Seeing the forest, from the trees

It was Valentine’s Day 2000 and Alain Houle was not quite sure what to do. He was alone in a fruit tree and the chimps were coming back.

“I thought I’d be killed,” Houle said later. “They climbed up, looked at me, barked at me, and then settled down to eat.”

After Houle climbed down that day, he returned to the research station in Uganda’s Kibale National Park and met Richard Wrangham, Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology, who has studied the park’s chimpanzees since 1987.

Though Houle was in the park studying the diets of monkeys for his doctoral work at the University of Quebec at Montreal, Wrangham expressed interest in Houle’s experience and said that chimpanzees had never been studied at eye-level in the treetops before.