After three days and three nights of bus travel that took me from Cusco through Bolivia to the northwestern most province of Argentina, I finally arrived in Formosa, the site of Owl Monkey Project (the other half of the monogamy project) where I’ll be working for the next five weeks.  It was quite a relief to finally sleep in a bed for the first time in four nights, but probably because I had gotten caught up in the thrill of traveling during the past month, I wasn’t initially quite as excited to start work in a new research site as I had been upon leaving Tiputini.  Once I got out in the field, however, my excitement quickly returned, and the first time I stood in the middle of the forest here and the sharp, clear beep of the telemetry told me my first owl monkey sighting was near, I was thoroughly eagerness to immerse myself in the lives of a new species of monkey quickly returned.

The work has felt both remarkably similar and considerably different from what I was doing in Tiputini.  To begin with the setting, the landscape here looks almost nothing like the rainforest.  The field-site itself is on a huge cattle ranch called the Estancia Guaycolec, so the area is dominated by large grass plains filled with cows, and then the occasional clump of forest which the monkeys inhabit.  The vegetation in these gallery forests is nothing like the dense, multi-layered, growth of the rainforest, as mid-sized trees make up the large majority of the flora, and there’s relatively little ground cover to get in the way of a field researcher trying to move about and follow his or her monkeys.  At times I almost feel like I could be in a forest in the northeast United States until I see something distinct like a bromeliad (or a monkey) that reminds me I’m far from it.  Nonetheless, the openness of the forest can make following the owl monkeys a good deal easier and more pleasant, as I’ve been able to avoid the frustration so common in Tiputini of following a group of monkeys you simply cannot see because the foliage of trees is so dense.

The owl monkeys do make up for this, however, by spending a large portion of their daytime hours sleeping.  Most species of owl monkeys are completely nocturnal, but the variety here, Aotus Azarai, are cathemeral, meaning they have periods of activity and rest during both the night and day.  Such daytime activity luckily means the monkeys can actually be studied in the wild, but the sleeping they do in the daytime also makes for some fairly dull observation periods.  Interestingly, the activity patterns vary according to the cycle of the moon, with more nighttime activity during a full moon, but even though there has been very little moon in the time I’ve been here, I’ve still spent a lot time watching owl monkeys nap.  But at least they are napping in plain view, right?  And while sleeping monkeys aren’t particularly exciting (though they are adorable), the cathemeral habits of the owl monkeys do give allow us to take a lengthy lunch/siesta break from field work in the middle of the day, and avoid 10+ hour days in the field.

Another difference that I suspect is at least somewhat caused by the increased openness of the forest (as well as its less expansive boundary) is the increased number of groups that are being monitored by the project.  While there are just five groups and one individual with radio collars (the Monogamy Project had four at Tiputini), there are over twenty groups in the area with at least an individual and a territory identified.  Keeping track of so many

uncollaredgroups in the rainforest would take a huge amount of effort, but when the forest space is limited and the forest itself is more open, its possible to do periodic checks on a larger number of groups in order to get data on group composition.  As a result, in addition to just doing the behavioral data that I focused on in Tiputini, I will be helping check up on the less frequently monitored groups, checking to see whether any juveniles have dispersed or adults have been displaced.

More differences from research in the rainforest come from the fact that this area of Argentina is sub-tropical and thus relatively dry, and can get quite cold in the winter while being boiling hot through most of the summer.  It is winter here now and also the dry season, so it hasn’t rained in weeks and my first few days in the field were freezing cold.  Bundling up in gloves, a hat, and essentially all my warm clothes to go out into the field makes following the monkeys here feel a good bit different than it did in the temperate but oppressively humid and wet rainforest.  Its warmed up some since the first few days, but the more extreme temperature conditions are even more noticeable because we’re roughing it a bit more when we’re out in the field.  We sleep in tents and while there is a building where do our cooking and store our food and equipment, there is no regular electricity (meaning no refrigerator) and no showers, and there certainly isn’t anyone to cook our meals or do our laundry like in Tiputini.  At the same time, we are less than an hour from the city of Formosa, so on the weekends we get a short respite from camping and field work, as we return to the city and to do data entry, shower, wash our clothes and reconnect with the world a little.

Despite the substantial differences between here and Tiputini as a result of the setting and the owl monkeys’ activity patterns, the behavior I have thus far observed feels very familiar.  The owl monkeys are monogamous just like the titis and sakis, and thus generally live together in groups consisting of a male, female and one to three infants or juveniles (interestingly it is not always the case that both the adults in the group are the parents of the young).  When its time to sleep, the family finds a suitable branch and huddles close together as tightly as possible for warmth just like the titis would, with the youngest generally squeezed between its parents,  The males are heavily invested in paternal care, so the infants and younger juveniles can be quite attached to their fathers, but are also particularly curious about the human observers that follow them around from time to time.  And in all, the monkeys’ days consist largely of sleeping and eating, with a little bit of movement and perhaps grooming mixed in to keep things exciting.  In comparing the titi and owl monkeys, in fact, its quite remarkable that species from two distinct genera inhabiting two very different environments have such similar social structures and behavior.

Of course, there do seem to be important differences between the owl monkeys and the titis.  One that became noticeable within my first few days of research was intensity with which the monkeys seem to protect their territory.  One morning I was following a male and female monkey that made up the group D800 when I realized that within plain view and no more than 30 meters away was a neighboring group of three monkeys passing through the area.  I was expecting a dramatic inter-group encounter to follow, but neither group of monkeys was particularly concerned.  Dionisio and Doli of D800 watched the other group with some interest, but no apparent concern, eventually the two groups parted without event.  This was quite surprising to me given how intensely territorial I had experienced titis to be, and that owl monkeys have even smaller territories despite similar weights.  It is of course quite possible that such uneventful inter-group encounters occur in titis and no one notices them, but every such encounter I saw or heard of consisted of a quite a bit of vocalizing and stress for all parties involved.   A few days later, I did witness another inter-group encounter among the owl monkeys with stronger reactions by both groups (consisting of intensely watching, running back and forth, and vocalizing), and I also have seen the intense response of a group to the recording of an aggressive male call, so it is not as if the owl monkeys don’t care much for their territories.  But if the owl monkeys are in fact less guarded about their territorial boundaries (which do overlap in the first place), it is interesting to think about what that might say about the importance of mate-guarding and resource-guarding in comparison to the titis.

At any rate, I am happy to be thinking about such questions and spending time in the field again, and overall I feel quite satisfied with the mix of interesting fieldwork and a pleasant atmosphere here at Formosa.  I like the openness of both the forest itself and the surrounding savannah, and how it allows you to actually see the large variety of birds that live in the area.  It also allows for some stunning views of the sunrise and sunset, in the mornings we walk to the forest at the very tranquil crack of dawn, and practically every evening we walk back under a sky painted orange and red.  The flora and fauna are not as diverse and spectacular as the rainforest, but the environment is interesting nonetheless, and the monkeys here have just as much to offer, so I’m excited to continue researching.

 

 

After the somewhat stressful series of bus rides of the previous few days, and the overall experience of getting used to traveling alone in the previous two weeks, taking the plane from Lima to Cusco and spending the week with Elizabeth around Cusco and Ollantaytambo was a welcome period of relative relaxation.  It was funny how comparatively easy and natural going through the airport seemed, given that there was a real order to things that I was actually familiar with, instead of the chaos and unfamiliarity of every other form of transport I’d used since leaving Tiputini.  Also, being with someone who generally knew the ins and outs of the area we were in made for a different experience, as there was no longer the need to constantly stick my head in the guide book or ask every helpful person I could about what to do and where to go.

