Into the Forest

I've been at Semliki for nearly a week. It's fantastic. The camp is on the border of the wooded grassland (basically a savannah) and the riverine forest where the chimps spend most of their time. The chimps follow the food and at the moment there are these orange sized juicy fruits in the forest called Saba florida that the chimps are eating. They look kind of like giant passion fruit and dont taste too bad.
The forest itself is great, you learn just how many shades of green there really are. Before I enter the forest I douse myself in a protective coat of DEET to repel bugs but as Im the only person here who does this I think its just paranoia. The biting bugs arent too bad. Tsetse fly follow you around sometimes but Ive yet to be bitten by one. However, on my first day in the forest I did manage the smart move of standing in the path of a safari ant hunting party. I was pulling them off for about 5 minutes whenever I felt a pair of mandibles snap shut somewhere on my legs. There are a lot of incredible insects, and birds, they are all reminiscent of species back at home except twice the size and with intensely bright colours. For example the sparrows have turquise chests and red spots by their eyes.
Although the chimps are often hard to find, Ive seen them quite a few times already. The rangers track them by looking for foot and knuckle prints on the ground and listening for chimp movements and calls in the trees. The most common call is the pant-hoot, often given when a chimp moves to a food and nearly always when chimps meet each other. The pant-hoots start quietly and get gradually louder, with the hoots being connected by audable inhilations of breath. After spending hours wandering around getting demoralised from failing to see any chimps its exciting to suddenly hear them calling, often very nearby. The chimps have been getting more used to being followed by people over the last few months. So now we can often get quite close, only metres away when they are in the safety of the trees. I thought I'd identified a new female, with siamese features, only to discover when I got back to camp that people already knew her, but Im still hopefull.
At the campsite we are laying gravel paths to stop the rainy season weather that now approaches from turning the place into a mudbath. A common house gecko has started coming to my tent at night to hang out on the wall and eat the bugs that always fly in. I've named him Mr Tokyo and expect to be devestated when he doesnt appear one evening, eaten by some larger animal. Speaking of which there is supposed to be a leopard that sleeps under the tent platforms in the rainy season. Hopefully I'll get to see it.
I should be back on the internet in 2 weeks to do another update. By then I hope to have made progress on two main projects, getting decent photos of the chimps for an ID booklet and collecting some chimp dung from identified individuals in testubes for DNA analysis later so that we can figure out who is related to who and construct a family tree.
Hope everyone is well!
Cagan