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Discovery: Obsessed with the Quest: Inside the Minds of Chimpanzees

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29/04/2024 GMT

Obsessed with the Quest: Inside the Minds of Chimpanzees

BBC World Service - Discovery, Obsessed with the Quest: Inside the Minds of Chimpanzees

What does it mean to be a chimpanzee? And following the monarch butterfly migration.

Catherine Hobaiter explains her quest to understand what it means to be a chimpanzee and Sara Dykman recounts her 10,201-mile journey following the monarch butterfly migration.

Primatologist Catherine Hobaiter has spent more of her adult life in the rain forests of Uganda, with family bands of chimpanzees, than she has with her own human family members. For more than 20 years now she has spent 6 months every year at a remote field station, getting up before dawn every day to observe and collect behavioural data on family bands of chimps as they wake up and go about their daily lives. What is she trying to find out, that has gripped her for so long?  

It turns out that life in a chimpanzee troupe is every bit as gripping as a soap opera. But there are many more moments of beauty, revelation and the joy of discovery, as Catherine pursues her continuing, multi-decadal quest to understand what it means to be a chimpanzee. 

And when Sara Dykman set out to bicycle with the monarch butterfly migration, from the mountains of central Mexico, across the USA to Canada, she didn't think about the 10,201 miles that she would cover. Coping with headwinds, heavy rain storms, and everything from dirt roads to busy highways were not the challenge for Sara though. It was seeing how little of the Monarch's only food plant, milkweed, was left for them to feed on during their amazing, multigenerational, multinational migration.  

However, Sara found solace in the many conservationists and backyard butterfly gardeners she met along the way, and in the 9000 schoolchildren she gave talks to en route. The most emotional part of the journey for Sara was the last three miles - arriving successfully back at the monarch's overwintering site in Mexico. 

Produced by Diane Hope. 

Credits:  

Monarch butterfly recordings - Robert Mackay

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