11h with House

After managing to go out from bed at 5 (not without the corresponding struggle,sure ) and getting ready for a long day following the samango monkeys through their thorny and spiky home range; I was waiting for 40 minutes to the Crossliner to come. As it was getting late and I didn't want to loose the monkeys if they had slept at the trees that surround the Owner's house (that’s why it’s called the House Troop), I left him a note at the Barn and walked toward the place I expected to find the monkeys. Fortunately, there they were, all spread throughout the garden.

Some scans passed with them feeding on the trees and I trying to don't be completely slobbered by Gunter, by giving him distinct sticks to play with and by climbing to the highest rocks I could find...(It didn't work pretty well, my poor smelly fleece can testify so...). As soon as I could see some of the monkeys out of the garden, I ran away there to escape from the massive dog, who was barking to me for a while, looking at me sad from the other side of the fence.

Soon, some of the monkeys travelled inside the forest, leaving short after the vicinity of the Bushbuck trail, which means that I had to spend the majority the day jumping different kind of bushes, walking on my haunches to avoid others and removing thorns from my clothes and skin. At least, I hope to end up this experience with strong legs and healing capacity…inshallah

Around 10, there was enough coverage for the mobile phone so I could receive half text of the Cardiffian telling me that the Crossliner had gone to town to solve some visa stuff and that she could accompany me if I texted her to *part of text is missing*. Well; I was already expecting to be alone with the monkeys all the day and, actually, I was enjoying pretty much the experience, I needed to get rid of human primates for a while, just a little bit. It was pretty discouraging for me to see the Crossliner lying around with the Sudoku booklet while listening to the radio between scans, so not having that example I could look at the monkeys and enjoy their behaviour more freely without feeling like a weirdo. That is how I could see some things that I couldn’t see before; such as how the juveniles become crazy when the male ( I call him Greg, because of Greg House) copulates with one of the females; and the juvenile spins around the couple making funny faces.Yeah, as here the winter is coming I'm gonna be again following monkeys in their mating season ( so jealous).  Or a baby suckling from its mother and being groomed. Additionally, as I’m pretty quiet, some other animals came to visit while I was following the monkeys like a female bushbuck:

A red duiker….

A warthog with her babies…

And the always present Guinean fowl!

Of course, I could also enjoy the side effects of the behavioural data collection, which is when your mind starts to flow around random thoughts such as your discouraging future. After all, I’m still able to see me being an overqualified McDonals or Burguer King employee...My PhD applications haven't been too succesful...well, one was, but if don't find a scholarship I'll have to withdraw it...I'm gonna applied for more if the work and the intrinsic laziness of the research assistant allow me, but I'm not having good expectations about next year...and, of course, a recurrent not so random thought, thanks to the constantly remind of the Cardiffian is the scarcity of men....Such a waste of youth, f&%ck!(well, that's precisely the problem ¬¬').... It's not something that I would normally say but, given that one of the purposes of the blog was to give some insight of the real world of the career in biology to the newcomers, I would. Scarcity of males it's getting a rule on field world...and you are gonna be isolated for a huge amount of time in the middle of nowhere...it's something to consider. So, boys, if you wanna increase your possibilities in having any kind of relationship with girls, study biology! If you don't get anything, you may have to re-think your sexuality, in which case, you are in the right place! As far as I know, a great proportion of guys in biology are gay so...girls, maybe a trip to Lesbos is not such a bad idea...yeah, the 15 minutes between scans let you think more than you would like to, and I also have time to miss Morocco, the macaques and my fellows...and that some behaviours previously attributed to the unequal sex ratio, after a kind of experimental replication, came to be seen in a different way since in the second case the outcome is pretty much the opposite than the one of the former. As I said, random thoughts.

It was getting dark when I finally reach the last scan, which made extremely complicated to see if the monkeys had nipples or not, so I could tell adult females and subadults apart. I stayed a little bit more, so I could take the GPS coordinates of the sleeping site and when I did it I realized that my head torch didn't gave light more than a metre away...then is when you stop to care about snakes and start to be concern about leopards! Fortunately the monkeys were kind enough to don't go to sleep too far from a little path which I could follow and led me to a known trial, so I could find the Barn in not too much time. And luckily, I was so tired that I went to sleep just a couple of hours afterwards...I leave you with some seconds of my new monkeys...