This is why and how I write in the jungle - it has rained so much that we have been indoors ever since lunch, my battery is at 28% and dropping, my tamarin group just visited the station and dropped off the embankment out of sight, and it’s my twenty-sixth *gulp * birthday tomorrow.
I’ve managed to take a big break and watch the first two episodes of ‘Buffy - the Vampire Slayer’ and boy, were the 90s weird! I thought I’d feel this way about the 90s in forty years but it’s already happened...a sign of the times changing? Or just the way things work?
I’ve been drowning in PrimatesPeru and have recently received a flurry of complaining emails from the real world demanding more blog updates. I start guiltily at the sight of each email and quickly archive them making silent promises to write. Now that I finally have 26% of battery life left and no tamarins in sight, all I can think of is how I ought to have written earlier! My flow of thoughts is woefully disturbed but I will do my best in the next few paragraphs to bring you all up to speed.
The most remarkable change to the project is, of course, the recent growth of our wolf-pack, so to speak. We have four new assistants (who will be reading this) and I unashamedly admit that they are a handful! I spent weeks planning for them and in about two days had to admit that all my planning couldn’t have prepared me for all the excitement of having them around. They are a wonderfully interesting group of young ladies and have so much compassion and spunk… I love it!! We are now working out how we can all of us be mot useful to the project while also allowing them to learn a whole lot about the rainforest in the process. The next four months should be interesting for our wolf pack!
I’ve mentioned our group, FC, so many times on this blog that I feel like they deserve a proper introduction before I proceed any further. They have been the center of my life for the last few months (sorry Gid!) and merely being with them momentarily will show you why…since this is tough on most of you, I’ll try to do my best with the now 16% of battery life I have left!!!
FC was a frequent visitor to camp last summer. They consisted of seen individuals, including a single infant who was about 3 months old by the time I first saw him. He was a delight to watch nonetheless and I spent a happy few weeks running about after them trying to keep them in sight in the canopy. By the end of it, they would come within a few feet of me and were quite content to trill and chirrup at me conversationally every now and then. The chief reason I was able to get this close or even locate them single handedly was the presence of this wonderful fruit tree at camp. Everyday the anona tree would allow one of it’s large and soft fruit to turn mildly yellow and the tamarins would be there to nibble at it at some point in the day.
This year was no different. The anonas began to ripen in November and the group began its regular visits. We’ve dropped our spoons mid-mouthful and rushed out to the tree to watch the group time and time again. Usually, we hear them first, their high, melancholy calls drifting to us like some distant bugle call. Then we stop mid-sentence and charge out of the comedor en masse, startling everyone else out of their lazy afternoon reveries and sending a little thrill of excitement through the whole station. Sometimes things get very exciting and we even trap them at the anona tree, which has one of our permanent traps that they are most habituated to eating at.
On the 17th of November, this is exactly what happened and we were able to work with two adult individuals, a female and male whom we tagged with a radio collar and a red bead, respectively. We called them RC and GBR. About three or so days later, we trapped two other adults in the group at a nearby trap and gave Rhea, our first field assistant an overwhelming first day – these two we named GPG and GBY, a green beaded female and a yellow beaded male. The only little guy we couldn’t catch was NC, who steadfastedly regarded the traps with deep suspicion and might possibly be the smartest tamarin in the lot.
Over the next few weeks, several frightfully interesting things happened. We began to learn their personalities, which are distinct and utterly loveable. RC is the big momma of them all, lording it over everyone and most likely to be the mother although her behaviour contradicts all our mothering instincts. She barely carries the twins, we saw her nurse them more towards the end of the first month of their life rather than right in the beginning and at first, she was barely interested in carrying them either. The other female, GPG, is the absolute opposite, but was just not large enough to have had twins, considering we had her trapped a few days before their birth!
Of the males, GBR is the big guy, bossing everyone else around but working so hard that one hardly likes to grudge him any of that credit. He carries the twins everywhere, through the worst conditions, and the most dangerous, like when they have to cross spaces on the ground. He’s terrific at it and most attentive to their needs.
Over the last few weeks though, things have changed a lot. While we were away on our one-week break, we had some bad news from the station. Of course, it would happen while we were away. GBY was found limping on the ground an having trouble getting very high in the trees. We immediately emailed back encouraging them to pick him up and keep him in the lab for examination but the following day we received a whopping 220mm of rain in a single morning. It swamped the jungle in and around the station and no one was able to go out to look for him. The next day he was gone. We were pretty devastated and we really had no way to help, being so far away.
Our field assistants joined us on the 8th of January and we spent a few days training them. The first day we sent them out to the field, unsurprisingly, was a hard one on them. They returned exhausted and possibly quite understandably frustrated at everything – the jungle was all bamboo and swamp and sometimes bamboo and swamp, the monkeys stayed hidden a lot and were terribly hard to find, and it was hard to suddenly function as a full team, trying to remember the countless things one ought to do in the jungle while crashing through apparently impenetrable vegetation. The poor girls were overwhelmed and returned with one additional piece of bad news: GBW was gone.
We set out later that day to track the group one last time and Gideon confirmed once more that they were indeed accurate in their sighting...GBW was MIA. To this day, we have no idea what became of him. I still hold out the hope that he just moved to some neighbouring group and one day would show up there, white bead and all, but it is the rainy season and a dangerous time for tiny monkeys in the jungle.
A couple days later, Gid and I took the girls out on another long training session. We addressed all sorts of issues and together were able to overcome many difficulties that present themselves to the first-time monkey follower. Mid-way through the morning, and I mean around 8am, three hours into our normal day, we were surprised by a huge squabble between GBW, the big male and GPG, the young female. He chased her around and what was initially playful turned into a nasty fight. Several lunges and bites later, she sat licking her hurt ego a safe distance away from GBR and the twins. The latter, who were now incredibly adventurous and want to get into all sorts of trouble were creating the usual ruckus in a nearby tree.
Several times that day we would watch one twin fall some twenty feet out of a tree, land on the ground after bouncing down on all sorts of leaves and scoot up another tree unhurt. If anyone were studying the nutty bipeds watching the tamarins they would see shocked expressions, hear high-pitched squeals, and watch plenty of outstretched hands ready to catch the little buggers falling out of the sky.
After the squabble, things got even more complicated. A new group of four saddlebacks ventured well within the territory of our now tiny group. They lingered and were chased several times away from the area, only to reappear a half hour later. They were intensely curious about the twins and at one point got so close to them that one twin hopped onto a stranger and almost got carried away. All this excitement was accompanied by GBR taking the time out to chase every other tamarin away from the twins – he chased all his own group members too!!
Where all this will lead is anyone’s guess. This morning we saw the group again and to our utter relief, they still have their three adult members. The success of a group at raising twins has been shown to be dependent on the number of adult males in it, which is a grand total of one in FC at this stage. Also, it rains a lot, a large part of the jungle has now been converted into a swamp, and the twins keep getting stupidly adventurous. My heart is in my mouth and a tight knot of tension in my tummy accompanies all my observations of this little family that I have grown to love. I wish them the best but life is cruel, both here and most other places, so I continue to try to do my job as a silent observer to the best that I can.
There will probably be more sleepless or teary nights in the future. A large part of my twenty-seventh year of life is to be spent in the company of these tamarins so I’m hoping that my tamarin wolf-pack grows, just like my human one has. With some luck, we should have more animals trapped soon.
But mostly, it just needs to stop raining!!
Oh! They turned the generator on so my computer is charging again. I’m at 52%!
| Comments |
|
|
|||||
|
|||||
|
|||||
