2. The Sonso community
2
It remains the most exciting thing to be walking fast in the forest, moving with a travelling party of
chimps, we stop, they call, drumming, answers come from west, they move, we move...
(22 March 1999, 8.30 a.m.).The word ‘community’ is widely used in chimpanzee studies to describe the collection
of individuals that share a single range or ‘territory’. Is it appropriate? What is a com-
munity?^3 We normally think of it as a collection of people who live in one place, such as
a village community, though it can mean a dispersed group such as ‘the community of
equals’ or ‘the community of pigeon fanciers’; in this latter sense the emphasis is on
something shared by all members of the community. In the chimpanzee case the former
meaning predominates: the community lives together in one place, but there is also a
sense of sharing: for example, information about food sources is shared, some kinds of
food such as meat and large fruits are shared, there are shared elements of culture, and
there is sharing in the social and sexual sides of life.
Counting chimpanzees in a community
Because all the chimpanzees in a community are not found together, it is not immedi-
ately, or even quickly, possible to say how many of them there are. This is an extreme
form of the problem faced when working out the size of any group of animals: in the
case of birds, we have ‘bird counts’ and the problem of obtaining accurate numbers is
considerable. With primates, the problem is less extreme in terrestrial species such as
baboons or macaques: in such species the group lives together and moves together at
some time during the day, as in the case of Hamadryas baboons leaving their sleeping
quarters (Kummer 1968), and so can be readily counted. In the case of group-living
forest monkeys the problems are greater: even though the group lives together you often
cannot see all of them and so the number of individuals in a group increases with the
(^2) A complete list of the members of the Sonso community to date can be found in Appendix A.
(^3) TheOxford English Dictionarygives a number of definitions of ‘community’ of which the most relevant
to the chimpanzee case are the following: ‘The quality of appertaining to or being held by all in common; life
in association with others; the social state.’