Kipunji: the new primate on the block

by Felicity Egerton for Tanzania's high life, 24 February 2009

As programme maker Felicity Egerton heads into the forests of Mount Rungwe, she comes across some unusual primates.

On the slopes of Mount Rungwe, in the little visited Southern Highlands of Tanzania, there are pockets of flourishing forest. Roars, snorts, squeals and snuffles bring the landscape alive. Colobus and Sykes’ monkeys live in close quarters. Another sound resounds too, one like no other; it’s more of a ‘honk-bark’.

I have travelled to Tanzania to film a new television series on Africa’s Great Rift. We’re working with a research group from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), who have been based in the unexplored forests of south-western Tanzania for years. The forest is alive with chameleons, snakes and frogs… but we are here to film kipunji. Haven’t heard of it? Neither had WCS biologists Tim Davenport and Noah Mpunga before they arrived in the area.

First tantalising glimpse

A kipunji climbs through the trees

Motivated by rumours of an undescribed, shy animal researchers headed into the forest in 2000. The terrain in the forest is not easy. Thick vegetation and steep sided slopes, together with heavy rain generated from the surface of nearby Lake Malawi, makes looking anywhere other than at your feet a hazardous activity. But Tim and Noah were rewarded with tantalising glimpses of this cryptic animal throughout 2003, and finally, in December 2003, Tim got a good look, and realised this was a new species of primate. Imagine the excitement! Little did they know there were more twists to the tale to come.

The race was on to find out more about these unusual primates. The WCS group set up a habituation programme, to aid their study of the kipunji. Researchers were employed to track them everyday, recognisable to the animals by obvious blue hats. The idea was that eventually they would get used to the researchers head-gear and the team would be able to sit and observe natural behaviour in the wild.

Six years on and the kipunji here do not alarm call and flee at first sight, and, although the terrain still snares your feet at every step, it is occasionally possible to catch up and film them.

Hair-raisers

On first impression all you notice is the hair - kipunjis have fantastic crested hairstyles that give them loads of character. As wildlife cameraman Justin Maguire completed the task of filming kipunji for the very first time, I marvelled at how agile they were in the trees, despite being chunky in size. I was also very jealous of their thick, wool-like coat as the rain set in. Although the hairstyle suffers, most of the water runs off and they carry on oblivious. They are obviously well-adapted to this forest environment.

A kipunji sporting a typical quiff

At first they were thought to be a species of mangabey, but it wasn’t until a specimen obtained from a farmer's snare provided a DNA sample that the true enormity of the discovery was revealed. The kipunji isn’t just a new species, it's so different from anything else that it has now been reclassified into a genus of its own – the first new genus of primate described in 83 years.

Bizarrely the kipunji are thought to be more similar to baboons than anything else – maybe they have readapted to life in the trees, or maybe this population was cut off from its relatives from a volcanic eruption, before baboons evolved to live on the grasslands of Africa. One thing is for sure, as we ducked and dived and scratched and scrabbled through the undergrowth, trying to get a good view of the species honk-barking in front, it became more and more apparent that this, whatever it is, is a highly enigmatic species.

At last count there were 1,117 kipunji in the world. But these primates aren’t the only rare wildlife to be found in Tanzania’s Southern Highlands. Kitulo National Park is at the centre of an unusual trade. Poachers are entering the park to take, not wild animals, but plants. Felicity investigates in Orchid Poachers.