We spent a night and a day in Cusco, which is a very pleasant city with narrow, cobbled streets and neat architecture.  It was the capital of the Inca empire, so there are a lot of ruins and museums in and around the city providing a taste of what the empire was like.  We visited Korikancha, which was an important Incan temple that the Spaniards built a church on top of, and also snuck up to the Saqsaywaman ruins (essentially pronounced ‘sexy woman’) outside of the city at night after it was closed.  Visiting the ruins in the dark was very cool, especially since it gave us a spectacular view of the city lighted up at night, and it was also kind of eerie and exciting because we weren’t really supposed to be there and the darkness made the massive stone architecture a kind of otherwordly feel.   Thankfully there was a huge illuminated statue of Jesus looking over the city close by, and I think he was looking after us to make sure we weren’t overcome by any sinister Incan spirits.

While Cusco is definitely a neat place, the day we spent there was probably enough, as the city is also appropriately called the capital of Gringolandia because of the overwhelming number of tourists around.  When walking around the main plaza in the city, its hard to go more than a minute without someone coming up to you trying to sell you something (“Inca massage? Special price just for you!”), and in parts I’d say the ratio of gringos to locals is about 50/50.  At first the number of other gringos was a bit comforting, because for once I didn’t stand out as a total minority, but as I spent more time in the city the overpowering atmosphere of tourism got pretty tiresome.  There is a wall on one of the streets in the city with a 12-sided stone is supposed to an example of the skill of the stonework from Inca times, and there is always a crowd of tourists taking photos and a man dressed up in traditional Inca garb surrounding the stone.  We must have walked by the place a dozen times, and this rock is honestly not that interesting in the first place, but the whole scene just seemed more and more ridiculous every time we walked

by, because without knowing anything about the rock it would honestly look as if a bunch of people were continually staring at and taking pictures of a rather unremarkable stone wall.

Elizabeth and I got plenty far off the tourist track the next day as we embarked on a two day hike not from Ollantaytambo, where she’d been volunteering for the summer.  Our routed started at the tiny little town of Huaran and took us up a beautiful valley to the even tinier little town of Cancha Cancha, up and over a beautiful mountain pass, and down another valley dotted with lakes and a lovely waterfall and eventually to the slightly larger town of Lares, which was significant to us only because it had a hot springs.  Seeing Cancha Cancha, and spending the night camping there, was quite an experience.  The town was really just a collection of traditional stone houses with thatched straw roofs scattered throughout a half mile section of the valley.  I would guess somewhere between 100 and 200 people lived in the whole area, and the easiest access to their home was the trail we spent 4 hours hiking up on the first day.  We arrived shortly before sunset just as it was starting to get cold, and the place was pretty empty other than two two girls who were probably 13 or 14, and who looked very amused and intrigued that two strange-looking white folk had wandered into their town.  We walked around a bit trying to figure out where we would set up camp for the night, and ended up getting an offer to stay in the field right outside of a house by a cheery and excited-looking 10 year old girl, with the okay of her older sister.  The young girl looked on with fascination as we took out our tent, took out headlamps and began purifying our water, and excitedly asked to help us set up our camp.  Several times she offered to show us into her house to get out of the cold, and at first we said no as we didn’t want to intrude, but as it got darker, windier and a whole lot colder, the idea of a sheltered place where we could cook our dinner seemed a whole lot more attractive, so we obliged.

Two side by side stone buildings, each no larger than a good-sized bedroom made up their home, and the one we went into was illuminated only had a fire at one end where the mother was preparing dinner.  She spoke only Quechua and no Spanish, but through her daughters welcomed us to her house and explained that their father had died, so it was just her, her two daughters and the baby the eldest daughter had wrapped up in a blanket.  They offered us a seat by the fire and even gave us some of the potatoes they had cooked up to add to our dinner.  We tried making conversation, asking about what their life was like in Cancha Cancha, but it was a little hard to know what to say so mostly we just thanked them a lot for their hospitality and ate our dinner in silence, listening to the squeaking guinea pigs that were running around the room.  After finishing our meal, saying good night to the family, and heading out into the miserably cold night to our tents, Elizabeth and I both felt impressed by the ruggedness of their lives.  There we were, shivering like crazy and depending on our fancy gore-tex, gas stove, tent, sleeping bags and headlamps to make it through the night, and this 10 year old-girl was happily following us around in sandals without access to any electricity, living day in and day out in the bitter cold, her family surviving by growing potatoes in some impossibly unproductive land.

Of course in reality such a life is simply what the people of Cancha Cancha have grown up with, and what they know, and they are clearly well adapted to such a life or they wouldn’t still be there.  But there were some elements of sadness to their life that were more than the difficulty I had comprehending a traditional life style so different from my own.  The next morning before we took off we wanted to thank the mother for the family’s hospitality, but the eldest daughter told us she was drinking (it was 7:30 in the morning), and we soon after saw a man enter the house, who was likely there to provide the alcohol.  We also asked the daughters what they were going to do that day, and while the younger one had school, the older one (who was 19) said she would just stay in the house because there was nothing to do.  That painted a sort of dismal picture of what life in Cancha Cancha was like beyond the harsh conditions and lack of development: life didn’t seem to offer these people many options for  other than drinking, sitting around the house doing nothing, or leaving home like their brother apparently had to find a different lifestyle.  And it seemed that whatever education the youngest daughter was receiving wasn’t helping create any opportunities for her future either.  If I were to feel okay imposing any values on a society and culture totally different from my own, it would be that the people there ought to have the opportunity to engage themselves and improve their quality of their lives, whatever that improvement might mean.

The challenge of improving the lives of rural urban communities connects to an issue very much present in the volunteer work Elizabeth had been doing for the Sacred Valley Project.  The project runs a dormitory in Ollantaytambo for girls who live in rural areas (similar to Cancha Cancha, though not usually as remote) to stay in so they can attend secondary school, since such schooling is unavailable to them near their homes.  The project also provides tutoring assistance and extra instruction since the girls’ rural education generally leaves them behind when they arrive at their school in the city.  So the idea is that through increasing the upcoming generation’s access to education, the project empowers members from the rural communities to themselves improve the quality of life of their rural homes.  Through

talking to Elizabeth and spending some time at the dormitory itself, I saw the sorts of problems such a project runs into despite its good intentions.  The most significant seems to be a widespread problem with education, and that is the disconnect between what the girls are learning in the classroom and what actually might be useful for them in the real world.  There’s something very strange about a 15 year-old who comes from a town that just got electricity struggling to figure out how to balance an equation in order to get a passing grade in her algebra class.  And then beyond the subject matter, there is the sense that the girls are learning more about how to do schoolwork rather than how to think for themselves or be creative and original.  This was evident during an english lesson that I helped Elizabeth teach, where the girls were quick to copy down a large list of verbs in english and spanish, yet struggled to act out those verbs in a game of charades they played to help them learn the words.  In general the girls seemed serious about schoolwork and did have aspirations about their future, but whether their school and their environment would actually allow them to achieve such aspirations was unclear.  In reality the challenge of improving the lives of the rural communities in the areas and helping them adapt to a modernizing world is much larger than simply getting them to school.

I’ve gotten sidetracked from talking about how the rest of my time in Peru went, but since I’ve already written so much I’ll let my pictures do the majority of the talking from here on out, first starting with the rest of the hike that took us through Cancha Cancha.  Below on the left is a view we had on our way out from Cancha Cancha, and the right is a view we had about an hour later, as we made our way up toward a pass to the right of the peak seen in the picture.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As we continued up toward the pass, more peaks came into view, each one seemingly more impressive than the next.  I forget the names of the peaks, but the highest of them were well above 5,000 meters (16,400 feet), and I think we were around 4,500 meters at our highest.

