I am a primatologist who spends twelve hours most days in the company of a thirteen year old chimpanzee named Bow. I am also an editor with Inverted-A Press.
The logging continues, but Bow and I are finding ways to ignore it and get on with our lives.
Bow leafs through an issue of the Missouri Consevationist
Yesterday, for instance, Bow watched the loggers for a while without getting too upset. and then he led me in an exercise session indoors.
The loggers are here in the morning, but they leave long before noon. So when I go for my afternoon walk, all is calm, and I can enjoy the wildlife.
Yesterday, I got to watch a leaf fall from the sky, a common buckeye butterfly resting on my path, and two different groups of deer.
Some deer bound away at the first sight of me, and others stare at me long and hard.
This morning, Bow was so accustomed to having the loggers around that he let me go to the post office to mail off some bills and to buy new stamps. I chose the stamps featuring Monarch butterflies.
When I got home, Bow had been good. No accidents, no mess. So I showed him the stamps I had bought. Later he asked me to go out, saying he'd heard the loggers had food. (שמעתי שיש להם אוכל). I went out expecting to see the loggers eating sandwiches. But instead I spotted the twin fawns, nearly grown, taking shelter near the house.
Bow and I live in one of the most beautiful places on earth: the Missouri Ozarks. However, I am not a native of Missouri, and while Bow was born in this state, he is not a wild animal In Missouri, all the chimpanzees are domesticated, and none is subject to the Department of Conservation. But Bow still enjoys reading The Missouri Conservationist and looking at all the big, colorful pictures of Missouri wildlife that can be found within its covers.
"What is that book about?" my reader from Scotland asked when he saw Bow leafing through the Missouri Conservationist. I answered: "It's not a book. It's a magazine about wildlife and the flora and fauna of Missouri, the state that Bow and I live in. It has pictures of the same kind of deer and the same kind of butterflies that lie just outside our front door." And that is really what it is. This issue featured Monarch butterflies and white tailed deer of the very sort that showed up in the last few entries in this blog.
Deer come almost right up to my front door. I go out to the meadow and each time I meet a different butterfly.
We don't really need to read the Missouri Conservationist to see these sights, but the Missouri Department of Conservation puts out the magazine, and Bow's friend Charla subscribes to it and brings Bow copies to read.
Another friend who saw the video of Bow flipping through the pages of the Missouri Conservationist had this to say: "Sorry Bow, no cute chimps (other than you) in the Ozarks." But that's not quite factual, so I replied: "There are actually quite a few here in Missouri, but they are, of course, not native wildlife." I meant that because all chimpanzee in the US are domesticated, they would naturally not pose for the Missouri Conservationist, the way the deer and the butterflies do. But my friend said she thought Bow was looking for girlie pictures. Well, that's what we have Harper's Bazaar for. But it's something that I am very thankful for that the Missouri Department of Conservation has shown no interest in our locally born and bred chimpanzees.
The same cannot be said for US Fish & Wildlife, who, by declaring that American domesticated chimpanzees are an endangered species, have opened the door for PETA to harass local breeders into giving up their chimps and sending them to sanctuaries where they will not be allowed to breed, based on the claim that the species is endangered. Attempts to get a declaratory judgment to say the Endangered Species Act does not apply have proved fruitless.
Right at the moment, I am very glad there are no pictures of chimpanzees in the Missouri Conservationist. At least our local government has not yet lost its mind. They know that conservation of Missouri wildlife only applies to Missouri wildlife, not exotics and not domesticated animals.
I am surrounded by teenagers with attitudes. My daughter just turned seventeen. Bow is fourteen and will be fifteen in February. They are too old for this and too mature for that, and this movie is just for little kids and that book is juvenile, and I am beginning to feel a little left out of all this maturity -- because the kid stuff still appeals to me. I never outgrew it.
Bow' friend who brings him bananas and pickle ice gave us a recent issue of the Missouri conservationist that featured black bears. Bow did not appear interested at first, but then I started reading it out loud to him, He came and sat down beside me and took the magazine away from me to look at it himself.
He leafed through the article. I noticed that when he got to the end of the article about the bears, he leafed back, so he did seem to want to remain on the topic of black bears.
However, when I wanted to talk about the bear cub picture, and how the cub was just a baby, and how Bow used to be a baby, too, Bow grew impatient with me. He retreated away from the magazine, and sat there distancing himself, his hand supporting his chin, no longer engaged.
Note to self: never remind a teenager that he used to be a baby. That's something we must never talk about. But it seems like only yesterday...
Now that all the excitement of Bow's birthday is over, we are having an ordinary day. What does Bow do on ordinary days? Besides those fun times during breakfast, lunch, snack time, and dinner, when food is the focus, Bow likes to go outside and see what is going on.
Bow goes outside on a foggy morning.
Posted by Project Bow Fan Page on Wednesday, February 17, 2016
Bow's friend came by again this past week and brought him two new issues of the Missouri Conservationist to read. Actually, they had a very nice visit, and Bow enjoyed the socializing much more than any gifts she brought. Bow is at heart a very social person, and more than any material object, he likes to interact with people. He likes getting his back scratched, even if it is only with a pipe cleaner through the grid. He likes to groom and be groomed, to make faces, to jump in unison and to interact with others.
Bow is fundamentally social. More than anything else, he likes people. Which is why in the two issues of the Missouri Conservationist that he looked at this week, his favorite image was of a large group of men all standing together as one.
"I am Conservation," the not-so-large title at the back of the magazine reads. Then, underneath the photo it says: "Members of the Frederick Douglass Wildlife and Conservation Club pose for a photo at the August A. Busch Memorial Conservation Area in St. Louis, the site of club fishing trips at least twice. a year." Many of the men have their fishing poles with them. Bow looked at this image first before any other. He silently surveyed the group for a good long moment, and he came back to this shot several times while leafing through the magazines.
Yes, there were other photos he looked at. But he paused only briefly to look at images of deer.
His main focus was humans.
And he especially enjoyed images of humans interacting with other humans.
The images of sportsmen buddies captivated Bow the most. He's a people person.
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