and thoughtful and perfectly lit in that shot. After such an auspicious beginning, she just continues to be the perfect model. She's given me some of the most expressive expressions and poignant images I could have asked for. I use them all the time to tell my own stories and show how similar to chimpanzees we can be. 

Honestly, I laughed aloud when I snapped this shot. Now I used as a standard "TFW they start mansplaining your own work in the middle of your talk..."

...and a few frames later, this one, for "TFW they're mansplaining the point you're about to make on your actual next slide." Feel free to use both of these toward illustrating those points, btw.

Gola resting in 2017, studying me thoughtfully through her legs and the branches of her ground nest. Not sure which one of us is getting better data...

And Gola and I have been through a lot together- although, I should really say that I watched Gola get through a lot. As Olympia's next-oldest sister, part of my pain in Olympia's death was watching Gola grapple with it. She was one of the first chimps out of the tree, darting after her mother and peering into Outamba's arms as she clutched her dying infant. Watching her groom her sister's body, carry it around, try to rouse it into playing (for the full story on that day, please see my previous blog).

Gola and I have shared many moments. In this previously posted but still integral to this blog shot, she looks past the body of her dead sister and into my lens, her face still soft as it was when I first photographed her in 2013.

My favorite thing about Gola is that she is just so prosocial. Like her sisters, she loves carrying sticks and stones around with her, playing with them and building nests for them. One of her favorite games is picking up any infant, just to carry it off, build a ground nest for the two of them, and the just groom the baby in the nest. Of course, the infants are less thrilled with this game than she is and tend to run for their mothers after a few moments of forced grooming. Gola loves new females and has been among the first to approach and groom the three that have joined since I started working with the project. She seems sensitive to injured chimps as well. Over the summer she was very interested in the wounds of recently snared young male. When Gaga came back with her snare in 2016, Gola groomed her for hours.

Gola playing with her little sister, Omukunyu.

After I left the forest this summer, Gola lost her mother and newest sister, Omukunyu, too. I don't know much about how she's doing since then, but I've heard that she's been hanging with the big boys, like Tuber, seen below playing with Gola and chewing on her fingers. My fingers are crossed for this juvenile. Surviving without a mother is hard on chimps, even after they're completely weaned, but if anyone can get through it, a social butterfly like Gola should stand a decent chance.

*The actual first wild chimp that I saw was an elderly, and very dead, male named Stout, but that's another story for another day.