 

 

Eventually we were able to look over into the next valley, and our route took us by some pristine blue lakes and a beautiful waterfall, before eventually dropping us at a road several kilometers from Lares.  We were pretty tired and those last kilometers on the road weren’t that scenic and were a bit of a pain, but we were rewarded with a relaxing in the hot springs outside of town.

 

Lucky for us, the only bus out of Lares the next morning was at 4 am in the morning, as they close the road during the day for repairs, but we eventually made our way back to Ollantaytambo where we relaxed for the day before our next adventure: Machu Picchu.  Rather than paying 40 dollars each way to take the train to the site (in addition to the 50+ dollar entrance ticket to Machu Picchu itself), we opted to hike the 28 kilometers (16 miles) along the train tracks, which was actually fairly pleasant and not a bad way to spend the day for a budget-conscious traveler.

 

 

We camped the night outside of Aguas Calientes, the touristy town before the ruins themselves, and then arrived amid the huge flock of tourists from all over the world to see the ancient Incan ruins. It really is a pretty remarkable site, and the question that immediately came to mind as I got my first view of the ruins was what on earth motivated the Incans to build such an extensive city with its temples and terraces for crops on top of a such a massive hill.  As we find out, getting information about the ruins is actually somewhat difficult if you haven’t already arranged to be part of a tour group.  Not wanting to shell out more money for a private tour, we tried latching onto some other group tours, but for whatever reason these tours were ‘private’, so the guides refused our request to join up the group for a little extra cash.

 

We felt better, however after one guide told us that all the guides just make up stories anyway,  I think there might be some truth to that, which could be why its so hard to get information about the ruins at the site, since most of it is speculation.  We entertained ourselves by making up stories about different parts of the ruins and their significance to the Inca back in the day.

 

 

In the picture below on the left you can see Huayna Picchu, the peak beyond the ruins, which despite the steepness of its slopes you can  actually climb up.  We did this and it was definitely one of the highlights of the day, as the views were spectacular and there were actually a decent number of ruins on top of the peak itself.  How the Incas managed to build them I have no idea, but I suppose their existence was pretty good evidence that the Inca were both extremely intelligent and resourceful, and also probably a little bit crazy. The picture on the right is the view of Machu Picchu from the summit of Huayna Picchu.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In all, it was a pretty fantastic time in Peru, and it would have been nice to stay longer and explore the country a little more.  But the monkeys in Argentina were calling me, so after Machu Picchu and another day in Ollantaytambo, I set off for Formosa on a marathon series of bus rides that would take me through Bolivia to my next research destination.  I’ll write another entry as soon as I’ve settled in in Formosa.

I got off to a pretty hectic start in Peru.  The border crossing went smoothly, but as soon as my bus arrived in Piura, where I was planning on spending the night and then taking a bus to Lima the next day, things got a little crazy.  Instead of having a single terminal where all buses arrive at and leave from, Piura had the brilliant idea to have the different bus companies located all over the city, so that when you get off your bus you have to pay a taxi to take you around and find out where you’re going to take your next bus.  I had a small map of the city in my guidebook, and it looked like at least some of the companies were clumped together in a single area, but wherever my bus from Ecuador dropped me off, it was nowhere near that area nor could I locate where I was on the map and it was after dark so I didn’t really feel like exploring the city on foot.  So when I got off the bus I was a little disoriented (made worse by the fact that I was feeling sick and already kind of out of it from some bad chicken I ate the night before), and probably sensing my confusion, I was immediately hounded by taxi drivers yelling a million different things at me, trying to figure out where I needed to go so they could take me there and overcharge me.

That’s pretty much exactly what happened, for once I collected myself, I explained to the most persistent taxi driver that I needed to go to an ATM, find a bus ticket for Lima, and then go to a hostal.  I asked him how much, and he said 5 soles, which was cheap, so I hopped in, but soon found out that the 5 soles only got me to the ATM and I had to bargain the price down to an extra 15 for everything else I wanted to do.  Unfortunately, finding a bus ticket to Lima was not so simple, as it was supposedly a popular vacation time and apparently Peruvians aren’t scared off by a 14 hour bus trip to and from Lima as part of their vacation.  My taxi driver took me from bus company to bus company, it seemed that nobody had any available tickets to Lima, either that night or the next day.  Every other time I’d needed to take a bus somewhere, I just showed up at the bus terminal and there always seemed to be a seat available on a bus heading to my desired location within the next hour or two.  This clearly wasn’t happening on that day, which became increasingly worrisome given that I had a plane ticket from Lima to Cuzco two days later, so if I didn’t catch a bus the next day I would miss my flight.  I’d gotten the plane ticket for pretty cheap, thinking the one hour flight would be a lot less stressful than the alternative 20 hour bus ride, but now having a fixed time I needed to be in Lima was creating its own stress.

Everything felt incredibly chaotic as my taxi driver raced me around from bus company to bus company.  He was of course driving incredibly aggressively and erratically, which I’m pretty  used to, but this was made a little bit sketchier by the fact the taxi wasn’t a real car, but basically a motor bike with a covered cart attached to the back of it, so I didn’t even have a solid window or car door between me and the other traffic we kept almost running into it.  I’m pretty sure the taxi driver was taking me for a ride as well, as it seemed we would take the most circuitous route possible between bus companies, sometimes passing what appeared to be several different bus ticket offices on the way to our next destination.  And after I got turned away by the first few companies, he would keep saying he knew one or two more companies, but then after we visited those he would remember one or two other possibilities, whose offices were of course another five minute drive away.  I started doubting whether the 20 soles we had agreed to was really going to cover this trip, but I was too disoriented to really protest, and was getting more and more anxious about whether I would actually make it to Lima in time to catch my flight.

We probably had visited around eight companies, none of which had a single seat that night or the next day to Lima, before my driver pulled up next to some bus that appeared to be just about to leave.  He talked to the bus driver and then told me I could get on the bus for 120 soles (roughly 45 dollars).  That was a good bit more than I wanted to pay, so I hesitated and then the bus took off before I realized that I needed to get on that bus regardless of the cost.  I told my taxi driver as much, so we took off racing after the bus as he tried to flag it down.  I thought to myself ‘this is crazy are we actually chasing after a bus that is trying to leave the city on this puny little motorbike taxi?’, but the bus soon pulled over to pick up some other passengers, so I took the opportunity and told the bus driver I wanted on.  Just to make things more chaotic, however, as I pulled my bags out of the taxi I grabbed my small backpack from the wrong end and all of its contents ended up spilling on the street.  I quickly gathered them up, but later realized I somehow missed by my Ipod (the taxi driver who helped me gather up my things may have snatched it I’m not sure).  Then to make matters worse, to pay both the taxi driver and the bus driver, I only had bills of 50 and 100 soles, so I ended up paying 50 to the taxi guy and 150 to the bus guy, and the taxi driver ran off before I had a chance to ask for change.  To cap it off, as I got on the bus I realized that there wasn’t actually a seat available for me, but that I had just overpaid to be able to sit on the stairs of a double decker bus for a 14 hour ride.  It felt ridiculous, and I was mad about not getting change, but part of me also just felt hugely relieved to actually be heading toward my destination.

Things got better after that, as I befriended another guy who ended up on the stairs, and he somehow managed to get us up to the front cabin where there were a couple of real seats next to the driver.  The ride ended up being ridiculously cold up front, and there were a few things that felt kind of sketchy, like when without explanation the driver told us to cram into a tiny little room with a bed behind the driver’s cabin and wait for about 10 to 15 minutes (I think the bus was going through a police check or something), or when we stopped at a random intersection in Piura and someone came up and gave the driver a bag of something in exchange for wad of cash.  But after  plenty of badgering I at least got my change from the bus driver, and in reality I was just happy to have a seat on that bus and to make it to Lima.

