Vernon Reynolds is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oxford, UK. He has degrees from the Universities of London and Oxford. After completing his PhD (1961) on primate behaviour, he and his wife spent 1962 in Uganda locating wild chimpanzees and decided to focus their study on the Budongo Forest, returning to the UK to write his first book “Budongo: a forest and its chimpanzees”, published in 1965. In 1990, during his career at Oxford, he founded the Budongo Forest Project, later to be called the Budongo Conservation Field Station (BCFS). During the 1990s the focus was on research, with a succession of international and Ugandan researchers completing their Masters and Doctoral degrees with fieldwork on the primates and other species in the Budongo Forest. Since the year 2000 more attention has been paid each year to wildlife conservation and support for local communities around the forest.
Prof Reynolds retired from his Oxford post in 2001 but has continued to be involved in the activities of BCFS, in a supporting role. In 2005 he published “The Chimpanzees of the Budongo Forest”, an account of 15 years of research and conservation. He has received awards from the National Geographic Society and the American Society of Primatologists, and was honoured to be appointed Patron of BCFS in 2015, the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Field Station. He continues to visit BCFS on an annual basis and recently published a paper* on the consumption of minerals in the diet of the Budongo chimpanzees.
