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Floats Culture and that Mint mobile.com. The

1:26

time when I came closest to giving

1:28

up was having

1:31

to watch two chimpanzees

1:33

that I knew very well and one

1:35

of them killed the other one. That

1:37

was one of the hardest days in the forest. I

1:48

think if I'd had the next day

1:50

off, if I'd gotten myself thinking about

1:52

it too deeply, maybe I wouldn't have

1:55

gone back in. My

1:59

name is is Dr. Kedra Baysa

2:02

and I'm a primatologist at

2:04

the University of St. Andrews. I

2:10

suppose the primary quest of my

2:13

research is just to try and

2:15

understand what it means

2:17

to be a chimpanzee, what's going on in

2:19

their minds, what's it like to live life

2:22

as a chimp. The

2:30

beautiful Bodongo Rainforest which is up in

2:32

north-west of Uganda has been home for

2:35

most of the last 20 years now.

2:40

I spent about six months of

2:42

the year for most of that

2:44

time living out in the forest

2:46

and I've actually at this point

2:48

in my life probably spent longer

2:50

living in rainforests than I have in any

2:52

other place. Wet

2:56

socks, infant

2:59

coffee, rain

3:01

on the tin roof. I love

3:04

that, especially the clothing there. It

3:08

really does feel like going home to me when I

3:10

go back there. I

3:15

fell completely in love with the idea

3:17

of studying the evolution of minds and

3:19

thinking and behaviour. I

3:23

met a professor from the University of

3:25

St. Andrews who sent me out to

3:27

Uganda. I went out and being there

3:29

in the forest, getting to be a part

3:32

of their world, being in the

3:34

forest with them, just helped me recognise how

3:36

many things I really didn't know how to

3:38

ask or didn't even know where to start.

