The antagonism between the Waibira and the Sonso communities declined in 2000
when an ever-increasing number of illegal pitsawyers began felling mahoganies in
Budongo. They built a large camp on a site along the old logging road, where a conces-
sion had been given for some legal felling. This site happened to fall between the Sonso
and the Waibira communities’ ranges. The logging camp served as a collection point for
timber from all over the forest and at one point over 100 men were working there, with
trucks moving up and down the road several times a day taking mahogany to Kampala.
During this time we rarely heard the Waibira community and they ceased making incur-
sions into the Sonso range.
This interaction between logging activities and chimpanzee ranging behaviour is
described by White and Tutin (2001) for the Lopé site in Gabon. There, large-scale logging
had severely disruptive effects on chimpanzee ranges and there was a steep and long-
lasting decline in the number of chimpanzees seen. As they point out, where logging is
on a relatively small scale chimpanzees can move to other parts of their range, but when
it becomes large scale they no longer have this option and may be driven into the ranges
of neighbouring communities with consequent fighting and deaths. At present we do not
know what happened in the case of the Waibira community but the logging operations
stopped after a year or so when all the valuable timber had been removed and at the
present time there is certainly a community living in the Waibira range and it has
encroached on the Sonso range once again recently.
Inter-community aggression is always rare, but maybe it is more frequent if resources
are scarce or population numbers are high. Neither is the case in Budongo. Resources
seem to be plentiful and, alas, deaths from snare and trap injuries are the most likely
factor keeping the population to its current size. We shall return to the problems
associated with hunting by the local population in Chapter 9.
In the next chapter we turn to the social behaviour and relationships of the
Sonso chimpanzees and explore in more detail the ways in which they interact with one
another.
108 Social organization