Fifteen years ago, before the sun even thought about showing up, I’d be out there—somewhere in the tangled, humid rainforest of Bossou, Guinea.
Waking up to distant hoots, the smack of stone against nut, the rustle of something unseen shifting in the undergrowth. The chimps always woke first, setting the rhythm of the day. My job? Watch, take notes, don’t interfere. Sounds simple. It wasn’t.
I was supposed to be an observer, a shadow trailing a community of chimpanzees that had spent centuries passing down their own knowledge, generation after generation. They cracked nuts with rocks like prehistoric artisans, mapped their own networks through the shrinking forest, held grudges, formed alliances. They had traditions. Cultures. And we, the scientists, were the visitors—documenting everything, yet touching nothing.
I never expected to leave. Certainly not for Madrid.
A Life Spent Among Chimpanzees
Bossou is home to a unique but fragile chimpanzee population—isolated by deforestation, but holding onto behaviours that should have disappeared generations ago. Their survival? A fluke. A testament to adaptability. Unlike their more fortunate counterparts in denser forests, these chimps had turned survival into an art form, using stone and wooden tools to crack open nuts—a skill eerily reminiscent of early hominins. For years, I followed them. Mapped their paths. Documented how a mother would sit for hours as her infant clumsily mimicked her nut-cracking technique, missing more often than not.
We tell ourselves that culture is uniquely human. That the passing down of knowledge, the refinement of skills over time, the ability to watch, learn, and improve—these are things that set us apart. But the chimps of Bossou suggest otherwise. They remind us that the line between human and animal is thinner than we’d like to admit.
Then came the moment conservationists dread: the creeping realization that documenting something isn’t the same as saving it. The forests were shrinking. The chimps’ range, once a fluid, expansive home, was reduced to patches of green surrounded by human settlements. Ancient corridors severed by farmland. The very behaviours I had spent years studying were disappearing in real-time. Field biologists aren’t meant to intervene—we tell ourselves we’re neutral observers. But when you watch a culture eroding before your eyes, neutrality feels like an excuse.
Madrid: An Unexpected Wilderness
So I left. Not because I wanted to, but because I couldn’t keep pretending my presence was making a difference. Conservation, I had learned, was just as political as it was scientific. And Madrid? Madrid felt like exile at first—loud, chaotic, wrapped in concrete. The only creatures hammering away at nuts were tourists in tapas bars.
But here’s the thing. Madrid, in its own way, is a study in adaptation. A city built on migrations—of people, of cultures, of ideas shifting and layering over centuries like geological strata. And the more I walked its streets, the more I saw it: the same negotiations of space, of hierarchy, of power that I had spent years watching in chimpanzee communities. The same unspoken rules governing movement, dominance, and cooperation. Turns out, primates are primates—whether in a shrinking rainforest or a bustling metropolis.
What Comes Next?
Spain is a land of conservation triumphs and contradictions. It is reintroducing wolves even as its farmland expands. It is pushing for renewable energy while battling desertification. It is home to some of Europe’s last great wild spaces, yet they remain at risk. If my years in Guinea taught me anything, it’s that ecosystems—whether forests, cities, or entire nations—are never static. They’re in flux, shaped by time, pressure, chance.
I’m here to track that movement. To document the ways Spain is learning from its past, shaping its future, and navigating that thin, precarious line between preservation and progress. This is my new field site—vast, unpredictable, tangled in its own contradictions.