A life for chimpanzees – Expat Guide to Switzerland
Swiss-born Daniel Hänni has spent most of his adult life working with chimpanzees. As part of his efforts to protect them, he has dedicated the last 15 years to restoring Uganda’s forests.
Hänni from the northern Swiss canton of Thurgau was fascinated by primates as a child, when he scribbled the names of various common marmoset species on his pencil case. He spent hours observing chimpanzees in zoos and reading articles about the famous British primatologist Jane Goodall. When asked why he was so obsessed with primates, he replied, “I think it’s because they’re so human-like.”
He runs the now Jane Goodall Institute Switzerland (JGI Switzerland), which he founded in 2004. It has set itself the goal of promoting the protection of great apes and their habitat. He also organizes tourist trips to Uganda to visit the natural habitat of the chimpanzees. The funds collected are used for nature conservation.
A varied career
Becoming a professional anthropologist was not easy for Hänni. The powerfully built man in his fifties was previously the Swiss champion in athletics – in 1992 he won the Swiss championship in the Olympic relay with his team from Winterthur. He was also 400 meter champion for the canton of Zurich. He trained intensively for the racetrack and also completed an apprenticeship as a draftsman, which led to a job in the real estate industry. At the age of 26, Hänni dared to live out his passion to the full. He quit his job and went back to school to qualify for a degree in anthropology.
He was then qualified to set up the Swiss branch of the Jane Goodall Institute. In the application process, he finally got to know the British primatologist.
like-minded people
“She said she was impressed by my CV and expected to meet a much older man,” recalls Hänni. “She’s a kindred spirit.” This developed into a long-lasting friendship, evident in the many photos he shows us of the two together.
It was she who inspired him to continue the conservation work that catapulted him into the next chapter of his professional journey: the jungles of Uganda.
In 2006, Hänni attended an anthropology conference in Uganda to identify the problems faced by chimpanzees in the Albertine Rift Valley, a 1,200 km valley in Central Africa that is a prime primate home range. A chimpanzee census conducted from 1999 to 2001 found that chimpanzee populations were declining due to habitat loss from deforestation.
When JGI Uganda made a plan to reconnect scattered ape communities through reforestation, Hänni volunteered to participate in a new ape census as a basis for conservation work. After attending a course at St. Andrews University on how to conduct a proper scientific census, Hänni was assigned to lead the JGI Uganda project.
swamps, posho and beans
All of Hänni’s romantic ideas about working with chimpanzees were quickly dispelled. It’s been a challenging 18 months. Hänni and his team of international researchers and local assistants combed through the forests, not for chimpanzees, who tend to be scarce, but for the roosting nests they build in the trees every day. The number of nests left gives an indication of the density of the colonies.
“We ran between seven and 21 kilometers every day. Sometimes the woods were flooded, so I took off my boots to keep them dry and waded barefoot, but you had to watch out for thorns in the streams,” recalls Hänni.
He continues, “When we needed to reach transects deep in the forest, that’s where we pitched our tents. We always kept two people in the camp to protect it from wild animals, illegal hunters or loggers. We were often infested with ants and had to eat the same posho and beans diet for days.”
The results of the survey were sobering: the number of chimpanzees had declined since the last census. Hänni set about working with the local population to protect their habitat.
shrinking population
Information gathered by Hänni’s team and a subsequent census that ended in 2017 showed an ongoing decline in chimpanzee populations in Uganda. In the western Wambabaya forest, populations declined by 22.5% between 2000 and 2008 and by 31% between 2008 and 2017. The central Bugoma forest showed a similar picture (34.5% and 28%). The decline is due to deforestation and urban growth.
local knowledge
That was the beginning of Hänni’s love affair with the country and its people. “I wanted to get to know them, find out how they tick,” he says. He realized that conservation work would be impossible without collaboration. He met and married a local woman, Carmen, the mother of his two children. They lived in Kigaaga, near the forest, and shared a house with a teacher and research associates.
“If I hadn’t lived with the people and gotten to know their culture, I probably would have made many, many mistakes,” he says.
Hänni was the only white resident in the district. “When I was walking around town with my assistants and saw a white person, I wondered what they were doing there and forgot that I was white too.” They stayed in Uganda for two years, during which Hänni lived between his house and commuted to the forest.
Hänni’s approach was to reverse the effects of deforestation and plant millions of trees, thousands of which he soon found had been stolen over the course of the project.
“We planted a large nursery and found that thousands of trees were being stolen during the night and resold elsewhere, so we set up smaller nurseries on the farmers’ land,” he says. “Now several thousand farmers are getting involved, who get new trees every year.”
Some trees are planted specifically to provide building materials so people don’t cut down the forest trees where the chimpanzees live.
There were other reasons for deforestation. “In a forest, we noticed that trees were only felled when parents had to pay school fees,” says Hänni. “We found these families and paid the school fees for them. But in return they have to plant trees. That’s how we saved this forest.”
JGI Switzerland has helped fund the planting of over 5 million trees in a corridor between Budongo and Bugoma Forest. In 2009, the institute funded the establishment of an educational center for children in Kigaaga. The center works with 10 schools with a total of over 4,000 children and explains the conservation projects.
conservation tourism
One way to make his project sustainable was to start ecotourism projects. These would generate income for the preservation of the forest. This venture was not without criticism.
“I often get emails from people who say the animals should be left alone,” says Hänni. “It would be great if we could just leave forests as protected places, but if we don’t go there with tourists then the locals can’t protect them. They don’t have the money and neither does the government.”
Hänni returned to Switzerland in December 2012 and now lives with his family in Homburg, a small village in the canton of Thurgau. The former draftsman designed and partly built his house made of wood and clay. But he hasn’t quite left his earlier life in Uganda behind. He conducts around four safaris a year there with small groups of Swiss visitors.
To date, Hänni has taken more than 250 clients on small group tours of Uganda and about 80% of them have contributed to projects that support wildlife and chimpanzees. Hänni also has her own shop, Wild adventures of Africa, which organizes trips to track chimpanzees and gorillas. He’s still investing in the Albertine Rift Valley and is optimistic his corridor project will bear fruit.
“We need to work with communities and show them that humans and chimpanzees can live together,” he says. “If people see their livelihoods improved by chimpanzees, there’s a good chance the great apes will still be there 20 years from now.”
The Ugandan Ministry of Tourism says visitors bring in an estimated CHF1.29 billion (US$1.4 billion) annually. Joshua Rukundo, executive director of the Chimpanzee Sanctuary and Wildlife Conservation Trust in Entebbe, Uganda, says: “A large part of this revenue has gone towards developing the national park and enforcing wildlife and park conservation.”
The Swiss Jane Goodall?
Although Hänni has dedicated herself to protecting chimpanzees and their habitat for more than 15 years, she rejects the nickname “The Swiss Jane Goodall”.
“As a kid, I just had this dream of living in the jungle, climbing trees and protecting the animals and the forest,” he says.