guinea fowl. It has blue duikers, red duikers, bushbuck, elephant shrews, bushpigs, red
river hogs, porcupines and honey badgers. Two thousand elephants used to come to
Budongo in the course of their annual migrations from the Butiaba flats along the shore of
Lake Albert, up the escarpment, into the forest and then back down to Lake Albert again,
but today there are no elephants in the forest, all having been killed for food by soldiers and
others during the 1971–1986 civil war that ruined Uganda. This situation will probably
change slowly as the elephant population in Murchison Falls National Park to the north of
Budongo recovers, and elephants begin to return to their old patterns of movement.
History of the forest
Nor is the forest timeless. Every forest has its own particular history. Looked at in the
long term, forests come and go as the climate becomes wetter or drier. At times
Budongo has been joined to its sister forests along the western margin of Uganda. Today
the closest of these forests is Bugoma Forest, separated from Budongo by a distance of
40 km. Beyond Bugoma are Uganda’s other western forests: Kibale, Ruwenzori,
Maramagambo, Kasyoka-Kitomi, Semliki, Kalinzu, Itwara and Bwindi. Many centuries
ago these now separate forests formed a continuum of trees emerging from the Congo
forest just south of the Ruwenzori mountains, where the Semliki Forest now lies, and
then stretching up along the eastern side of the mountains where Kibale Forest now lies,
and on to Bugoma and finally Budongo, the most northerly part of this ancient forest.
With the coming of cooler and, in Africa, drier conditions the continuous forest became
divided into the series of forests we see today. Indeed, at various times these forests
were smaller than they are now. Archaeological investigations in Bugoma Forest have
uncovered traces of human settlement (pottery, evidence of fire, remains of cattle) deep
within what is now forest; it was woodland or grassland then.
Jollyet al. (1997) report on a study of the montane forests of western Uganda from
the end of the Pleistocene or late glacial times to the present. Although their study is of
montane forests we can expect that drier and wetter periods there would coincide with
those lower down. At the time of the last glacial maximum (ice age) around 18 000 years
ago, because water was locked up as ice in the northern and southern hemispheres, sea
levels globally were lower than they are today and this in turn led to drier conditions in
the tropics than we see today. We can thus envisage a time some 18 000 years ago when
the forest cover in western Uganda (as well as in the region as a whole) was appreciably
less than it is today. It may be that the Budongo forest did not exist at that time, condi-
tions having become too dry for its survival. Since then conditions have become wetter
again. During the Early Holocene, from around 11 000 years ago, lower montane forest
was on the increase, with a rich forest flora by 10 000 years ago. The same may well be
true of semi-deciduous forests such as Budongo. In the Mid-Holocene around
3000–4000 years ago, there were clear signs of seasonality, with wet and dry periods
such as we have in Budongo today. In the late Holocene, from around 2300 years ago,
there is evidence of forest disturbance, presumably resulting from human activity, i.e.
cultivation. This may mark the onset of the Early Iron Age in the region.
History of the forest 7