TV show led her to bond with chimp

A lot of people hear about endangered animals and what's being done to try to save them. Some respond by spreading the word to increase awareness or even by writing a check to help the cause. Very few, however, are so moved that they decide to get personally involved.

But Omahan Sara McCrone did just that after watching a television documentary describing how primates in Africa are being hunted for bush meat and are losing their habitat to foresters who sell exotic woods to high-end furniture makers and homebuilders.

The program she watched focused on Ape Action Africa, a group operating a preserve in Cameroon that takes in orphaned chimpanzees, gorillas, baboons and monkeys, and protects them from poachers. It prompted McCrone to volunteer.

Soon, Sprint had agreed to give McCrone time off from her job as an account manager, and her friends and family were helping raise money to send her to Africa. And that's where she spent six weeks this summer.

Although she worked at Mefou National Park, it is no tourist destination. The village within the confines of the preserve is fairly primitive. Volunteers live in houses that are closer to hut than hotel.

There is no power or running water, no telephones or computers. There are dangerous wild animals, deadly snakes and innumerable insects.

Insects are everywhere, she wrote in her diary. “Crickets the size of bullfrogs and moths the size of sparrows.”

Africa is unique, beautiful and dangerous, she said.

“I'm not suggesting that anyone go and do what I did,” McCrone said shortly after she returned to Omaha. “It was hard. It was very hard. People have to pay attention, or they can die.”

McCrone arrived at the Ape Action compound at the same time as a chimp whose family had been killed by poachers. Ten-month-old Victoria weighed a little over 9 pounds, was ill and had a gangrenous wound. She needed a foster mother to work with her during four weeks of quarantine. Victoria was promptly handed over to the other new arrival, McCrone.

A mother-and-baby-like bond developed between them. During the first four weeks, they were together 24 hours a day, and pretty much cut off from the rest of the world. McCrone cared for the chimp, played with her, slept with her.

It was a special experience, McCrone says now, but it also could be boring. The only other people she saw were those who brought food for her and the chimp, and the veterinarian. She read and played games with Victoria to pass the time.

Getting out of quarantine led to another set of problems. McCrone was charged with integrating Victoria into a group of chimps that was to become her new family. Victoria was not pleased. She clung to McCrone and wanted nothing to do with the other chimpanzees.

It didn't bode well for the separation McCrone and Victoria would face at the end of the six weeks. So the decision was made to approach the separation surreptitiously.

Another volunteer was gradually introduced to Victoria. On the night McCrone left the preserve, she put Victoria to bed as usual. After the chimp was asleep, McCrone gathered her things and was taken to the airport. When the chimp awoke the next morning, she was with the new volunteer.

Although her head told her Victoria had to learn to get along with her new family and without her, “it was difficult to give her up,” McCrone said.

McCrone said she has learned that Victoria is still going through the integration process but that she is doing OK.

Now McCrone has a new focus: getting the word out about deforestation and its impact on the native habitat. She wants people to understand that a “passive, easy decision made over here (about using exotic woods in a home or furniture project, for example) can have serious consequences” in Africa or South America or Asia.

McCrone also wants people to understand that the bush meat trade — the illegal hunting of animals such as gorillas and chimpanzees for their meat — flourishes largely because of poverty and a lack of education.

McCrone's eyes fill with tears as she relates stories of poachers shooting automatic weapons into trees at night to kill sleeping adult chimps and selling the young left alive.

But she brightens as she talks about Rachel Hogan, who runs Ape Action Africa, and other people she met during her stay.

Will she go back?

“I would go back,” she said, “but not necessarily will go back.”

Contact the writer:

444-1067, carol.bicak@owh.com