There was still a bit of craziness left once I arrived in Lima, like when for a brief moment I wasn’t sure if my backpack actually made it on the bus I was on, and the driver said something about me having to go to the central office to pick it up.  Also, the guy I sort of befriended ended up saying he wanted to share a hostile with me, which I soon realized meant he wanted me to pay for a hostel for the both of us, yet another example of a local’s friendliness being coupled with a desire to take advantage of the gringo travelers’ money.  But overall I found Lima to be a pretty agreeable city for the 24 hours I spent there, especially given its size (8 million people, I think the third largest city in South America).  I didn’t have time to see much of the city, but I got a chance to stick my foot in the pacific ocean, and had the amusing experience of seeing a large group of old couples quite skillfully dancing salsa in the plaza near my hostel.  And at any rate, arriving there meant the end of the most stressful part of my travels thus far, and the beginning of a quite enjoyable time in Peru.  I meant to include all of my time in Peru in one entry, but I guess I got a little carried away with this story, so I’ll include the fun stuff I did in the next entry.

Given the massive distance and the abundance of worthwhile things to see between the two research sites used by the Monogamous Primates Project, I’ve opted to take a couple weeks to travel while making my way from Ecuador down to Argentina, rather than just covering the distance in a straight shot.  As of now, I have just finished up a week and a half in the non-Amazonian part of Ecuador, and while that wasn’t nearly enough time to give the incredibly diverse country its due, I still got a pretty good taste.

I first spent a week in Quito, taking a Spanish class in the mornings to refresh my knowledge of the language (its been almost three years since I had to use Spanish), and getting to the know the city and the surrounding area in the afternoons and on the weekend.  The class was a good confidence-builder, and my Spanish is definitely functional at this point, but I’ve still got some progress to make before I can comfortably converse with people.  Traveling here you realize you can actually get away without knowing that much Spanish (I’m confident I know more than the average tourist here), but at the same time if you want a chance at feeling like anything other than a complete gringo who is here to throw money into eager hands of the Ecuadorian tourism industry, you’ve got to be able to speak with some comfort.  You just can’t engage with or get to know a country in the same way when you’re not speaking the language with the people that live there, which is something that’s constantly on my mind as I struggle to have conversations with the Ecuadorians I run into (or as I avoid the conversations altogether because I know they will be awkward and difficult).  I did stay with a host family so that I’d get more chances to practice Spanish and also get to better know some Ecuadorian people.  I ended up not seeing a whole lot of them, but my they were super nice and my host mom provided me with better food than I ever got in any Ecuadorian restaurant.  Overall I’d say Ecuadorian food is fine but nothing special.  Almost every lunch and dinner starts with soup, of which there are an incredible variety, and then usually follows with a plate of rice, some sort of meat, potatoes, a vegetable, and maybe an egg or some beans.  That standard meal gets a bit old, and the best meals I had were probably a steak I got from an Argentine restaurant and a shrimp ceviche that my host mom made.

Aside from the Spanish class and generally getting adjusted to staying in a foreign country, I fit a lot of things into my stay in Quito,. I spent an afternoon walking through the historical center of the city, which has some pretty neat architecture and a handful of impressive churches.  I took a tour of an art museum featuring the work of Osvaldo Guayasamin, who is probably the most famous South American artist of the 20^th century, and has some fascinating work depicting the struggles and suffering of all of Latin America at the hands of both the Spanish and the militaristic governments so often in power in this part of the world.  I also spent a night out in the Mariscal where Quito’s most popular bars and clubs, and took a trip to the equator just outside of Quito which was rather gimmicky but pretty fun, and there I got to see a real shrunken head of both a human and a sloth.  Over the weekend I took a day trip to Otavalo two hours outside of the city, which supposedly has the largest market in all of South America.  I wasn’t looking to buy anything but the market was still nice, and afterward I visited this very cool bird refuge where I saw up close a host of falcons, hawks, eagles and a particularly impressive condor.  The next day I visited the nearby town of Mindo, where I went ziplining through the cloud forests and got to watch a butterfly eat banana juice off my fingers.  And on my last day in Quito I took a ride on the teleferico, which is a tram that takes you up to 12,000 feet (Quito is at 9,000) providing a spectacular view of the city from the surrounding hills, and I took a scenic but exhausting hike up toward the pinnacle of a nearby volcano.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It wasn’t all that surprising to me that the things I enjoyed most in my first week away from the jungle were the things I did outside of the city, and that trend continued as Ieft Quito and spent a few days hiking in the area of the Quilotoa Circuit.  Starting from the city of Latacunga two hours south of Quito, the Quilotoa Circuit s a 200km road that loops through numerous picturesque indigenous villages dotting the surrounding countryside, and is highlighted by the Quilotoa Crater, an extinct volcano with a massive lake filling the crater.  My first day on the circuit I met up with Jose, a young guy I’d met the night before in Latacunga when asking for directions to a restaurant in town, and together we took a bus to the crater, where I was planning on checking out the lake and then hiking the 5 hours from Quilotoa to Chugsilan, the next town over.  It turned out Jose wasn’t much of a hiker, and wanted to head back to Latacunga later that day anyway, so he didn’t accompany me for long, but it was

interesting getting to know him nonetheless.  His father, grandfather and he were all artists that carved and painted these really neat wooden masks, some of which we saw being sold in Quilotoa, and I got to hear all about the process of making the masks and trying to sell them.  He talked about how hard it was for his family to make a living off of just the art, which was why he was going to study business at the local university the next fall, so he could figure out better ways to market his family’s art.

We had hiked for about an hour around the crater and after he turned around I decided that the scenery walking around the crater was so stunning that I would just keep circumventing the lake rather and save the hike to the next town for the next day.  I definitely made the right choice, as the hike was spectacular the whole way and I got an incredible view of the sunset from the town of Quilotoa.  The town itself wasn’t much, just a few hostels and the houses and farms of the locals, and it was freezing cold and windy once the sun went down, but the cold mountain air combined with the sunset and the remoteness of the place made for a very pleasant atmosphere, and I felt very happy to away from the hustle and bustle of Quito.  I spent the evening chatting with a friendly Ecuadorian family (with whom I managed to speak fairly comfortably in Spanish to my relief) as we ate dinner and huddled around a wood stove in our hostel trying to stay warm, and I went to bed that evening feeling like the day had been my best yet in Ecuador.

The great hiking continued the next day, as I met up with a couple other travelers and we navigated the maze of trails taking us from Quilotoa through Chugsilan to the very pleasant little town of Isinlivi.  Though the views weren’t as stunning as the day before, the countryside was still quite pretty as we descended from the crater, hiking through several valleys and getting an interesting taste of what life was like for the indigenous inhabitants of the area.  Most of the locals we saw were quite friendly, but the friendliness often seemed to be present with the intent of getting money from the tourists that pass by, which often times made it feel as if the friendliness wasn’t all that genuine.  Twice when we were unsure of our route, locals expected us to give them money in exchange for proper directions, and apparently there used to be signs clearly marking the correct paths, but they had been taken down by people in the area so that people would pay for guides.

