Meet The Kindas

Ithought I knew about baboons. After all, throughout my years of observing wildlife in many African countries, I’ve seen multifarious species of these animals. But I didn’t know about Kinda baboons (Papio kindae) until I visited Zambia in 2016. And who better to tell me about them than Anna Weyher, founder and principal investigator of the Kasanka Baboon Project based in Kasanka National Park. A meeting with Anna, an American, at Mutinondo Wilderness Lodge where she was enjoying a few days’ rest from her research work, proved fascinating.

I began by asking her about the project that is currently ongoing in Kasanka and how this started. She explained, ‘I started my Masters and my PhD studying a species of baboons that had never been studied before – in Kasanka National Park in 2010. They are called Kinda baboons. They used to be grouped with yellow baboons but with the recent genetic evidence in the last ten or so years we have realised that they are quite distinct.’

Are they confined to Zambia or where else is their range? ‘Their range is across northern Zambia,’ Anna said, ‘all the way from here in the north on the east side of Zambia across Kafue, and also southern DRC and then Angola.’ In fact they were named by Swedish zoologist Einar Lönnberg in 1919, after a site locality near Kinda, a town in southern Democratic Republic of Congo. She continued: ‘The project has been running now for six years, but when I started, it was a wild group that I had to habituate to my presence and I can now recognise them all individually.’ I wondered how many there were in a group. ‘About 65, but it can range from, say, 50 to 45, up to over 100,’ she told me. ‘We

have ten pregnant females this year and one of the interesting things about Kindas is that they give birth to infants that can be all different colours; all the other baboons give birth to black infants.’

I was keen to know how Kindas differ from other baboons such as chacmas and yellow baboons. Anna explained, ‘One of the differences when you look at them morphologically is that they are half the size of the chacma baboon, and the striking difference is smaller, leaner, longer legs. And we’ve noticed that there was very interesting male/female behaviour going on that hadn’t been seen in other baboons: the males were initiating the relationships with females and maintaining relationships with females across all reproductive states.’

She elaborated, ‘The male/female relationships are not just happening around the time when the female is ready to mate. Over multiple years, up to four years at a time, an alpha male will stay with several females, and even if the male below him has a female that is going into oestrus they don’t contest each other… but he is spending his time maintaining the relationship with the female, helping to hold the infant, carry it, and when the female is ready to go into oestrus again it seems that he stays with her. Out of all female/male grooming we see 80 per cent of the time the male is grooming the female in the Kinda. We see in yellows, chacmas, olives and hamadryas that it is actually the complete opposite.’

‘How do they sleep?’ I queried. Anna answered, ‘They sleep in very tall trees at night, just before the sun is setting, and then they wake up around sunrise, when they conduct the majority of their social activity. They are a very woodland species: Kindas are in the miombo woodland, feeding, resting, socialising, getting water, but the majority of their day is spent

feeding, and then making their way to their next sleeping site while it’s still safe and climbing up the trees. And then we’re able to get there, me and my scouts, before they’re ready to move for the day and then we follow them slowly.’

Anna’s enthusiasm for her project is evident. ‘We’re just seeing infants, especially females that were born at the beginning of the study, who are now actually having their own infants, and observing the mothering styles and the changes. Some males have left and there are new dominant males.’

When asked if the population was stable, she answered, ‘Well, in the area where I’m studying them, they are poached and there was one worry at the beginning of the study. I wondered, “If I get them very used to humans, am I putting them in danger of the poachers?” We realised that absolutely not. Whenever we come across them or they are hunted with dogs they act completely differently and very defensively and accept us in a very different way and manner. Baboons in general are very, very adaptable.’ With that said, I am confident Anna’s Kindas are in very good hands.

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