The Budongo Trail

Edinburgh Zoo's Budongo Trail allows visitors to see our chimpanzees in the world's most innovative, interactive chimpanzee enclosure. Watch these amazing creatures in their home and learn all about the links between humans and our closest relative. The exhibit boasts a huge indoor-outdoor environment that can house up to 40 chimps. The Outdoor climbing and vegetation area provides fun, foraging, and exercise, and stimulates the chimps to use and show natural physical, social and mental behaviours that you would see in the wild. There is also a network of indoor rooms for the chimps with different environmental conditions such as temperature, humidity and lighting, so each can have a preferred "hangout". Its not all about the Chimpanzees though! There are plenty of areas for visitors with viewing galleries, plasma screens, interactive displays, murals and live plants.

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Find out the links between our Budongo exhibit and our work in Budongo Forest in Uganda.

Find out how we support Chimpanzees in the Budongo Forest in Uganda:

The Budongo Conservation Field Station (BCFS) combines research and conservation to ensure sustainable management and use of the Budongo Forest Reserve. There are many different projects taking place at the BCFS including monitoring chimpanzee health and disease. Health monitoring happens on a daily basis, when possible, and it involves systematic collection of clinical and behavioural data observed among the chimpanzees, for example coughing and any injuries. Currently, over 430 individual habituated chimpanzees are monitored at 8 sites. The BCFS team also work with local communities and help to dissuade hunters from setting bush meat snares in the forest, which the chimps regularly get caught or injured in. As part of this scheme they provide the ex-hunters with goat breeding pairs in order for them to start an alternative source of livelihood that is not dependant on forest resources. These ex-hunters have in return voluntarily participated in snare removal exercises alongside the BCFS snare patrol team.