The desire to get money off of tourists is understandable, as its so obvious that you as a traveler with your fancy backpack and high-tech camera are so much better off than the people living off the land, but its also frustrating to be viewed as merely a full wallet that people can take advantage of. Even Jose, who did seem genuinely quite friendly, asked for me to pay for his bus ticket, and upon leaving said he hoped I would be able to help his family out in some way.  Obviously tourism is a great way to help bring money into these communities, but deciding what constitutes a genuine service and what is simply people trying to take advantage of you or asking for a handout can be tricky to figure out.  Simply handing out money doesn’t really help the communities in any sustainable way either.  I encountered a number of begging children on the hike and was told later that often parents will have their kids stay home from school because they see the begging as more productive for the family.  Clearly not a positive impact of tourism on the community.  And when the desire and need for money is so dominant, it really changes the relationship between the travelers and the locals so that it feels like both parties are merely using each other.

When I asked Jose what the local indigenous people thought about all the tourism, he said they are largely happy about it because they are very proud of their culture and their land, which was nice to hear.  I guess sometimes that pride only seems to come out in a desire for money, but thankfully not always.  One really refreshing interaction I had on the hike was with another local artist who came out of his house as I walked by looking a little lost and took me to a lookout point to show me the way.  He then brought me into his shop and showed me the word carving and painting he did and said that I didn’t have to buy anything, he just felt he ought to be hospitable to the people that came by showing them his work and directing them the right way.

Another friendly interaction with the locals was during my exit of the Quilotoa loop, in which the only transportation from the town I was in was the milk truck.  I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect, but riding in the milk truck ended up being a thrilling adventure.  Basically the truck winds through the more sparsely populated areas of the region and picks up whatever excess milk the locals’ have to sell from their animals, and also serves as a transportation system for anyone needing to go the nearest town.  The ride itself involved about ten of us, half locals and half tourists piling into the back of the truck with the huge milk crates for about 90 minutes of riding in the bitter cold on a very bumpy, curvy and at times scary dirt road that went through some beautiful countryside.  Even though the old Quechua women didn’t speak much Spanish, we still had a great time laughing at ourselves getting tossed around by the bumps in the road and freezing to death on the back of that truck.  While I was a bit relieved when the ride was over as we returned to a more urban setting, as I got on a bus headed toward Peru, I was definitely treasuring the taste of rural life and friendly locals I’d gotten in those three days prior.

 

 

 

Yesterday was my last day in the field with the monkeys here at Tiputini, and it ended in appropriate fashion for the rainforest: with a torrential downpour.  Despite a rainy first two weeks, its been remarkably dry recently.  The depth of the Rio Tiputini, which has been as high as 11 meters in the last few months and as high as 9 during my stay, is now just below five, which makes for a pretty remarkable change in the way the river and all the streams feeding into it look.  To highlight the difference, you can see two pictures below taken from the exact same spot on one of the trails that goes right through titi territory.  Just a few weeks ago, the water was so high that all that was visible of the bridge was the rope that serves as a handrail, and crossing the bridge meant going into water well over your boots.  When its real bad the water can get up to chest level.  As of now, however, you can stand on the bridge and look at least ten feet below you to an almost completely dry streambed, which to me is a pretty impressive demonstration of the rapid and massive fluctuations in the amount of water this environment can contain.

But on my last day with the titis, as I got my umbrella and rain jacket out in preparation for the hard rain that I could already hear hitting the canopy above me, I was thinking less about water levels and instead was sympathizing with the titis who were about to get drenched.  The rain here can be intense.  It was beginning to come down in sheets, and within a few minutes a pretty sizeable stream coming from the ridge behind me began forming  I was hoping I would get a nice goodbye to the six members of group B whom I have become acquainted with these last five weeks as they all filed into their sleep tree, but given that it was already almost five in the afternoon (which isn’t far from their bedtime anyway) I figured I should take any opportunity I had to avoid getting soaked by heading back to camp as soon as the rain lightened, even if it meant foregoing a face to face farewell.

The last two weeks provided a handful of noteworthy events, both monkey and non-monkey related.  The non-monkey related event doesn’t actually have anything to do with me, but instead was an incredible sighting by Pete Oxford, a professional photographer who is spending a month taking pictures at Tiputini.  Just two weeks ago, Pete become the first person ever to shoot photographs of a black panther in the wild.  He was canoeing down the Tiputini and caught site of the animal on the bank of the river, and remarkably had the fortune to spend well over an hour photographing it as it lazed about with very little concern for the human rapidly snapping pictures of it.  The pictures are absolutely phenomenal, as the black panther (which is actually a mellanistic jaguar) is a beautifully sleek and powerful-looking animal, yet its gorgeous black coat has a few spotted imperfections from scars and the like that let you see just how wild it is.  One of the sad things, however, is that when Pete sent the pictures to his agent hoping he would hear that national geographic and other wildlife magazines should be thrilled with the shots, he heard that there probably wouldn’t be a whole lot of interest because people have seen photos of captive black panthers so much.  Even though it is one of the rarest animals to see in the world, and nobody to date has captured a wild one in a photo, magazines don’t expect the picture to sell to the public because people are used to seeing photos of perfectly formed animals that grow up in captivity, and they don’t much care if the picture is of a wild animal surrounded by the wild environment it naturally lives in.  Hopefully something will work out and the photos will get the recognition they deserve, but it seems a real shame that something so cool might not be fully appreciated because of concerns about money and what the public has been trained to see.

Getting back to wild animals that I am working with, however, we did another playback experiment with group B, who hadn’t responded to the recorded calls in our previous two attempts.  We play each call several times in order to get as much of a response as possible, and after the first two calls it looked as if yet again this group would foil our experiment.  There was some slight moaning from Bongo and Banana, the adult male and female in the group, but Bongo initially seemed more interested in remaining with his youngest offspring, who was snuggling up against him trying to rest.  Finally after the third call, Bongo moved toward Banana and they finally started dueting.  They called only once, however, for about two minutes and didn’t move toward the source of the recorded calls or show any of the extreme agitation that we had seen with Kong and Katta in group K.  Such a response fits with the lack of response seen from group B to our previous playbacks, and it may indicate something about the dynamics among the titi groups.

Later that day, I was following B’s neighbors to the east, group L, while Amy stuck with Bongo, Banana and company, and we witnessed the two groups come to within 50 meters of each other at their territory’s edge.  Vocalizations were coming from both sides, but again Bongo seemed much less agitated and vocalized less frequently, while Lucifer, the adult male in group L was doing the majority of the calling.  Group B has the largest territory among their neighbors, and the most individuals in the group (the two adults also interestingly seem to be the most wary of human presence), and it could be that there is a hierarchy among the titi groups in the area, and because of their numbers or some other reason, they are dominant.  As a result their neighbors are much more concerned with what group B is doing than the other way around, hence the higher levels of agitation and more frequent vocalizations by L and K when compared to B.  This is of course rather speculative, as not that much is known about intergroup interaction among titis and more data would be needed to show that these patterns are consistent, but it makes for an interesting hypothesis.  Furthermore, these differences in group responses add a layer of complexity to the present research questions about the maintenance of social monogamy, since the differences among titi groups suggests some variation exists even among a single species in the behavior surrounding male and female contributions to mate guarding and territory protection.