3:47

I'm a research camp in the forest and I get

3:50

up in the morning and we walk sometimes an hour,

3:52

an hour and a half up to where we left

3:54

the chimps the night before. What we're

3:56

doing is we're going into the forest in the dark

3:58

before the chimps and zeros walk. in

4:00

order to go and meet them so that we can spend

4:03

the whole day together. As

4:09

you start to hike into the forest, one

4:11

of the beautiful things about walking in the

4:13

dark is that you hear everything. And

4:16

I love that. I know that I walk this path every

4:18

day for months and months and years and years at this

4:20

point. So I can do it in the dark. I turn

4:22

my head to a trough. You

4:25

just sort of float out through the forest and

4:27

hear all of those sounds right through the

4:29

forest as everything wakes up. One

4:34

of my absolute favorite is the colobus

4:36

monkeys that we have in Bodongo have

4:39

what we call a dawn chorus. One group

4:41

will start and then the next group and then the

4:43

next group. And one of the things

4:45

that I love about that feeling is that we're one

4:47

of the most eastedic heurists

4:50

in Africa. But actually, you

4:52

find colobus monkeys from east Africa all the way to

4:54

west Africa. And so I just love

4:56

the idea that this morning

4:58

wave that just resonates through

5:00

the forest of the colobus monkeys as they're

5:02

waking up and passing on that call to

5:04

the next group and the next group right

5:07

across the continent, kind of like a Mexican

5:09

wave being sent from one side of Africa

5:11

to the other. Chimpansese

5:33

can live well into their 60s, so they

5:35

have a very similar in some ways life

5:37

history. And you recognize

5:40

a chimpansese exactly the same way as you'd

5:42

recognize a person. So it's their features

5:44

of their face, the way they move, the

5:46

sound of their voices. Most

5:48

of what you see of chimpansese, because they spend a

5:51

lot of time up in trees, is

5:53

you see them from the underside up. So

5:55

you get to recognize chimpansese bottom. Sometimes a

5:57

lot better than you recognize their faces. One

6:04

of the chimps that has fascinated

6:06

me for a really long time

6:08

is called Nambi. So chimpanzees typically

6:10

have their politics and their social

6:13

hierarchy is technically run by males,

6:15

but females have a lot of

6:17

leverage. And Nambi knew exactly

6:19

how to exercise it. She

6:23

is probably in her mid-sixties at this

6:25

point. She lives in the Sanso community in

6:27

Badongo. And she is just

6:30

ahead of this epic dynasty

6:32

of a family. She has

6:34

had sons and daughters, she's

6:36

got grandchildren, and it's

6:38

just been this immense, immense privilege to

6:40

have been able to be a part

6:43

of her life for this long. So

6:51

she's in what we would call the

6:54

equivalent of menopause now. But some of

6:56

the most fascinating days have been her

6:58

with her sons. Essentially she's like one

7:01

of those helicopter mums, socially engineering her

7:03

children's lives. Her last boy

7:05

Musa was this slightly layabout. Honestly he

7:07

has a powerful, high-ranking mother. He didn't

7:09

really have to work that hard, never

7:12

really cut the apron strings kind of

7:14

boy, who could easily have been alpha

7:16

male. But he just honestly didn't seem

7:18

like he could be bothered. So

7:21

what Nabi would do sometimes is she

7:24

would be the one to go up and

7:26

she would groom all the high-ranking boys. And

7:28

you know this is Nabi and she's very

7:30

influential. So they were very accepting of her

7:32

coming over and grooming. She would

7:34

groom the alpha male and then she'd groom Musa

7:36

and then she'd groom the alpha male and

7:39

then she'd groom Musa. And she would just sort

7:41

of move backwards and forwards between them. And

7:44

then slowly, slowly, slowly kind of

7:46

withdraw herself and very

7:48

effectively have essentially inserted Musa into

7:50

this kind of high-ranking male grooming

7:53

place. And so there are

7:55

all sorts of little ways in which she would make

7:57

sure that her children were in all of these positions

7:59

of training. How it... One

8:08

of my absolute hardest days in the forest

8:10

was when Lola, she was in estrus, that

8:12

means she was ovulating, she was able to

8:14

have a baby. And that's going to attract

8:16

a lot of attention from the boys. And

8:19

we had our ex-alpha male, Dwayne, who I

8:21

knew incredibly well. And that's part of what

8:23

I think made this hard, is, you know,

8:25

I knew these two chimps. This was not

8:28

our chimps and strangers from the neighbours, not

8:30

that that's a great day in the forest.

8:32

These were two individuals I knew well. And

8:35

he had been alpha male, but he wasn't anymore. He was a

8:37

bit too old now. So

8:44

what he really wanted to do was for her to come

8:46

away with him so that they could go off and he

8:48

would get exclusive access to her in that time. And

8:52

so he was asking her to follow him. And

8:55

Lola, who was still quite a young

8:57

adult female, she would come over and

8:59

that's not what he wanted. So he

9:01

would chase her or threaten her. And

9:05

it gets to the point where

9:07

Dwayne is incredibly frustrated and he

9:09

is hitting her and chasing her.

9:11

Sometimes she is screaming

9:13

and running away. The

9:19

violence of this escalates. Because

9:24

it was just me and the two of

9:26

them in the forest, she would sometimes

9:28

run behind me screaming and sort of,

9:30

I'm there filming

9:33

what is this incredibly rare

9:35

behavioural interaction. I know I

9:37

have to take this data, but I just,

9:41

I can remember standing there in the forest

9:43

with tears running down my face, knowing that

9:45

I could have intervened and knowing that I

9:48

couldn't and I shouldn't. And that wasn't my

9:50

place. And I was there to observe and

9:52

I was there to understand. And

9:58

I can close my eyes and picture it. right now

10:00

and still see her face and

10:03

I wasn't sure she basically escaped at the end of

10:05

the day. But

10:13

the next morning we go into the forest and we

10:16

find her dead. She'd

10:18

had some hemorrhaging on her brain and she just

10:20

hadn't been able to stay conscious through the night.

10:23

I went home that night and

10:25

put my camera down and put

10:27

a very large very stiff whiskey.

10:29

It was

10:32

a really pivotal moment for me because I think it

10:34

told me that what it means to be a chimpanzee

10:36

is not just the fun stuff. If we want to

10:38

understand them, if we want to understand how their behaviour

10:40

relates to ours we have to do it justice and

10:43

to look at all parts of that even when they

10:45

get tough. I

11:04

love love when it gets dark. I've always loved

11:06

you know a lot of storms and sun lights but

11:09

there's something really special about being in the forest when that

11:11

comes. It will obviously

11:13

go very dark but before that you hear

11:15

the wind in the trees and

11:18

it almost sounds like it's raining but it's not.

11:20

It's just the wind getting up through the forest

11:22

and you can hear it coming towards

11:24

you from the distance. It

11:34

comes at you like a wall of water.

11:42

Actually one of my absolute most favourite things

11:44

and it doesn't happen very often is if

11:47

you're with the chip planet it's a big

11:49

dramatic sky tearing apart thunder

11:51

kind of sound. It

12:00

depends on your full rain dance. Most

12:06

chimp displays are big and noisy and

12:09

extremely vigorous, and rain dancing, it

12:11

is perfectly described as a

12:13

dance because it's almost like ballet. Not

12:20

everybody in the group, but you'll have one or two

12:22

of the big males, will start. And

12:27

they'll be sort of swaying backwards and

12:29

forwards, and then they might run up

12:31

a tree or kind of move, but

12:33

they're doing it in this just this

12:35

fluid, beautiful, flowing movement. The

12:41

big males will be swaying back and forth,

12:43

sometimes two, three, four of them doing it

12:45

in synchrony, and they're completely silent, which big

12:48

males very rarely are when they're just swaying.

