1. The Budongo Forest
Up early, fried mashed spuds from last nightfried egg, all done in oil and v. tasty...Geresomu
takes the temp (max and min) & rainfall readings at 7 a.m. People are getting busy. Kingfishers,
doves and hornbills with a background of colobus make up the morning sounds, plus a few human
sounds — chopping, children’s voices, sound of gum boots walking across the wet grass (22 March
1999, 7 a.m.).The Budongo Forest lies like a sleeping giant at the top of the Albertine Rift, part of the
great Rift Valley that cuts through Africa from North to South (Fig 1.1). It is a large for-
est by Ugandan standards, though by comparison with the great Congo forest across
Lake Albert to the west it is tiny. Altogether it comprises 435 km^2 of continuous forest
cover. The land undulates gently, with an overall downward slope from southeast to
northwest, so that its rivers flow towards the northwest, leaving the forest to run down
the escarpment that leads to the Butiaba Flats along the eastern side of the Rift Valley.
These rivers include one, the River Sonso, that runs past the site of our Budongo Forest
Project (BFP) and provides us with water in the dry season.
A good place to see the whole of Budongo Forest is from the fire tower on Nyabyeya
Hill, above the Nyabyeya Forestry College situated about 5 km from our Sonso camp.
When you climb up to the tower and look out over the forest stretching away to the west,
north and east, you cannot help being impressed by the sea of trees as far as the horizon.
The forest looks quiet, undisturbed and timeless. Towards the east, at the forest edge,
you may see a tiny vehicle making its way along a road or a wisp of smoke where some-
one has a fire going, and further away to the east you can perhaps see the Kinyara Sugar
Works factory with its permanent pall of steam. But the general impression is one of
dark green, luxuriant vegetation (Synnott 1985 records 725 species of trees, epiphytes,
lianas, herbs and shrubs in Budongo Forest).
This forest, so quiet and peaceful from afar, is in fact teeming with animal as well as
plant life, and inside the forest there is constant activity and noise. It is home for an
estimated 584 chimpanzees (Plumptre et al. 2003), together with thousands of redtail
monkeys, blue monkeys, black and white colobus monkeys and forest baboons. Among
its 226 bird species (128 of them true forest birds, according to Friedmann and
Williams, 1973) it has the rare Nahan’s francolin, three species of black and white
casqued hornbills, turacos, grey parrots, brilliantly coloured forest kingfishers and forest