As I said in previous posts, the snow finally covered our Middle Atlas Mountains a couple of weeks ago and with it, new situations appeared too.
Firstly, it is well known that when it snows is less cold than the average (the average of a cold winter, I mean…); however, when there is snow but it’s not snowing it can be colder than hell! (as the thermodynamics laws state, the hell is frozen (For Spanish-speakers or google-translator addicts (though not trust it too much): Termodinámica del infierno ! Sorry Christians).
This is how last week we reached a record of cold temperature since I’m here: -8ºC. I know that is probably not too cold for many people, but I’m not used to be more than 2 or 3 degrees below zero!! We found the macaques in what we have called the Peace area/site/place (It’s relatively far from the tourist area and the nasty tourists normally don’t go so far, so we can have good times alone with the macaques and a little bit of silence without anybody throwing stones or snowballs to the monkeys). We had just arrived when I saw Fingers peeing from a tree. I ran there with my pee-catcher and got it. It wasn’t too much quantity because he was quite high and in these cases the pee scatters all around (included us, of course).
The Boss was near me and tried to help me to collect the urine from the sieve with the pipette and pass it to the eppendorf; it was my first day as responsible of faecal and urine samples. She took a pipette and with it, some of the pee from the sieve. When I had the eppendorf on my hand, she tried to pour the urine on it but…it was stuck and frozen inside the pipette. While she was saying that she could not believe I looked at her and observed how some of her hair was, as well, frozen! The macaques don't seem to be very affected by the snow and the cold; at least this group (let's see in 15 days how my little Greens are doing). They don't expend much time on the trees, except when tourist bother them too much and they flee away at the top of the cedars, and they look happy of having access to water always that they want. Only the infants look a little bit colder, with their reddish noses.
They do a pretty much normal life, with Twix grooming and copulating with the subadults females, Vanilla (Tamara) and Washabi (Mortichia); Olive (Athena) aggressing Cinnamon (Osiris), the males masturbating and eating the semen afterwards (proteins are scarce!...an excuse as any other, I guess…), Safran (Luna) pursuing Nutella or Galack while masturbating in front of them trying to convince them to copulate...nothing weird!
Nonetheless, last week was hard for them and more for us because the amount of tourists. It was the Mawlid (Birth of the Prophet), and the Moroccans had a week off. The field site was, as a consequence, awash by tourist from Casablanca, Rabat, etc, that came to see the snow and to disturb the monkeys. Apart from feeding them with crap, scaring them and playing music loud, we could also see many throwing them stones, snowballs...You can imagine how much my opinion about humans has improved during this week...I should have specialize in microbiology and made up a lethal virus as was the initial plan, but it's too late now, sigh. This harassment, of course, stresses the macaques and sometimes you can see very sad scenes as I saw yesterday. I found Tequila (Leila) with her infant (Tabasco, the cutest infant in the world) and Pepito on the top of and oak surrounded by around 15 tourists screaming and throwing them food. At the end, Tequila couldn't stand it any longer, and ran away from the tree. Unfortunately, Tabasco wasn't brave enough to follow her and stayed on the tree screaming very scared while the tourists laughed. Then Tabasco went close to Pepito and hugged his arm until Tequila, grunting, came back to pick her up.
It is not surprising then that, sometimes, the macaques decide to go away from the tourist area and enjoy some time without noisy humans. Today, for example, we found them relatively close to the tourist area, but they started to walk to the Peace place and crossed the road to go to a new place I had never been before, the Paradise area, according to the Boss. They seemed to have being waiting for us to guide us to this quite place that reminded me to the Green group's site. So, against cold, what better than going to a clear terrain inside the forest and spend the hours under the sun? They are more intelligent than they seem to be! They gave us this marvelous and peaceful day...only a little bit damaged by the fact that we lost the S. Carolinian for 4 hours...
So, on the average, our monkeys don't seem to suffer by the harsher weather conditions of this month, as it was expected.
Unfortunately, we, the researches, are not so well adapted nor equipped for the snow and the below zero temperatures as the macaques are. My snow boots were completely destroyed before the snow came and, after a couple of weeks I realized that no matter how many layers of plastic bags I wore, my feet were always swimming in an icy lake a couple of hours after arriving to the field. As you can imagine, this is awfully painful. But I'm tough, god damn it! However, a girl appreciates to don't suffer when there is no need for it and, when I told the Boss that I needed to buy some waterproof boots she said me that the family (the people that rent us the flat) had given back the rubber boots of the German and the Ohioan. Since then my feet, under 6 layers of shocks, are always cold but at least, dry. Thanks, girls!
Nonetheless, before this, I could prove what the consequences are of wet feet plus stomach ache. As I said before (First steps with the Barbary Gang), one night we had dinner with a couple of guys of the BBC and the couscous we ordered made that our guts were a good revival of Vietnam war. However, we didn’t notice the morning after, so we, happily, we went to the field. The first in starting dying was the French, followed by the English. I felt, certainly, some pain, but I could stand it…till the end of the day when I was almost fainting...and the French was starting to feel better again! So it was painful but short. Nevertheless, when we finally arrived home I went into the bed and after a while I realize that I couldn't stop shaking and that I felt terribly cold. I thought that maybe I had fever, so I used the thermometer...but it was the other way around, my temperature was below normal. I checked a couple of times more but the result was the same. A little bit freaked out, I warmed some milk up and it seemed to work. Not much latter I was again with the temperature of any other living human.
It wasn't as easy for the French, even though. After expending a pair of unhealthy days of between Azrou and Fez, her guts weren't either in a very good shape and, after a day in the field the consequences appeared. I went late to bed, as usual, and start to type stupid stuff on the laptop when she woke up shaking and started to put on the half of the clothes she had in her suit case. I gave her my thermometer and she saw that, as it happened to me, her temperature was lower than it should. I prepared a hot water bag for her and she could sleep but the morning after her temperature wasn't right yet and she needed a day off to warm up.
Of course, in none of the cases we reach a temperature as cold as to call it hypothermia, but we were close...
Apart from this, the shower usually hasn't got hot water and the house reminds to the North Pole even with the stove and the gas radiator. However, whenever I feel a little bit pissed off because I see the steam of my breath while sitting in the living room, I think about Madrid and its emptiness and I say "God damn it, cold is good for circulation!! This is healthy!" and I enjoy the "harsh" field biologist life again.
“el cariño es cosa de niños”.
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