Monkey business
F or many people, living in a Tanzanian jungle for four years with no creature comforts would be an absolute nightmare.
There are deadly bugs, poisonous snakes and a whole host of wild beasts to contend with, and that's before you think about the hot and damp tropical climate.
Dr Charlotte Uhlenbroek, the naturalist hailed as successor to David Attenborough's TV crown, studied for a degree in zoology and psychology and later a PhD in zoology at the University of Bristol, specialising in chimpanzee behaviour and communication. And even though she's happiest in the jungle, she actually lives just outside Bristol with her TV producer husband Daniel Elston.
While researching chimpanzee behaviour for her PhD, she travelled to the forests of Gombe on the banks of Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania, east Africa, and she stayed for four years.
"Despite being there so long I was actually very sad to come back to the UK. It was so difficult to leave," she explains.
"I wanted to stay to write my PhD paper there, but my university supervisor had to drag me kicking and screaming back to Bristol.
"While I was in Gombe, little baboons used to come to where I was working and try to steal my pens and things. When I was in Bristol writing, I just had the traffic to look at. I really missed those baboons!"
Uhlenbroek has now returned to our screens on Sunday nights on Five, with a new four-part series, Among The Apes.
In the first episode, screened last weekend, she examined a community of her most beloved species of primate, chimpanzees, in Uganda's Budongo Forest.
"I'd not been to Uganda before, so I was excited about that," says Uhlenbroek, whose past series include the BBC's Chimpanzee Diary, Cousins and Talking With Animals.
"We had two weeks to film the chimps there. Obviously, in that time, you're not going to be able to start from scratch with completely wild and unhabituated chimps, so throughout filming we piggy-back the research of the field workers out there. There have been people studying the chimps of the Sonso community for nearly three decades now."
As a species, chimps share about 99 per cent of their DNA with humans, making them our closest living relatives.
Although the animals are very used to being observed by humans, scientists and field workers still maintain a healthy distance when going about their research.
"There's always the issue when you meet wild apes of disease transfer," explains 41-year-old Uhlenbroek.
"You have to keep your distance for the first few days while you're in quarantine to make sure you haven't brought in any flu viruses or bugs.
"Chimpanzees can suffer from common colds, but don't have any resistance so instead of a bit of sneezing like we have, they will die, and the virus spreads very rapidly through the population. It is very important to keep that distance at first."
When she and the crew arrived in Budongo, they got to see the political nature of the chimp world first-hand, with the group's alpha male Nick – "he was named after a researcher years ago" – struggling to establish his superiority over the rest of the Sonso chimps.
"All the other chimps constantly avoided him," she says, "and whenever he was around, there was lots of tension and aggro. It didn't seem to be a happy, settled community.
"Gradually, he started to actually enlist the support of the group and be a bit nicer to the other males. It was extraordinary to be there at that time.
"The politics among chimps is fascinating. It's all about how good they are at making alliances. I've seen chimps do extraordinary things, you can get back-stabbing, little coups, all sorts. You never know what's going to happen from one day to the next day in the forest."
In the three parts that follow, she travels to far-flung regions, studying mountain gorillas, orang-utans and a group of baboons in their natural habitat.
"There are similarities across the board, in terms of intelligence, they all have long childhoods, but each species has unique characteristics.
"Orangs, because they're so solitary, are quite passive and calm, while gorillas, because they have one dominant silverback, tend to be very cohesive as a group and all stay very close.
"Chimps live in multi-male groups, where there are lots of males vying for power and they don't have such close ties. Chimp society is much faster moving than the others, but most frenetic of all are the baboons.
"Baboons are interesting and unique in the way females have a lot more power in society, and there's a hierarchy decided by class. Some are born with a silver spoon in their mouth, whereas others are born at the bottom of the pile and it pretty much stays like that forever.
"Baboon infants are also the most amusing, funniest, maddest little animals you will ever see."
Uhlenbroek's TV career started back in the late 1990s when she was scientific adviser on a number of films made by National Geographic. Thanks to her undoubted knowledge of the subject, enthusiasm and photogenic looks, she was soon asked to appear in front of the camera, where she has remained ever since.
Her love of wildlife goes back to her early childhood. Although born in England, she was just 10 days old when her parents whisked her off to live in Ghana. Her Dutch father was an agricultural specialist for the UN.
After living in Ghana until she was five, the family moved to Kathmandu, Nepal, where her love of conservation really took off.
"I used to play around on the streets of Kathmandu with the animals, and then one day I started a stray dog club with some friends," she says. "We'd spend our pocket money buying food for the dogs we found, and if they had puppies, we'd take them round the neighbours and knock on doors to see if anyone wanted them.
"I should think the locals thought I was crazy, and every time I brought another one home, my dad thought, 'Here we go again, more waifs and strays for the menagerie'. But every time he said we weren't having any more animals, I'd find a kitten or a puppy, his heart would melt and they'd stay.
"I'm now involved in a charity that helps stray dogs in Kathmandu, something I always wanted to do when I was little. So to go back and really sort out the problem is amazing."
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