Monkey Boot Camp

I’ve had some great days and some less than great days. The last two field days I went out, the first day was great. Following the monkeys was easy, I was doing well with the IDs, I was following a monkey in the morning that rested which meant I got to rest. It was all in all a really great day. And, I decided that I wanted to wake up the monkeys the next today, so I got to head home a little early.

I think it was mostly because I didn’t get a good night’s sleep that the second day didn’t go so well. My room is right next to the table that most people hang out at, and the windows in my room along the ceiling are mesh wire, so they’re open and essentially its like whoever is at the table talking might as well be sitting in my room talking. Which is fine. That is life in a communal space. But, I had to get up at like 3:30, so I went to bed pretty early. I tried to fall asleep, but I couldn’t help but listen to the conversation right outside my room. So, I decided to put earplugs in. But this made me a little nervous about missing my alarm in the morning, and I had a weird dream about cats turning into monkeys with their ears chewed off; so, I did not sleep well. (As a side note, I had a dream last night that I went to the library and half of it was under water and you had to scuba dive to check out your books, which is kind of a cool idea, I think. And there was this one part that had tons of great white sharks, and I saved this old man from committing suicide by diving into it.)

Anyway, I only got like 4 hours of sleep. Which, for some people is not an awful thing, but for me, I need my sleep, like 9 hours of it. 4 just does not cut it. So, I wake up the monkeys, which went fine. I was able to follow the trail in the dark better this time, and the moon was out, so I didn’t even need my headlamp when I was walking on the paved road. The monkeys were already awake and moving when I arrived at 5am. And they were moving fast. They dispersed quickly, but I managed to follow them pretty well. I did have a mini tantrum / break down over the dense underbrush that I had to crash through. The monkeys were just moving through a large area with really dense underbrush, and I was constantly having to fight with vines and low branches and the like. When the monkeys are moving fast, you are watching them while you’re moving, and are therefore not looking where you’re going, and its easy to get tangled up, which happens frequently. Normally I just crash through it or try to untangle myself, but this morning at a particularly bad patch, I got caught up, couldn’t get free, and just got irrationally frustrated (break down). I violently crashed through the vines with complete disregard for their well being and flung the dismembered pieces to the side (tantrum). Then I was fine. All in all, it lasted about 10 seconds. Not bad, but I did really lose my temper.

Quickly after that, the monkeys slowed down to eat, and I did a few practice behavioral follows. Valerie met me around 7:30, and we followed the monkeys to a rest stop, where they rested for a couple hours. Which was nice. That’s when this picture was taken. (If you look above me and to the right, you can make out Baba, the alpha male. He’s not looking at the camera, uncooperative monkey.) When the monkeys started moving again, Valerie suggested that I practice calling out behaviors while she did a follow, so she could see what I was seeing, and correct me as needed. So, I started doing that, and after a couple minutes my brain just stopped working, and I just stopped talking. I completely and utterly spaced out. Now, I freely admit to being a space cadet. I admit that quite a bit of the time my head is in the clouds, but usually not when I’m on task and on the spot. But I spaced out, and worse, I didn’t really notice that I had spaced out. Until Valerie gave me this look of confusion and annoyance, and started calling out the behaviors which I should have been calling out. So, I felt really stupid. I felt like she thought that I couldn’t tell the difference between when a monkey is traveling, grooming, or foraging. When, really, I can. I think its just because I’m not used to calling out the behaviors that made it more difficult for me. That coupled with a complete brain fart just resulted in me looking like an idiot.

