Trapping the tamarins

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Unusual sight at the dinner table at CICRA last night: Sarah, another researcher at the station, sitting calmly as a baby monkey sits perched atop her head, clutching her hair and peeing down the side of her face. As it turns out, CICRA is probably one of the few places where someone walking around with a baby monkey on their head doesn’t really cause that much shock. A couple of nights ago, one of the researchers here carried a tiny injured owl monkey into our lab. He appeared to be about one to two weeks old, with a broken tail and leg injuries, as well as a large portion of his skin torn off. He had been found on the ground near camp. Mini set to work giving him antibiotics, cleaning his wounds and splinting his tail. Since then, he’s made himself quite a comfortable home on Sarah’s head and is doing much better. The plan is to nurse him back to health and either send him to an animal recovery facility or perhaps make some reintroduction attempt. Anyways, it’s pretty amazing how quickly the presence of the baby monkey at dinner has become completely normal.
In terms of the tamarins, I’ve previously written about the difficulties of following an already tagged tamarin group, but it turns out that trapping new individuals is proving to be even harder. Several methods have been discussed and tried, including the construction of a massive net gun to shoot at the monkeys, Spiderman-style. One morning, an entire six hours was dedicated to creating a camo drop-down net (its frame constructed out of branches and all that jazz), only to discover upon testing it out that it could easily crush the monkeys on its way down. So it goes in the field. We have discovered that playing voice recordings of saddleback twins protesting seems to attract any nearby saddleback tamarins in the area to the traps. The problem is getting them to come down onto and into the traps, as they tend to just surround the area and then move away. In order to try to entice them to enter the trap compartments, we have even created dummy tamarin infants out of wire and twine. I can honestly say that they are absolutely terrifying to look at and the image of their faces haunts me but, from afar, they slightly resemble monkeys of some sort. Additionally, the traps are baited with bananas, which would seemingly be very appealing to monkeys, but here’s an interesting tidbit: the tamarins don’t actually know what bananas are and thus don’t realize that they are a delicious fruit to be eaten. So, when we check the traps, we usually just find extremely rotten fruit covered in bugs. I’m afraid that the smell of rotten bananas has become a constant in my life and, sadly, I will never look at them the same way again. Even when they’re covered in peanut butter and honey. A real tragedy.
Another important aspect of trap design is that they are constructed in such a way that you actually have to be present at the trap when the tamarin enters in order to pull a string, which then closes the compartment door. As you can imagine, you quickly become massively frustrated as you sit silently in the brush around the traps, with approximately 20 mosquitos in your crotch, watching as the tamarins fidget around. The suspicion with which the tamarins approach the traps implies their awareness of all the humans in the surrounding area; it’s times like these when you realize that the monkeys are watching you as much as you are watching them, and that you’re pretty much getting the raw end of the deal. They stick around long enough for you to cramp up and acquire numerous bites in the most unfortunate places before happily moving along.
Trapping aside, tamarin follows of the tagged group have been highly interesting lately. Sadly, GBW, an incredibly chill guy and my favorite member of the group, seems to have disappeared from the group! We’re not sure whether he’s been kicked out and transferred to a new group or what exactly is going on. However, the other day, we observed an insane amount of aggression within the group, something which has not been seen before. GBR has gone on a bit of a power trip and was seen constantly chasing and biting the two adult females, RC and GPG. Thus, it’s a possibility that he may have forced GBW out of the group, though we’re really not sure.
The days here are long, as we’re out in the field by 5am and stay out till 5:30pm, but rewarding when you get to see such cool things. And you always come across things that you don’t expect: today when we were out scouting for new tamarin groups, we came upon a group of four river otters milling about! Really neat. The food here keeps you going and I usually manage to finish my lunch in about 0.2 seconds. It’s pretty aggressive. LOTS of rice with beans or some kind of meat. There are also these orange cookies which have quickly become a staple in my life and make me incredibly happy. However, I am really missing my normal food and found myself staring at a picture of a hamburger for about five minutes the other day. Not cool.
Well, I hope you all are well and, again, send me updates because I’d love to hear how everything is going! Take care.

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