DAWN STARIN is an anthropologist who has spent decades researching human and nonhuman primates in Africa and Asia. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Scientific American, The Humanist, andthe/ouf*nal of the Royal Society of Medicine, among other publications.
For many years, I spent my days, from well before sunrise until long after sunset, following a troop of endangered western red colobus monkeys (Piliocolobus badius temminckii) around a small forest in The Gambia. Established in 1968, the Abuko Nature Reserve encompasses several types of habitat within its 260 acres: riverine forest, woodland, Guinea savanna, clearings, and swampland dense with Raphia palms—all surrounded by agricultural fields, rice paddies, vegetable gardens, village compounds, and roads. No matter how deep I was in the forest, the sounds of everyday life constantly seeped through, reminding me that this reserve was a green oasis amid one of the most densely populated places on the African mainland.
Some 130 red colobus lived in Abuko, spread across five separate troops. Mostly arboreal, they shared their home with two other monkey species: the gray-green, tweedy-haired green monkeys (Chlorocebus sabaeus) and the terrestrial patas monkeys (Erythrocebus patas), agile, long-legged, fleet-footed creatures expertat raiding crops. Occasionally, a lone adult male Campbell’s monkey (Cercopithecus campbelli) would wander into the reserve, spend some time resting, grooming, and feeding on fruits with the colobus, and wander out again. I have no idea where these lone males came from (the nearest known troop of Campbell’s monkeys was roughly five miles away) or where they eventually went Various small and medium-size mammals, mysterious reptiles of different sizes, several amphibians, and hundreds of bird species ran, crawled, climbed, swam, and flew through the reserve.
I entered Abuko for the first time in 1978.1 wish Icould remember everything I felt, everything I saw, during that first day, but there are some things I will never forget. I was immediately enthralled with the dark, witchlike shadows cast by the twisted tree trunks and the long, woody liana vines. I watched a back-fanged African beauty snake, a relatively harmless species, slither across my path as I almost bumped into a bushbuck (an antelope with distinctive white markings). I marveled at a pair of hamerkops—wading birds that could have been dreamt up by Dr. Seuss—and their massive nests, some of which can weigh more than 100 pounds. I saw a hulking Nile crocodile slide into a pool and heard the green monkeys bark their alarm. I tasted the honey-flavored mampato fruits that had been dropped by some red-billed hornbills. And I heard the magnificent, glossy-plumed, violet turacos call out their cooroo-cooroo.
I had been told that Abuko was not safe, since there were too many venomous snakes—puff adders, mambas, and cobras among them. But I had always been
