Anne Jahelka of Monterey, Tenn., sent us this note after she visited Great Ape Trust with Nikki Hancock, a Great Ape Trust member from Milo, Iowa: “It was such a privilege to be able to visit The Great Ape Trust. Everyone with whom we came into contact was so friendly and helpful. The staff went out of their way to ensure that we had a good experience. It was fascinating to watch the many different videos and then go on to visit with the apes themselves. Kanzi and his language skills are simply amazing to watch!”Special thanks to Rhonda [Pietsch], who took the time to explain many things to us about The Trust and the apes. I live in Tennessee and arranged to coordinate my visit with this great ape experience. I’m already planning to continue my membership and return next year also. Thanks so much.”

One of the things that makes our Membership Days visits so successful is the ability to visit with Great Ape Trust scientists and staff, including Pietsch, a manager with responsibility for overseeing the day-to-day operations in the bonobo and orangutan homes.

Photos: In the top photo, Rhonda Pietsch makes a point to visitors about orangutan behavior and cognition. In the bottom photo, she completes a physical therapy session with the orangutan Allie, with whom Pietsch worked at the Denver Zoo before joining Great Ape Trust’s ape caretaking staff in 2008.  Read more about their special bond here.

Visitors to Great Ape Trust’ 230-acre campus in southeast Des Moines continue to give us strong reviews about the multi-venue experience we’re offering with our 2009 Membership Days.  We received the following from one of our July 18 visitors, Maureen McGarry, pictured at left with her family:

“Our tour was fascinating!  I have worked over 15 years as a speech language pathologist so I was fascinated by the research with Kanzi in the area of language production and comprehension.  My son Ben, age 7, was chosen by Kanzi to ‘chase’ and he is still talking about it.  Continue to open your facility to families!  Thanks again, Maureen McGarry.”

Because of the flooding on our campus in the summer of 2008, our visitation was necessarily discontinued. “We responded by establishing an even more meaningful, engaging visitors’ experience,” says Great Ape Trust Operations Director Jim Aipperspach. “To be sure, the apes and the professional staff, as well as our visitors, are thoroughly enjoying the insightful, educational experience at Great Ape Trust.”

Our 2009 Membership Days are sold out, and additional visitation days will not be scheduled this year. The Trust’s visitation program strikes a careful balance between maintinging the continuity required by an aggressive ape-language research trajectory and public interest in meeting and learning more about the bonobos and orangutans living at Great Ape Trust.

We’re getting great reviews from guests visiting Great Ape Trust as participants in 2009 Membership Days. Our 2009 tour season is sold out and comments from guests like Martha Tinker of West Des Moines help us to understand why. In a recent e-mail, she told us that she was “totally blown away by your facility and the research being done at the Great Ape Trust.”

We restructured our visitation program this year to allow guests more time with the apes and scientists. “The interaction with the scientists was most valuable,” Tinker said. “Without their commentary and explanations, it would have been difficult to understand the research and benefits of the work being done at Great Ape Trust. I found all of them willing to explain their research and to andwer questions at a level I could understand. They were also willing to spend any amount of time doing this.”

Tinker said what impressed her most was that “such a facility, with absolutely top-notch researchers, exists in Des Moines, Iowa.”

“No one thinks of Des Moines as a ’science center,’” she said.

If you’d like to comment on your visitation experience, please send an e-mail to bdalbey@GreatApeTrust.org.

Photo: Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Kanzi, whose spontaneous lexigram utterances as an infant opened new frontiers in the science of ape language.

Finally the day came when I could go out with the chimpanzees. It felt as if I had been waiting for this for millennia – from the day I had heard I was Senegal-bound, or back to when I first became interested in great ape behavior. This was the culmination of all my apprehensions about my intended career, and all my excitement about the same thing. Would I find that  studying wild great ape behavior – what I have worked and hoped for – would be the right career for me?

We left that first morning at 4:30 a.m. to head out to where the chimpanzees had nested the night before. The sun had not yet risen and we began our walk in darkness, guiding our steps along the trail only by the light of our flashlights. Despite the early hour, my head was already buzzing with excitement. An hour and a half later, we caught our first sight of the chimpanzeess. I couldn’t believe I was really here, seeing wild chimpanzees right before me. Read the rest of this entry »

Although we each have our own huts in camp at Fongoli, as long as the weather allows we sleep outside instead, as it is cooler outdoors than inside. That first day at the Fongoli camp site, I awoke from my bed around 6:30 a.m., unable to sleep any further due to the intensely bright morning sun. Jill had left a few hours earlier to find the chimpanzees, and to get back into the swing of things.

I rolled away my mosquito net, and got my first real look at my new stomping grounds for the summer. Three cylindrical huts that serve as rooms and one larger hut for equipment, all enclosed by a woven bamboo fence. Enclosed as well is the grass-roofed awning under which we sleep. Beyond the fence lies the mosaic of habitat in which the chimpanzees spend their time.

It would be a few more days until I had the opportunity to see the chimps myself, and rightly so. If for nothing else, I view those first days of rest necessary for me to get acquainted with not only my new surroundings, but the heat. As it was technically still the dry season and the rains were not to come for a few more weeks, the air was very hot and dry. Temperatures around this time of year hover above 100 degrees, with heat indices sometimes reaching as high as 120 degrees. Growing up in Minnesota myself, I could not have imagined living in such a climate. That first day, I could do little more than lie in bed and read; the thought of heading out into the bush at this point was simply unimaginable. How will I survive the summer in such heat, let alone follow around a group of chimpanzees?

Editor’s Note: Erin Wessling is a recent graduate of Iowa State University and is spending the summer in Senegal as a research assistant to Dr. Jill Pruetz at the Fongoli Chimpanzee Field Site. To read Dr. Pruetz’s blog, go here.