Qualla: Budongo Forest

Budongo Forest: Introduction

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Luis Daniel Carbia Cabeza, CC BY 2.0. In 1962, a young Oxford anthropologist named Vernon Reynolds walked into a dense mahogany forest in western Uganda and began watching chimpanzees. He could not have known that the forest would soon be engulfed by civil war, that the chimps he studied would be hunted and their infants trafficked to collectors on three continents, or that he would return nearly three decades later to find out whether any had survived. Budongo Forest, draped across the escarpment northeast of Lake Albert and rolling down toward the East African Rift, is a place where the persistence of both science and nature has been tested repeatedly -- and where both have refused to give in.

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Image: Luis Daniel Carbia Cabeza | CC BY 2.0

Budongo Forest: Cathedral of Mahogany

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Josefito123, CC BY-SA 4.0. Budongo covers 435 square kilometers of moist, semi-deciduous forest in Uganda's Hoima and Kikuube districts, making it one of the largest remaining natural forests in East Africa. The canopy is defined by East African mahogany trees, some of which were spared from commercial log...

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Image: Josefito123 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Budongo Forest: Wings in the Understory

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dror Feitelson, CC BY-SA 3.0. What makes Budongo exceptional among East African forests is the presence of bird species found almost nowhere else in the region. The checklist includes 60 west or central African bird species known from fewer than five locations in East Africa, a biogeographic puzzle that hints...

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Image: Dror Feitelson | CC BY-SA 3.0

Budongo Forest: The Chimps That Endured

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dror Feitelson, CC BY-SA 3.0. Reynolds was one of three pioneer field researchers who set out in the early 1960s to study wild chimpanzees -- the others being Jane Goodall at Gombe and Adriaan Kortlandt in the Congo. He published a book about Budongo's chimpanzees in 1965, but the decades that followed brough...

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Image: Dror Feitelson | CC BY-SA 3.0

Budongo Forest: A Field Station Rises

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Josefito123, CC BY-SA 4.0. The research team that rebuilt Budongo's scientific presence did so in repurposed buildings originally constructed for Budongo Sawmills Ltd. -- a fitting irony, given that logging had been one of the forest's chief threats. In 2005, Edinburgh Zoo and the Royal Zoological Society ...

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Image: Josefito123 | CC BY-SA 4.0