Another notable behavior I observed with the titis which is probably less significant but cool nonetheless occurred the same day as the playback.  I saw the juvenile from group L, accompanied briefly by its mother, come all the way to the ground to feed on a fruit that had fallen from a nearby tree.  Its not uncommon to see titis come low (like head-height), often to feed on insects, but for them to come all the way to the ground is very rare.  Just to see a monkey whose home is so obviously the trees above you on terra firma seemed bizarre, and to have the juvenile do it when I was within 20 feet was really surprising.  He just seemed so exposed.  The next day I got a sense of why he and his mother might have been willing to leave the safety of the trees to eat that fruit, as I saw how much they absolutely love it.  I found out its called a tagua fruit, and it comes from a palm tree encased in a hard spiky shell.  For the second day in a row I saw Infant 10 and his mother feeding on it, this time on the tree itself.  It was an adorable demonstration of parental care, as Infant 10 needed his mother to take piece of the shell off, after which she would often bite a piece of fruit off and hold it in her mouth for Infant 10 to take.  They both were clearly thrilled to be eating tagua though, as they excitedly munched on it for over a half hour.  The juvenile would often get particularly excited and try to take things into his own hands by grabbing the fruit (which was about half the size of his body) at his mothers protest.  Lulu (the mother) proved to be wise in protesting, for as soon as Infant 10 finally did get the fruit away from her, he dropped it to the ground.  This didn’t stop Infant 10 though, as he cautiously made his way down the tree over the next couple of minutes before finally reaching the ground and his prize, the remainder of a de-shelled tagua fruit all to himself.  While the day before he spent only about two minutes on the ground, twice retreating back up the tree to check out his surroundings, this time he stayed there happily eating away for over ten minutes, even though I was closer to him than the day before.  Perhaps going to the ground isn’t as big of a risk as it might seem, since most of the animals that could prey on the titis could catch them in the trees as well as the ground, but it still is quite unusual.  And notably, group L has had a lot of offspring die before reaching adulthood recently, which could potentially be related to the young engaging in similarly bold behavior.

At any rate, as I reflect on my experience here at Tiputini as a whole, it doesn’t quite seem like I’ve been here for six weeks, but at the same time I feel as if I have done a ton of work.  I have completed over 200 twenty-minute focal samples and spent around 175 hours with the titi and saki monkeys here at Tiputini, watching them fly through the trees, do nothing for hours on end, eat, pee, poop, groom each other, tail-twine, have sex, duet, eat again, rest again, rest some more and so on.  Even though it feels like its been a lot of work, its also a fairly miniscule amount in comparison to what needs to be done in order to have data that can definitively say something about social behavior.  So while I was drawn into this project because I was interested in studying the reasons why monogamy makes for an adaptive social system, the fieldwork has taught me more about what it takes to study something like that rather than given me much in the way of answers.  I think that’s still pretty valuable, and I suppose that so far it has also provided  lesson about the nature of research (especially behavioral research on animals in the wild).  And one important thing that I have seen through the field work is the differences in social monogamy across species, showing how monogamy is really a broad term that encompasses slightly different social organizations that are likely adaptive for slightly different reasons.  In a few weeks, I’ll get to start observing another monogamous species in a completely different environment in Argentina, the owl monkey.  Even though their social behavior is very similar to titis, I’m quite interested to get a sense of the sorts of differences that might nonetheless exist.

(Note: I’m uploading this blog back in Quito where the internet isn’t painfully slow, so I’m including a lot more pictures that I wasn’t able to upload before.)

 

One of the tricky things about studying the behavior of monkeys in the wild is that you have no control over what they are going to do, and therefore your observations are totally at the whim of the animals.  If they decide to fly off through the trees over a swamp with water that goes up to your waist, that’s where you have to go to follow them.  Or if they decide to sit still out of view high up in a tree tangle for hours upon end, then you’ve got to sit under that tree and wait with them.  You’ll get good data when your animals let you get good data.  Of course, the upside to that is that you get to see the animals do precisely what the animals want to do.  Other than being habituated to a few clumsy researchers following them around on the ground all day, the animals being observed are living in the natural environment they evolved to survive in, allowing you to make conclusions about their natural behavior that cannot be made using only animals in captivity.   For example, pictured here are a titi (left) and squirrel (right) monkey feasting on some crackers outside of the hotel where our first boat ride into Tiputini left.  They are  adorable and getting this close to them took way less effort than getting half as close to just one habituated monkey in the wild would.  But all you can say about primate behavior from observing them is that monkeys who are regularly around humans who give them food are pretty much okay with hanging around humans who give them food. [Note: I unfortunately am not allowed to post pictures of the monkeys in Tiputini due to rules about data privacy, so this is the best I can do in terms of monkey pictures].

So primatologists and their field assistants go out into the field day after day to watch the monkeys in their natural habitats, and sometimes the animals do interesting things that provide a lot of data that helps us toward understanding their complex social lives, and sometimes they don’t seem to do much and you wonder how much you really learned anything that day.  The contrast between two days I recently spent in the field, one with the sakis and one with the titis, exemplifies this variability quite well.  Last week I went out early in the morning to find group L, who I had previously had my best days with, but this time the day was decidedly bad.  In my first spotting of the group, I had Lucifer, Lulu, and their infant in my sights for maybe an hour, the majority of which was spent with the monkeys rustling about out of view in the top of the tree.  They then decided to take a route through the trees which took them across a stream, forcing me to leave them to use the bridge several hundred meters upstream to get to the other side.  I found them after another hour or so of searching, and had enough time to get one and a half twenty-minute observations periods before a downpour caused the monkeys to go high up into a tangle while I sought refuge under my umbrella.  When the rain finally stopped, the group was nowhere to beseen, and while I found them and lost them several more times throughout the afternoon due to more rain and the titi’s talents as escape artists, I ended the day with focal samples that consisted largely of data points merely saying certain individuals were active but out of view.

Just two days ago, however, I spent the day following the saki group we are studying, and while the morning started similarly without a whole lot of recognizable activity, in the afternoon things started heating up.  The group started spending a lot more time lower in the trees where I had a continuously clear view of their activity, and I began to notice Mendel, the adult male, engaging in some curious behavior.  He started with a period of gruff vocalizations, almost like barks, and then began traveling from tree to tree rubbing his chest and sometimes his genitals on the branches he was occupying.  He also began following Mona quite closely, not letting her get more than few meters away from him, and often chest rubbing on the spot she was in before.  The following eventually stopped with Mona and Mendel settling down together and though I could not see entirely, it appeared that they began grooming eachother.  Not long after, the two balls of fur I was looking at (which is generally what sakis look like up in the trees) shifted positions and seemed to meld into one, until I saw Mendel’s face poking out above the furry mass and realized Mendel was moving rhythmically back and forth with Mona below.  They were having sex.  It was rather brief and in some ways unspectacular, but it loaded the rest of the day’s activity with significance.  Mating is obviously one of the most important activities to the animals’ survival, so getting data on everything surrounding such an episode, from the way Mona and Mendel acted throughout the day to the chest rubbing and vocalizing leading up to the sex, is invaluable and might offer insight in to the saki’s mating strategies.

So the lesson is that sometimes you’ll get a days’ worth of exciting and interesting data and sometimes you’ll get hardly anything, but you get to reassure yourself because you are studying monkeys in the wild, making the behavior you to see that much more meaningful. And thankfully those studying animal behavior  in the wild are not completely at the whim of their animals, thanks to the possibility of playback experiments.  Conducting a playback experiment involves playing a recording of a vocalization that a given group of animals might hear in the wild (their neighbors’ territorial calls, for example) from a hidden speaker, and observing the animals’ responses in order to gain an understanding of the significance of the call and what their responses might say about the animals’ behavioral tendencies.  So while the circumstances are in fact artificial, the animals in theory are acting as they would in a completely natural circumstance.  And as a researcher you are able to create a situation where you have increased your chances of getting high quality and interesting data that that has the potential to say something significant about the some aspect of the animals’ behavior.

Playbacks are particularly helpful for the work done under the Monogamous Primates Project because they provide an opportunity to observe potential differences in male and female investment in territoriality and mate guarding. Titis, for example, often call together (called dueting) both naturally on their own and in response to the vocalizations of surrounding groups.  But males have still been observed to show a stronger response to potential intruders, leading movement toward other groups’ vocalizations and displaying more aggressive behavior than the females.  Very little is known about male and female saki vocalizations, but the coordinated displays usually seen in titis has not observed.  Seeing precisely how the males and females respond to such encounters can provide hints as to what exactly each sex is getting out of a monogamous social relationship with their partner.

