On Thursday 15 October Cindy, RZSS Edinburgh Zoo’s oldest chimpanzee, will be celebrating her 50th birthday at the Budongo Trail. The event comes just a few weeks after RZSS celebrated the 10th anniversary of its involvement in the Budongo Conservation Field Station (BCFS) in Uganda.
To mark the special occasion, keepers will be giving Cindy fun birthday treats of tasty coconuts and stuffed pillowcases for her to play with. They will also be decorating the chimpanzee enclosure with a large birthday banner, made especially in her honour. Born on 15 October 1965, Cindy is the oldest chimpanzee within the group of 18 housed at the Budongo Trail at RZZS Edinburgh Zoo.
Donald Gow, Budongo Team Leader at RZSS Edinburgh Zoo, said: “As Cindy is now the oldest chimp in our collection, it is very exciting to be celebrating this major birthday with her. She is a slight, very clever chimpanzee and is recognisable due to her very spikey hair!’
“Cindy has been with us a long time and is a grandmother to Kindia and Kilimi within our group. She enjoys her time in the state of the art Budongo Trail, one of the world’s most innovative and interactive chimpanzee enclosures.
“This birthday is extra special as Cindy was here during both the development of the Budongo Trail here at RZSS Edinburgh Zoo and the establishing of our partnership with the Budongo Conservation Field Station (BCFS) in Uganda. It is very fitting that she is celebrating her big milestone as we celebrate RZSS’s 10 year anniversary of working with the Budongo conservation project.”
This September, BCFS in Uganda celebrated its 25th birthday with an enormous gathering in the Budongo Forest, an occasion which also marked ten years of support from the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) as the project’s core funder.
The Budongo Conservation Field Station, which started in 1990, is located in the Budongo Forest in Uganda and is home to between 600 and 700 chimpanzees. Since 2005, RZSS has helped to support research being conducted into areas as diverse as chimpanzee habitat protection and the primate roots of human language, as well as research into chimpanzee health and disease.
The station has developed into one of Africa’s leading conservation projects, combining cutting-edge science with practical action on the ground, all underpinned by local community involvement. Taking a holistic approach, the project promotes alternative livelihoods (particularly with ex-hunters), conducts forest edge planting research and works with local schools to encourage behaviour change. It remains to this day one of the very few places in the world where wild chimpanzees are closely observed in the wild.
One of the station’s key community projects is the ex-hunter scheme, which helps reduce the number of hunters looking to the forest for bush meat by providing them with alternative livelihoods. This thereby reduces the amount of snares set in the Budongo Forest, helping to protect chimpanzees and other native wildlife.
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