Two weeks
ago, a new volunteer arrived to work with the samangos, the Belgian. After some
research in primates as a part of her studies, she has been working in
conservation for several years and decided to take a short break in her job to
come back to the forest and crawling on the ground pursing elusive monkeys.
As a
primate co-ordinator (sounds great, but only means that I have to spend lots of
hours trying to disentangle and homogenize the mess of data we have and prepare
the PDA and so on, not that I know much, unfortunately, though I do my best); I
had to train her. So, on Tuesday 6:30, we started the training, just in
front of the Barn, where the monkeys had been kind enough to appear. In a
matter of minutes, she realized of all the pitfalls that the data collection.
While the monkeys travelled slowly (very kind of them) towards Bush camp, I was
telling her all the story of the primate side of the project since I arrived
and my pretty useless struggle to improve the methods, gaining only a lot of
stress, social marginalization and even some white hairs! By the second day,
she was the one teaching to me about the monkeys. She not only realized of the
different between sub-adults and juveniles, age-classes that I joined because
there was a lot of disagreement between my old fellows, but was able to
distinguish between male and female sub-adults by looking at the teeth,
something that I hadn’t think about.
At first I
was quite ashamed that she knew more than me, and felt sympathy for the
Cardiffian, who probably went through something similar when I arrived but, in
contrast to her, I felt, finally, relief.
Finally there was someone in the project that
could teach me something about the monkeys and that agreed with me that we
needed to improve the methodology (well, best of all, establish and objective
for the data collection!!!). So , in some days, when the director arrives, we
will have a meeting with him to try to make of this a serious project. But,
even if nothing changes before I leave, it was quite good to see the Belgian
crawling on the ground to pass a fence determined to don’t miss a single scan
of the monkeys…while some of my fellows could loose one hour of data just
because they couldn’t find a hole on the fence to pass. Finally, a real
primatologist in the project, I missed to see someone dedicated so much after
all the sloth that I had seen, suffering under the absurd dictatorship of
undergraduate students with too much power and little knowledge… Summarizing, I
am really glad and hopeful, maybe my time in South Africa is not doing to be a waste of time
after all.
In
addition, most of the people that were here before have left, and only the
Belgian, The French-Spanish and me remain as volunteers of the project, so the
average age and experience has increased dramatically and it finally seems that
we are carrying out a research project and no a g&%dam summer camp.
Anyway; I
am still with the camera-traps and so I will at least 2 weeks more, that I’ll
have to come back with the monkeys because two new volunteers are arriving for
working in the predator side. Until then, I will enjoy my walks with the
French-Spanish up and down Lajuma and the surrounding properties checking
cameras and tagging them after, finding surprises like crazy juvenile baboons
shaking the camera on a daily basis or watching the battle between to
porcupines. Additionally, the leopard trapping is re-starting in a couple of
days and some people has come to tag some samangos to take samples for genetic
analysis among other things, and the Frenchs are leaving and slowly being
replaced by Germans (Prefer the formers, I was improving my understanding of
French quite a lot, but c’est la vie). So, let see if the last month and a half
that I’ve got here is, FINALLY, something worthy to tell, full of biology and
only patched by social problems. Now the sky is bluer, the slopes less tiring and even the bushbabies sound like music.
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