In the playback experiments I have been helping run, we play a recording of the territorial vocalizations often heard in inter-group encounters from a speaker about 40-50 meters away. Ideally, the animals respond to the vocalizations we play with vocalizations of their own, so each time we do a playback we bring the recording equipment and my job is to make the recording while Amy does the behavioral data. The recording needs to be from a neighboring group so that the individuals being observed are actually hearing a call that means something to them, meaning that we need one good quality recording for each group’s neighbors.  But even in a controlled experiment like a playback, my experience so far has further shown the variability you get in terms of animal cooperation with your data taking needs.  Group B is a group of titis whose territory sits right between the two other titi groups, so getting a recording of their calls is essential for quality playbacks with the other groups, but both times that we tried a playback with them, the group simply didn’t respond with obvious vocalization or other sort of behavior.  Its hard to say at this point whether it’s specific to the recording we are using or the group itself, but the recording used was at least good enough to cause group B’s neighbors to call though so it really is rather puzzling

Thankfully, the two other playbacks we have run thus far did in fact lead to some noteworthy behavior.  With the sakis, as soon as the recorded call began playing, male Mendel oriented himself toward the speaker, becoming piloerect (meaning his hair was standing on end) and eventually barking in the same direction.  The rest of the group meanwhile moved out of view away from the sound of the call, and about 10 minutes after the sound of the call Mendel also moved out of view in the same direction.  About 45 minutes later Mendel began calling again, starting out as a bark and eventually leading to a loud trill, which was soon joined by Mona (the adult female).  Just before this, however, we heard a different Saki group calling, and Amy spotted them heading away from the group we were following, which adds an interesting but also somewhat complicated twist to group M’s behavior.  Mona and Mendel continued calling intermittently for the next fifteen minutes before beginning a foraging bout on a group of swarming army ants, and then their day seemed to progress rather normally.

With the titi group K, the adult male Kong similarly turned directly toward the call and started chirping and moaning.  He then took off in the direction of the call with Katta (the adult female) and Katta (the juvenile female) trailing him, first solo calling before Katta joined him in a duet.  The sheer volume of the duet is quite impressive from such small animals, and it really is quite amusing to see the titis’ entire bodies shake with each note they bellow in an attempt to intimidate potential intruders.  The dueting started and stopped several times throughout the next twenty minutes, with Kong continually moving closer to the speaker with Katta in tow.  Eventually they stopped, and spent the next few hours at the edge of their territory in the area where the recording was played.

So what can we say about the significance of these responses?  At this point not a whole lot, as we need a lot more data to see what sort of patterns emerge (Amy is hoping to run a total of eight playbacks witheach group over the course of her study), but I do think its interesting and possibly significant that the male titi went directly toward the source of the vocalization and the rest of the group followed, whereas with the sakis, Mendel stayed put while the rest of his group left, and eventually he followed them.  Perhaps that had something to do with the presence of the other group of Sakis that we saw and heard later, or perhaps there was some feature of the calls themselves that caused the different responses, but it also seems possible that it reflects a greater concern of sakis with mate-guarding while male titis are less concerned about protecting access to their female and more worried about territory.  Going along with line of thinking, I found it curious that throughout the rest of the day, Kong seemed to spend much more time in proximity (including two grooming bouts) with his juvenile offspring Kia, rather than Katta.  Even though the events of the morning were clearly quite alarming for Kong, they didn’t appear to lead to increased mate-defense or any real change in the interaction of the Kong and Katta.  It would be easy to continue hypothesizing interpretations for the significance of the events surrounding the playback, but so far its only two data points, and the difficult thing with behavioral data is that there a large number of explanations for any given action.  Nonetheless, its exciting and refreshing to be able to run a real experiment with the animals that ensures at least a pretty good chance of seeing some truly interesting and significant behavior.

I have now spent eight full days in the field following the monkeys, and the experience thus far has put me through a pretty wide array of emotions.  Overall, its hard to say anything bad about this sort of work because the monkeys are remarkable creatures.  Both titi and saki monkeys are pretty aptly described as adorable bundles of fur, so getting to spend most of your day with them is in many ways a treasure.  But I’m also learning that it can be quite trying at times, and there are plenty of reasons why researchers out there are not dying to do intensive behavioral observations on these two species, despite their interesting and unique social organization and behavior.

A typical day of field work involves getting up around 5:30 in the morning right before it starts getting light out, picking up our breakfast and lunch (which we’ll eat in the field), and packing up the gear we’ll need for the day, ideally leaving camp by 6:30.  There are three groups of titis and one saki group with individuals who are radio collared, so we’re able to use telemetry to locate the approximate location of the group and begin our behavioral observations as soon as we find them.  Unfortunately the telemetry can sometimes be a bit of a headache, as the radio signal can bounce around and seemingly could be coming from any direction, and even when the telemetry is working well, spotting the monkeys isn’t always easy.  The foliage in the rainforest is dense and the tops of tallest trees are often out of view, so you might even see some individuals climb to a particular tree but then they are out of view for over an hour.  Meanwhile you’re stuck on the ground craning your neck to look above and see if you can catch a glimpse of movement, and inevitably as soon as you decide to take a break from looking, they sneak out of the tree and the next time you check the telemetry you realize your monkeys are elsewhere.

So what I really came to realize after the first few days in the field was how much of this sort of work is about patience.  The long hours, the physical nature of tromping through the dense jungle, the unpleasantness of the insects and the rain and the humidity and everything else haven’t bothered me too much, but what’s been the biggest challenge is dealing with the amount of time one spends enduring those things when you can’t find or see the monkeys.  I spent my first three days in the field with Amy being trained, but my first day out alone I started searching for the monkeys around 8 in the morning and saw no sign of them until 2:30 in the afternoon, when I finally found them in an area I didn’t even know was part of their territory.  I was somewhat relieved to hear that such an experience isn’t unusual for a first-time field assistant, but it was horribly frustrating nonetheless.

Things have gotten much better already though, as I’m getting a better handle on how to use the telemetry and am getting more familiar each group’s territory and where they like to hang out.  And as Amy has taught me, even the times when you’re unable to see any monkeys are opportunities to look around you and appreciate everything else the beautiful scenery of the rainforest has to offer.  There are an absurd number of bird species here, strange and interesting varieties of plant-life, and when you’re just sitting there quietly off the trail and away from camp, there’s always the chance that something really cool like a tapir or an ocelot will come by.  Being out in the thick of it so much has also given me the opportunity to see all ten species of monkeys that inhabit this area, (titi, saki, woolly, howler, spider, squirrel, capuchin, owl, tamarinds and most importantly pygmy marmosets, which are small enough to fit into your pocket).

And no matter how frustrated I might get at the monkeys when I can’t see them or figure out exactly where they are, when they do come into view those frustrations quickly subside as I am immediately drawn in by the fascinating and delightful nature of the titis and sakis.  Yesterday after spending most of the morning waiting for a group of titis to come down from a spot high up in the canopy where I could not see them in the slightest, I got several hours worth of observation where at least one of the three individuals in the group was less than 20 feet away from me.  At one point for a good 30 minutes I got a wonderful view of the adult male in the group Luciferus, and his offspring INF 10 (project code for an infant born in 2010, since they don’t get names until we can be sure of their sex) huddling together on a branch with their tales intertwined, taking shelter from the rain under some large leaves and every so often scrunching their furry little bodies closer together to stay warm. (the tail-twine is a behavior only seen in titi monkeys, and the fact that a father would be engaging in such protective social behavior is rather unique as well).  About an hour later the infant was sitting in a thick tangle at about eye level not more than ten feet away, and we both stood there simply staring at each other for a good five minutes.  I thought that after that experience I was developing a pretty good rapport with the INF 10, but then not long after he nearly peed on me so now I’m not so sure.