12:54

It puts the hair up on the back of your neck because

12:57

you're in this big storm, and then watching them

12:59

experiencing it, and sort of almost

13:01

feeling their awe of

13:03

genuinely awesome events. Maybe

13:31

I've accomplished what I thought I might

13:33

be interested in doing when I first

13:35

started, but the thing is, the question

13:37

gets bigger. I wanted to know

13:40

how chimp is communicating with each other in

13:42

particular about trishes. But

13:47

then realizing, oh, wait a second, if I

13:49

can describe what they're gesturing about to each

13:51

other, to a certain extent, I

13:53

know what they're kind of talking about

13:55

with each other. So now I

13:57

can ask things like, how do their relationships?

14:00

change and vary, who although

14:02

social politics basically get

14:04

the key to the whole soap opera

14:06

of their daily life. At

14:12

this point it's been decades of my

14:15

life still wondering about some of the

14:17

questions that I was first thinking about

14:19

the first day that I spent with Japanese.

14:26

Next group says to the quest for discovery,

14:29

Sarah Dykman describes her cycling adventure

14:31

to follow the migration of monarch

14:33

butterflies. I

14:42

rode my bicycle following the monarch butterfly

14:44

migration from Mexico to Canada back which

14:46

ended up being 10,201 miles. There

14:53

were moments where I'd been biking all

14:55

day and I hadn't seen a monarch

14:58

and I'd seen acre after

15:00

acre of perfectly mowed grass and I

15:02

would see a little milkweed

15:04

on the side of the road and

15:07

then I would see the mower coming to

15:09

mow down that last little tiny bit of

15:11

prairie and I just, man, I just wanted

15:13

to lay there and cry. My

15:22

name is Sarah Dykman and

15:25

I'm part amphibian biologist, part

15:27

adventurer, part educator, a writer

15:30

and oh boy a little bit

15:32

of everything. My

15:35

bicycle is what I describe as a

15:38

yard sale that exploded. It's

15:40

a little bit of everything. It's an old

15:43

beat up mountain bike that I bought for

15:45

about $200. On the

15:47

bike are panniers which hold all my

15:49

gear. The front ones were store-bought but

15:52

the back ones are made from

15:54

old kitty litter buckets. It's comfortable,

15:56

it gets me where I need to go and no one

15:59

wants to steal it. It's

16:06

funny because whenever I describe

16:09

a monarch butterfly, I describe them as

16:11

orange and blue. And

16:13

I realize that I always picture a monarch on

16:15

a blue sky. Monarchs are

16:17

like a nice deep orange with these

16:20

black veins and some white spots.

16:22

They're really flappy flyers. They're

16:24

not in a hurry. And they're pretty big. The

16:30

beginning of my trip, my motivation

16:32

was to have an adventure, to

16:34

learn, and to share my

16:37

passion for the environment with kids

16:39

by linking my trip and the

16:41

butterflies to schools. Halfway

16:44

through my trip, I realized the monarchs need

16:46

a voice. The monarchs need people to

16:48

step up and change how we live

16:50

and change how we view the world.

16:53

My motivation became fighting as

16:56

hard as I could for this butterfly. I

17:03

arrived to Mexico in the coldest

17:06

part of the winter in January.

17:09

The monarchs are at about 10,000 feet above

17:11

sea level. You see a little cluster, and

17:13

then your eyes sort of adjust, and you

17:15

start to see all the clusters. And

17:18

then you realize there's millions of monarchs hanging

17:20

from these trees. And

17:22

then you come back a few months later when

17:25

it's gotten warmer, when the migration is beginning. And

17:27

you could close your eyes, and you could

17:30

hear a million monarchs flapping their wings. No

17:37

one expects to be able to hear a monarch butterfly.

17:40

It's subtle, but you can. It's

17:42

really beautiful. When

17:50

I started my trip, the first few miles

17:52

were sort of surreal because I was on

17:54

this road and I felt like I was

17:57

in a river of butterflies.

18:02

And because it was like a bumpy road,

18:04

I wasn't going terribly fast, so I was

18:06

kind of meeting the monarchs where they were,

18:08

and we were just kind of traveling together.

