This week, I did my first couple of monkey follows (really, I should say monkey follow attempts). The first day, I found the troop at sunrise, and thought I was off to a pretty good start. However, they were really spread out in the forest (so often I would only see a couple of monkeys out of a troop of forty individuals). They were also being extremely quiet, and the noises of their movement was drowned out by birds and baboons doing their “wahoo” calls in the distance. This made them pretty challenging to follow, and I lost them at 11a.m. After a couple hours of searching, someone radio’d me to say that she saw a couple of monkeys that she thought were from the Barn troop (the one I’ve been following). There were only two monkeys, and neither of them had ear-tags, but they were in the Barn troop territory, and I figured the rest of the troop was probably nearby. However, I didn’t see any others for awhile, and after about twenty minutes I started to wonder if they were two dispersing males. After three hours of watching them eat seed pods (that was literally all they did), I decided that they definitely were not part of Barn troop, and I left to try to find the troop. I never did find them, though.  Fortunately, my second day of following went a bit better…there were a few mishaps, but I at least did not completely lose the group. 

Also this week, I moved out of “The Barn” and into “Bush Camp”, where the other research assistants from my project are living. There’s no internet, and electricity is only available with a generator for a few hours at night. The walls are made of bamboo, which has a nice rustic charm, but is somewhat permeable to mambas and such. Anyway, I’m glad to finally be settled into the room I’ll live in for the rest of the summer. 

I think that’s about it for now.