But what am I actually doing out there in the field besides following these guys around, having staring contests and nearly getting peed on?  There a couple different components to the behavioral data, but the most basic task is simply recording the location of the individuals in the group every 20 minutes, either based on trail markers, previously marked feeding trees or GPS points.  The meat of the behavioral observation work, however, comes from the focal samples.  As frequently as possible, we conduct a 20 minute intensive observation of one individual in the group, recording each specific event that occurs in that time period, as well as logging the behavioral state they are in every two minutes, and the state of the other individuals in the group every four minutes.  This amounts to a detailed record of all foraging, social, moving, resting, vocalizing and other sorts of behavior by the focal animal and the others in the group, as well as the relative proximity of the other individuals to the focal animal.  While individuals and sometimes the whole group are frequently out of view, by the end of the day you have ideally collected enough data to give a fairly comprehensive account of what everyone in the group you were following was doing and where they were doing it.  Thankfully we use a dictaphone for the focal samples so we can keep an eye on the monkeys (it is not uncommon to look down for a few seconds to record ranging data only to have your focal individual disappear from sight upon looking back up), but that also means when we return to the lab we have to transcribe all of our focal samples so we can upload everything into the database, all of which is a pretty lengthy process.

The protocols for the behavioral data collection are incredibly detailed and were a bit overwhelming at first (there are 55 possible social behavioral that can be recorded, for example), but I’ve realized how necessary such detail and precision is if you want to actually have quantitative data that allows you to say anything about primate behavior.  Rather than simply reporting the subjective impression that male titi monkeys spend more time with their offspring, the project has data on the actual average distance between an adult male on its offspring, the frequency of which they are each other’s nearest neighbor, amount of time spent in contact, in proximity, and grooming, and so on.  Another really important thing about the exactness of the data collection protocol is that data collected in the same way for titis monkeys, saki monkeys, and even the owl monkeys which are studied in Argentina, so the research done can as part of the monogamous primate project can be truly comparative.

And while the work I’m doing with Amy isn’t necessarily interested in all the details of something like the titis and sakis foraging behavior, for example, the fact that such data becomes part of the database regardless of the specific questions being investigated means that the project Eduardo and Tony (the PI’s) have set up has an incredible mass of data on pretty much all possible behavior that could be studied in tits and sakis.  This data collection in Tiputini goes back all the way to 2003, so there is a ton of data in the database available for someone with the time and energy to analyze and perhaps develop new ideas for questions that might be asked about these primates’ behavior. So while the amount of time and energy it takes to go out into field day after day and day and intensively record everything that these animals do is substantial, the quality and quantity of the data available through such efforts is impressive and opens up the possibility for a lot to be said about the behavior and social organization of the monkeys being studied.

 

[I wrote this a little over a week ago but haven’t been able to post it until now.  Sorry for the delay.]

Yesterday I finally arrived at the Tiputini Biodiveristy Station (TBS) in the Amazon forest of Yasuni National Park, Ecuador.  Because of plane delays, it took me a full two days of traveling to get to Quito, but the trip into the jungle from there was quite pleasant and relative to the chaos of the previous two days, quite relaxing.  From Quito I flew west to the small city of Coca with four others who were visiting TBS for the weekend (the station frequently hosts short-term visitors and groups of students in addition to the researchers who stay for much longer), then traveled by boat for two hours along the Rio Napo.  Next was a 90 minute bus ride through a bunch of land owned by an oil company which seems to be quite protective of their land, as the security to get through was about as tight as an airport (plus a guy hanging around with a machine gun) and you’re not allowed to take pictures or use a cell phone when traveling through.  The plus side was that the road was in pretty good condition even though there’s been a ton of rain recently, not at all the miserably bumpy and rough South American bus ride that I’ve heard a lot about.

The final leg of the journey was another two hour boat ride along the very pleasant Rio Tiputini, at which point it really started to feel like we were going somewhere pretty remote.  The Tiputini is pretty narrow and boating away from the road you could sort of feel the jungle closing in on you.  We didn’t see any particularly noteworthy wildlife while on the boat, but there wasn’t any sign of civilization either, and the flora itself is pretty impressive.  Everything just seems more intense.  The foliage is thicker, the leaves are bigger, the colors are brighter, there are a wider variety of plant species, and riding down the river you could just tell that the place was brimming with life behind the thick walls of vegetation that crept in on the river.

The station itself is really nice.  All the buildings are quite nice and the station has running water, electricity (for part of the day), internet (thought its slow), a lab for the researchers, a small library and a collection of huts that can house about fifty people.  There is a even a full time staff that lives at the station (they’re called tigres for some reason) and cooks all your meals for you and does laundry.  So for living in the jungle its pretty cush.

I haven’t yet gone out into the field and see any monkeys, as today was spent mostly reviewing the behavioral observation protocols and doing some background reading on monogamous primates.  I did get a chance to hike to the canopy tower though, which rises a good 150 feet above ground and gives you a pretty good perspective of how much there is to the rainforest that you can’t see from the ground.  It was pouring rain when I got up there, so again I wasn’t able to see any wildlife but getting a view from so high up in the rain was pretty cool by itself.

Tomorrow I’ll start getting trained to do the behavioral observations and will get a sense of what its like to follow monkeys around all day.  I’m going to be working with Amy Porter, a graduate student from UC-Davis, helping her with a project she is doing researching titi and saki monkeys, both of which are considered monogamous but differ in the degree of attachment seen between the male and female and the amount of parental investment seen by the male.  Titi monkeys are rather unique in that they are on of the few primate species in which the fathers invest heavily in raising offspring.  Male saki monkeys, on the other hand, show no such behavior yet may be offering other services to females that help reinforce the monkeys’ monogamous status.  One of the important questions underlying Amy’s research and the Monogamous Primates Project in general is to what degree social monogamy in humans and other species evolved in order to essentially lessen the load for females during parenting and to what degree it may have evolved as a mate-guarding strategy for males.  It seems likely that both explanations play are correct, but possibly to different degrees for different species.  By recording species and sex differences in a variety of behaviors such as affiliative behaviors, scent-marking and vocalizations to protect territory, and parenting behaviors, we will be able to get a sense of the factors that help maintain this monogamous social system in two different species of primates.

I am realizing just how much time and energy in the field it takes to even begin to answer these questions, so its not like I’m going to leave here in five weeks with any answers.  Tony Di Fiore and Eduardo Fernandez-Duque, the creators of the Monogamous Primates Project and primary investigators of the research examining social monogamy in titis and sakis here at Tiputini (as well as the owl monkeys I’ll be researching in Argentina later this summer) have been working on these questions since 2003.  They have already come upon some really interesting findings (of which I’ll probably go into detail more in a later entry), but it has taken years of set-up and hard work habituating, collaring, and tracking the monkeys to do so.  Amy work’s is just one part of Tony and Eduardo’s larger project on monogamy, and with the time I have here all I can do is help contribute to a small portion of Amy’s work.  But that’s just the nature of scientific research, and with the time I do have here, hopefully I’ll get a better picture of what these primates’ monogamous lives are like.  At any rate I’m excited to get out in the field tomorrow and watch some monkeys.

 

Joseph Carpenter ’11 received a summer stipend from the Marian E. Koshland Integrated Natural Sciences Center. He will be doing a project for the Monogamous Primates Project in Ecuador and Argentina.

Learn more about Joseph’s project>