18:13

I always describe it as like a river of

18:15

orange wings. And

18:20

it felt amazing. I mean, I was a little

18:22

anxious at the start. And

18:30

that kind of came to a head a few

18:32

miles after starting when the monarchs

18:34

just kind of went their northern

18:36

route into the forest, and

18:38

I stood there on the road, which

18:40

went the opposite direction, and I thought,

18:42

oh my gosh, Canada is really far

18:44

away. What am I doing? A

18:51

lot of people told me that this trip

18:53

was a bad idea, and so you're standing

18:55

there watching the monarchs abandon you and recognizing

18:58

how much you have ahead of you. I

19:09

didn't actually see many monarchs after that for

19:11

probably a couple weeks. And

19:15

I just remember thinking, this is going to be

19:17

so embarrassing, and I do this whole trip, and

19:19

I don't see any monarchs. And

19:25

I saw three in

19:27

Mexico, and I threw my bike down. I

19:29

danced in the middle of the highway, cars.

19:32

I always thought I was going mad. I

19:35

was a little bit. And

19:41

then slowly as I hit Texas in the Midwest,

19:43

I would start to see one or two a

19:45

day, and then I realized it didn't really matter

19:47

if I saw monarchs, because

19:49

every single day, every single person that I

19:51

stopped and talked to that passed me on

19:53

the highway, that I met at a grocery

19:55

store, that I visited at a school. That

20:00

was the point. The point wasn't actually to

20:02

bike with monarchs, wasn't to follow a specific

20:04

monarch the whole way. The point was to

20:06

be their voice. And so

20:08

it was meeting the people that could protect

20:10

the monarch that became the goal. I

20:20

left Mexico in March following

20:22

monarchs, and I'm

20:24

100% sure that the

20:26

monarchs that I started with didn't finish

20:28

the trip. And

20:31

this is, to me, the most amazing part of the

20:33

migration, is that it's

20:35

multi-generational. I

20:40

left with the monarchs that had overwintered.

20:43

They made it to the southern part of

20:45

the United States, Oklahoma, Texas, and

20:47

they laid their eggs and then they died.

20:50

And those eggs became the first generation

20:52

of the season, so I followed the

20:54

kids of the overwintering monarchs, and then

20:56

I followed the grandkids, and then I

20:58

followed the great-grandkids, and even the great-great-grandkids,

21:00

all the way back to Mexico. So

21:06

we're talking about an insect that

21:08

grows up on some

21:10

milkweed, the only food source of

21:12

those monarch caterpillars, and then becomes

21:14

a butterfly and flies thousands of

21:16

miles to a tree that their

21:18

great-great-grandmother rested on the winter before

21:20

without ever having been there, without

21:22

having any guides. I

21:26

remember a moment, I think I was in maybe

21:28

in Indiana, and I crossed a railroad track, and

21:30

it's just this weedy-looking spot, but I had noticed

21:32

some milkweed. I was very good at spotting milkweeds,

21:34

and I stopped my bike because I was also

21:36

very good at coming up with any reason to

21:38

pick a rest, and I found

21:40

a little egg. You can read about

21:43

it, you can know the facts, but when you

21:45

look at a little egg on a milkweed, thousands

21:47

and thousands of miles from Mexico, and

21:49

know that that egg has the potential

21:51

to go that distance. To

21:53

navigate with all these other butterflies to

21:56

the same trees, it's just so amazing, and

21:58

that was when I wanted to go. is

22:00

I want other people to feel that amazement,

22:02

to have that moment of awe. People

22:10

always thought that it was the miles or

22:12

even the weather or hills that would be

22:15

the hardest. But 100%

22:18

those things are all so much easier to

22:20

tackle than what I think the hardest part

22:22

of my trip was, which was just

22:25

the mental energy that went into

22:27

spending every single day biking through

22:29

monarch habitat, seeing what

22:31

the monarchs have to face

22:33

and how limited their space is now. And

22:36

I was alone and my trip was like

22:38

I think eight and a half months and

22:40

I spent 10 hours a day

22:42

looking at the destruction and it hurt my

22:45

brain, it hurt my heart and my soul

22:47

and that was a thousand

22:49

times harder than any hill I've ever biked up.

22:53

People expected me, you know butterflies are so

22:55

happy, you must always be happy and I

22:58

was so mad and I'm tearing up

23:01

just thinking about how mad I was. I

23:05

just wanted anyone to feel the anger

23:07

that I was feeling and

23:09

then like recognizing that wouldn't work. Part of

23:11

me just wanted to just go somewhere else

23:13

that I didn't have to face these facts.

