Post No. 1 — Looking back forty-years to 18 January 1981
From the age of perhaps six or seven, I was besotted with wildlife television programmes — all in black & white back then in the early 1960s — by the likes of Armand and Michaela Denis, ‘Look,’ by Sir Peter Scott, and ‘Animal Magic,’ by Johnny Morris.
Before the trip, my mother told me not to come back with a beard but when she saw it was bright ginger, she was convinced this was our Scottish and Viking ancestries shining through and jokingly forbade me to cut it off! My father was much more pragmatic, He simply wanted to know which one was the chimpanzee. {:-) As for the baby chimp, its parents had almost certainly been killed for ‘bush meat’ and its owner claimed he had ‘rescued’ it, but it wasn’t being adequately cared for — a very common, sad fate. (More on this story in a later post.)
