After three straight days of traveling, I’ve just finished my first full day back in Gombe National Park in two years. (I had to take a small break from the field to welcome my second child.)

It’s absolutely great to be back, and we have a good-sized Lincoln Park Zoo contingent here right now. Carson Murray, our postdoctoral fellow, is here working on our maternal stress project, Emma Lantz, our Fulbright scholar, is studying the interaction of stress and parasites, and our consulting parasitologist, Tom Gillespie, Ph.D., from Emory University, has joined us for the trip as well.

We had a long morning of meetings with our health project team to check on the status of our various projects, and then we were able to get out into the field and see the chimpanzees in the afternoon. We first came upon a group with one of the oldest females, Sparrow, and her son, Sinbad. Sinbad is a young male and was practicing being a tough guy by displaying and hurling things down from the trees at us. He caught Carson on the upper arm with a large, tough fruit, but we all came away unscathed.

The group got larger, and I saw many of my favorite individuals, such as Kris and Wilkie and Golden, one of the only surviving twin chimpanzees in the wild. All were doing well and contentedly gorging themselves on fruit. We only stayed an hour, per regulations, but then took a walk to the waterfall—the main water source for the park—arriving back right before dusk. All in all, a wonderful first day back at Gombe.

Elizabeth Lonsdorf