23:17

But then I would meet someone

23:20

that cared and they would remind me that I'm not the only

23:22

one feeling this. So

23:32

many amazing people and we were all connected

23:34

because of this butterfly. When I

23:36

got to Canada I knew I was only halfway done but I

23:38

honestly just

23:41

try not to think about the

23:45

big picture ever. So when I was in Canada I wasn't thinking about Mexico,

23:47

I was thinking about Ohio and I was thinking about the presentations I was

23:49

going to give. So I was just thinking about the

23:53

big picture and I was thinking about the big

23:55

picture and I was thinking about the

23:57

big picture I was going to give. I

24:00

just really only focused on each

24:02

chunk at a time. The

24:07

obstacles that I think a lot of

24:09

people would have thought would be my

24:11

breaking points, like a mechanical breakdown or

24:13

a super rainy day or the day

24:15

I had to literally bail water out

24:17

of my tent with my cooking pot,

24:19

those actually aren't the moments that I

24:21

look back at as the

24:23

hardest part. I actually am really

24:26

grateful for those moments. I think they're like

24:28

a fun distraction. I

24:31

have this good habit of whenever something is

24:33

really tough, when I am just like freezing

24:35

cold and battling a terrible wind on a

24:38

scary road, I just always think, oh, this

24:40

will be a good story. Or, oh, yeah,

24:42

I'm not going to forget this. I

24:49

spoke to about 9,000 kids on my trip. I

24:54

have a memory of going out to a school garden,

24:57

and when you tear milkweed, a

24:59

little bit of this gooey white

25:02

latex poison will ooze out like

25:04

sap. And all the kids

25:06

erupted into cheers because they thought it was

25:08

a little egg, but it was just

25:11

a pinprick of this milky latex. I

25:13

better look closer. And then they saw a real

25:15

egg, and it was just like, we'd won

25:17

the million dollars. And

25:20

then a monarch flew over our heads, and it

25:23

was Super Bowl winning status. We

25:25

were all so happy to see this butterfly. The

25:43

last three miles of the trip included the

25:46

hardest hill of the entire trip, super, super steep. And

25:50

I remember giving it literally everything I had, then

25:54

I walked a little bit. And

25:56

so I'm plodding along, and I

25:58

really love it. saw

26:00

a monarch and I just remember like

26:03

being amazed. Just

26:09

being like, oh my gosh, you actually

26:11

do this. You actually fly back

26:14

to Mexico. I kind of

26:16

stopped and watched that monarch and was

26:18

just like really grateful to them. And

26:23

then you get to the colony and it's

26:26

always pretty surreal to finish a trip,

26:28

but I was really grateful because when

26:30

I got there, all of

26:32

the guides, locals that lead people up

26:34

the mountains, they were all congratulating

26:36

me. And I remember parking my bike and

26:38

being like, I'm almost done. And then I

26:41

walked a little bit up the hill and

26:43

saw them and remember thinking like, which

26:45

of you did I see on my trip? Who,

26:49

this is the most emotional part for me. My

26:54

favorite thing to do is to think

26:56

about all the monarchs

26:58

that exist in that forest in Mexico

27:01

because people cared, because people

27:03

decided to share their yards, because

27:05

teachers decided to give their students

27:08

that chance, to give

27:10

the monarchs a chance. And

27:12

so I just remember thinking of all

27:14

the gardens I'd seen and all the

27:16

people I met and which of those

27:18

monarchs like owed their existence to

27:20

those people. And

27:27

it just is such a beautiful example of

27:33

like our choices do matter. Because

27:36

those monarchs wouldn't be here without people deciding that

27:38

there's more important things than

27:40

having a perfect lawn. Yeah.

27:51

The mountains are what keeps me motivated in life. It's where

27:53

we get to ask ourselves who we are and

27:55

who we want to become. Attitude

28:00

of this century. Finals mountaineers

28:02

set out on individual missions.

28:05

To become the first woman to scale. All

28:07

Fourteen. And the World. Eight Thousand

28:09

And Fourteen. Mountains all above eight

28:11

thousand meters. A this about pitting themselves

28:14

against nature rather than each other. Naming

28:16

the only one of them would succeed,

28:18

but whether they liked it or not,

28:21

it would come to be seen as

28:23

a race five when and fine against.

28:25

Each other the media's needed to

28:27

seeing some competition on behind it.

28:30

As a. Deadly consequences

28:32

we're just not designed to

28:34

live in. December. Men kissing.

28:36

Down A with my only. Goal in

28:38

deficits in this amazing Sports stories from

28:41

the Bbc. World Service tell their

28:43

story in chasing mountains. Every

28:45

staff was an achievement. Search

28:47

for amazing sports stories wherever you get

28:50

your Bbc. Broadcast.