Uganda Wildlife Authority

Yes.

And yeah, it's a beautiful experience, and the communities also benefit a lot, you know, because the Uganda Wildlife Authority gives a margin of all the park entrance fees to the community to support them with the schools, the education, the children, the families.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes, when I became a wildlife veterinarian, first of all, people were looking at me rather strangely because there were no veterinarians treating wildlife in Uganda at the time.

So they were probably wondering, what is she going to be doing? You know, my fellow colleagues in the Uganda Wildlife Authority, because the National Parks became the Uganda Wildlife Authority when they merged with the Game Department.

But my boss, the director of Uganda National Parks, knew why he hired me.

And so very quickly, he kept me busy.

He's now the head of the honorary wardens.

I'm an honorary wildlife officer as well.

He's the head of the honorary wildlife officers, which the Wildlife Authority has given to people who they feel have contributed a lot and can continue contributing in the future and so they we are kind of advisors to the uganda wildlife authority and through that medium we're still working closely together at one point we both served on the board of the wildlife authority a number of years ago after 10 years ago when maybe 10 years after setting up conservation through public health they asked me to serve on the board so it's I've had a number of people like that in my life many people in different sectors supporting me and We also have, you know, so many people are supporting us.

Our patron is the Queen of Buganda, and that's really getting Ugandans interested in wildlife.

And Nishida said, what, don't all chimpanzees do this? And that was the moment that they together discovered cultural differences in these different research sites with these two different communities of chimpanzees who biologically were the same, but culturally were really different.

Jessica, you're an honorary officer of the Uganda Wildlife Authority.

Regarding chimpanzees, what are the threats to their conservation and how are their numbers faring these days?

Yes, so it's very hard to tell how many chimpanzees there are because it's very difficult to do a census of the chimpanzees.

Governments care.

The government organizations were just starting up.

The government of Uganda was, there was a new Uganda Wildlife Authority that was coming up that started in 1998.

And now, I mean, there's just an explosion of support for great apes in the country.