Finally, the PhD student left and I moved with my new team and started to work with them. I feel like a child whose byke has just been removed the small wheels on the sides.
We didn’t come back to the green group site; the rest of the week was dedicated to finish the data collection on the tourist site. I really prefer the other one; that forest is a kind of magical place, even if you still can see a lot of human traces, usually is peaceful and quiet. I really enjoyed feel the pass of the weeks on the turnover of the fungi species during the autumn, and the silence during the solitary lunch minutes…
Well, let’s go to the point. The two following days nothing really special happens, though my skills as research assistant had a great improvement. My new fellows and the PhD student II travelled around training on identification and data collection, and the PhD student and me kept going with our business.
On Thursday, however, we tried a final modification in the cooperation experiment that we were carrying out. This experiment consisted mainly in two separated boxes with a tray inside in which we put food. To reach the tray, two macaques had to pull at the same time of a rope joined to the tray. So, in this final step we put a screen between the boxes in order to see if they had understood that they needed another monkey to reach the food. However, we didn’t see any of them looking at the other side of the screen to see if there was a potential collaborator; instead, we found out that the screen avoided them to aggress each other. So, we had very weird partners like Galack, a young adult male with Luca, a weird juvenile that, under any other circumstance had been open mouthed promptly. It was a good day for him, I guess.
Then, the last working day the macaques ran away from the tourist area and went into the forest, which is not as pretty as the green group one but, nonetheless is better than that humanized patch full of rubbish (F%$cking humans!). I had my best day as research assistant and I collected a great amount of data and even discovered weird tendencies in the monkeys, like the fondness of Twix, an adult male, for the subadults females like Mortichia (aka Washabi). At the end of the day, the PhD student went alone to farewell her macaques, something that I imagine must be pretty tough.
The weekend was wasted in packing, cleaning and handing out with my new fellows. It’s weird how company can change the perception of a place. My old group was, at least for me, pretty eclectic. Each one seemed to have a hidden world inside and any interaction was, let’s said, special. Now, on the other hand, is like being in Europe again and that dream sensation is gone. Maybe is just because I miss the African toilet downstairs or because I have finally become (too much) used to this; or maybe is just that first times are always especial. I don’t know, but a little bit of what made this place “magical” disappeared with the departure of each of my old fellows.
Finally, the PhD student left on Monday morning and, as part of this magical realism end, the weather changed. It’s weird but, just when I left to spend the Christmas in my hometown the temperature dropped; when the Californian left the opposite happened and, in this occasion, the snow began…though not bad till today!
So, my first day with the Barbary gang, name that the Boss (PhD student II) has given to our team, was a completely new thing, even when the monkeys and the place were the same. Instead of collect behavioural data, this time I had to collect faecal samples! (well, train for it). This is a very funny task in which you spend hours and hours looking at the macaques ass to see if something comes out, which is not very common. So, after six hours I saw Twix sandwhiching with another male and running away with the infant when suddenly there it was! A f&%cking piece of monkey shit!! I radioed the Boss and she came with the French to teach me how to handle the sample. So, with a couple of sticks I had to remove the stones, leaves and stuff and the smash it and make a ball ( Not many people apart from biologist and related academics can play with shit and make it sounds serious and useful, ha). When I finally got the ball, the Boss told me to discard it because it was just a trial…F&%ck!
No more faeces during the rest of the day and we had to leave soon because it started to snow heavily.
Actually, today we could only be at the field for less than an hour because everything was already covered with about 6cm of snow and it kept snowing. However, was nice to see the place in white, and the macaques look yellowish on the snow, and kind of creepy. Their eyes, which normally are sweet and green-brown olive looked blueish and without pupil, and this was particularly disturbing in Donut, one of the biggest males that looked at us with his hard-monkey face from the top of an oak.
Let’s see what happens the next days. I’m glad to stay and see my macaques on the snow, I really was looking forward it, and I’m pretty happy of being able to work with the Boss, that has some possibilities of being on my heros pantheon together with the Portuguese (I’ll write a revival post about my Master thesis one of these days so everybody can admire her feats). However, I miss the feeling of living in an impossible world…I have never got along with reality.
…When hope is unfounded, call it masochism…sigh...
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