As we were ready to eat Vincent announced he had a birding client for Saturday and could he do that rather than the neighborhood meeting. Chris, his client-to-be, works for the British Society for the Protection of Birds, the U.K. equivalent of the Audubon Society. Certainly it was OK and as a professional (semi-pro?) courtesy I said that if Chris would take care of Vincent there would be no charge – and no record. And by the way, could we join them?
So we left Amnon and Passy to meet with the natives and joined them at the “royal mile”. Chris was interesting and Vincent knows his stuff – Connie added five new birds and we saw several old beauties including the emerald cuckoo and the blue-breasted kingfisher.
Then we met Dwayne (or Duane). He seems unconcerned with the spelling. Chimpanzees are like that, you know. Dwayne is about 40 and has enough gray on his back to prove it. He is the alpha male of the SONSO group and was knuckling his way along side the road checking the status of the fruit crop so he could report back to the troop. He was closely trailed by his human shadows, SONSO staff with a hand-held computer to monitor his activities. We wondered how Vernon Reynolds collected all his grooming and copulation numbers. Dwayne isn’t tame but he is so comfortable with humans that I can’t consider him “wild” in the sense of the other chimps we have seen.
We arrived back home around noon and I asked Amnon how the meeting with the locals went. We wanted to show them what we were doing and explain the rules about hunting and wood-cutting and generally be good neighbors. Vincent had scheduled it for 9:00am but no one had come by noon. Amnon was optimistic that they would come by 2:00pm or so. Talked about dashed hopes (mashed dopes?) or making an impact. Impossible when ‘yes’ means ‘no’, ‘now-now’ becomes ‘later’ and ‘soon’ is ‘never’. We must accept low standards that we seldom achieve. Even BBB who smiled like the Cheshire cat and shook my hand when I gave him a t-shirt and shorts (a little paint splattered and too large, but clean!) appeared today shirtless in his tattered shorts. As C. Brown would say, “good grief”.
P.S. It’s 2:00pm. BBB is wearing my t-shirt and there are 21 villagers in the center. Patience, my son, have patience.