A little bit about Valerie. I like Valerie. She’s high energy and talkative, very smart, and I enjoy spending time with her. She's very thoughtful; when I bought my replacement camera, I forgot to buy a memory card, and she gave me hers to borrow, without me even having to ask for it. She’s definitely type A. She likes to plan and be in control. And, really, she has little control over anything in the field. Not what the monkeys do, where they go, whether we can find them or not, how fast I learn to accurately and precisely collect behavioral data. All of which I know is hard for someone who hasn’t done field work before and likes to be in control. And she’s undertaking an extremely ambitious project and is under a lot of stress, which I recognize and understand. Valerie’s also an only child, and (and I really hope I’m not offending anyone who may be reading this, especially if they themselves are an only child :) I think when you grow up alone you just miss something. I don’t know what it is, but there is this, um, sharpness to her sometimes. The same thing that I’ve noticed in other only children. I think only children have all the anxiety and tension that got embedded into them from their parents who were going through parenthood for the first time, and were totally freaked out themselves. But, they didn’t have any younger siblings to a) take their aggression out on and b) just mellow them out. I don’t know if sharpness is the right word, but sometimes her tone is just… harsh. And I’m such a sensitive soul… but seriously, she can be a little intense. One other thing I’ve noticed, is, I think because she likes to be control, if I, or someone else, is doing something that is not necessarily the exact same way that she would do it, I think she has difficulty seeing that the end result would be the same, even if the method is different. I think she just sees “That person isn’t doing that the way I would do it, therefore the end result might be wrong.” And sometimes I have energy to explain why I’m doing something the way I’m doing it, but when it comes to mundane stuff like cutting vegetables or putting groceries on the conveyer belt, I just don’t have energy to explain myself. So, I just let it go, but I still get secretly a little annoyed that I appear less than competent and need to be ‘corrected’, just because I don’t want to have to explain my particular, perfectly good method of doing things.

So, back to the bad day. So, we follow the monkeys a little longer, and I was having a horrible day with IDs. Every monkey I looked at looked like one of 4 monkeys, when in fact there are about 20 adult monkeys in our group that we need to recognize. And I messed up a few other times. I won’t go into details, because it would take far too long for me to type out, but I didn’t really mess up in truth, so much as just not fully explain myself, so it just looked like I really didn’t know what I was talking about. I also think because it was the second field day, I was more tired and just had a long day in general.

The next day we had a data day, which means we weren’t in the field. Valerie and I went over how to enter some of the data, and at the end of our ‘training session’ she asked me how things were going, and told me that she wanted me to let her know if there’s anything she can do to make the learning process easier, or if there’s anything I need; that if I need to talk, or need a hug or anything, her door is always open. So, I feel like she recognized that I had a bad day, and was frustrated, and she was trying to make me feel better. And she did. I just keep telling myself I need to get through this first month! Its like monkey boot camp!

The next day in the field (yesterday) was great. We searched for the monkeys and I found them super early, at like 7 am. They rested really early, for almost two hours. We were just hanging out, waiting for the monkeys to start moving; I was lying down on the ground, with my legs up on a branch. My kind of field work! And a bunch of the monkeys pooped after they rested, so we got a bunch of fecal samples; we actually got all the fecal samples we needed in one day, which is almost a record. I had a ‘Wow, I’m hanging out in the forest with monkeys right now, this is soooo cool’ moment, which I haven’t had in what seems like a long time. When I took this picture, there were a bunch of juveniles playing and roughhousing to my right, which I think is what this little guy is looking at. Moments after I took the picture, this little one jumped off the branch, walked past me, put out his hand and just ever so lightly touched my leg, then ran over and joined in on the play. I love the little ones, they are just too sweet, curious, and cute!

We’ve also seen some cool wildlife. Well, mostly just snakes. Actually, the two most venomous snakes here. This moccasin I discovered while I was collecting poo, and almost stepped on. Okay, not really almost stepped on, but I was collecting a fecal samples mere feet from the snake, without having realized it was there, and was walking around a branch to collect some more, when I spotted this guy in my path. Which I am really happy that I did. Because snakes were the last thing on my mind at that moment, I was totally focused on finding the poo and getting it in the ice pack before the hormones started to denature. So I’m glad that the reptilian, or whichever part, of my brain recognized the snake as a snake and stopped me from getting closer to it. This encounter has also made me better about looking before I sit, knell, swat, or get anywhere close to the ground.

A vine snake (not sure, need to check, but it sure looked like a vine) Valerie spotted. Not venemous. It stayed like this with its mouth open for several minutes, until we left it. Wonder why...

This rattler Gavin (a researcher working on his PhD here) spotted tonight on the trail between the alberque and the lab. It was much bigger than any other ratttler I've seen, and is the most venemous snake in the park. I think fer-de-lances are the most venemous in the country, but I don't think they are here in the park. I love the photo of everyone else taking photos of the snake. It was like we were paparazzi, with all our flashing cameras. Crazy biologists.