Feel the Burn

Hi everyone-

After 2 weeks of living in the field, we are starting to get into a routine. We spend 2 days in a row out with the monkeys (generally 5:30am-6:00pm) and then 1 day back at the Centro. We look forward to our days off since we get to catch up on sleep and emails. They also give me an opportunity to review my experiments on video and plan ahead for the next field days. And sometimes slip out for a swim in the poza :)

So far things have been going well. We have been rotating between 4 different monkey groups in order to avoid having monkeys habituate to the models. This makes it difficult for Shira, my assistant, to learn the monkey IDs, but she keeps plugging away at it. Two of the groups live near our house which means sometimes we can leave the house 5 minutes before dawn, walk down the trail behind our house, and pick them up. Other days we travel to one of the 3 monkey groups on the other side of the hills (Pelon side). We only go on days that other people have the monkeys since it takes an hour to hike over there and so we can't be there when they first wake up (or we'd have to walk an hour in the dark). On these days we leave the house at 1st light and start hiking. Once we reach Pelon side we radio our fellow monkey researchers to figure out where the monkeys have travelled since daybreak. It makes for a long day, but we figure we will be really strong after doing this every few days for 5 months!

Living in the Centro has been good. Shira and I take turns cooking dinner on the propane stove and everything has been yummy so far. We even invited our "neighbors", the other grad student and her assistants (who live 30 minutes away via trails) over for dinner. We made lentil rice patties and french fries which turned out pretty well. It was nice to socialize although the Centro is generally pretty lively. Living with the park guards and now their cook allows us ample opportunity to learn and practice Spanish. Hopefully, my Spanish will improve while I am here. So far so good. One more week of work and then we'll head to the beach for a little vacation!



And now for your viewing pleasure...BABY MONKEYS! YAY!