Surprise...

is the name of a two-year-old chimpanzee. She lives with her mother, Katie, in a refuge for orphaned and trafficked chimpanzees. As the refuge area is only theoretically big enough for four chimps to have enough to eat in the wild, and in fact more than 40 live there (they are fed four times daily by their keepers), the females are given contraceptive implants - but, like humans, they don't always work. Hence Surprise. We saw her and the other 40 on their island last Saturday.

All of the other chimps want to care for Surprise, but Katie only lets those who have been nice to her in the past have contact with the baby. Most of the new chimps who come into the refuge are quite young, less than 3 years old (chimps stay with their mother until they are about 12) - usually they are orphaned when their parents are killed, or discovered when someone is trying to sell them as house pets or to a circus - and the other adult chimps also compete to become a foster carer for the new babies. Seems that chimps can also feel childless.

I am of course very interested in primate communication, though, so I'll not have any comments about how very human they are, and how they can TALK you know, TALK. They have some gestures - but according to my data, the ones they develop spontaneously or learn from each other are about the level of a 6 to 7 month-old human infant. If you are at all interested, the difference between the species seems to be mainly due to the human infant's desperate desire to connect with, copy, and attend to the same things as, older humans. Chimps may love each other and they are definitely affectionate but they when they make eye contact it is direct - they don't seem to work out that someone else looking at something means they are paying attention to it, nor therefore to extrapolate that the look-er wants them to pay attention too.