Bye Lajuma...

I'll write something whenever I've the time.... Right now, I'm just trying to pack, hard because I came with a suitcase and a backpack and now I can only take one of them because of the flight company; plus my travel around the country is not completely solved yet and I found out this morning that I didn't get the job I applied for, so when I come back to Spain I will be one of that 50% of young unemployed with great qualifications but no hope. Great day, yeah. Keep on standing, anyway...

Inter-Group Encounter: Barn VS House troop

Last week, I was following House troop and we were getting close to the Barn, when half of my monkeys ran towards me. I was kind of excited 'An inter-group encounter?Finally?' The only inter-group encounter

I had seen so far were when I wasn't following or when they found each other in the sleeping sites, but not a full one from the beginning.


Soon, I saw 3 monkeys coming, open-mouthing to mines. I radioed the Belgian to confirm, and she told me that she was with most of the monkeys of Barn troop at 150-200 m. But I knew that it was that, these evil monkeys are always extremely spread.

Few minutes later the little battle started, after my troop decided to stop ignoring the other (see video). However, while most of the visible members of Barn troop were, at least, paying attention to the battle, most of mine were some meters behind feeding. 'F^@ck, guys! What are you doing? We are more, let kick their as{^s!' But they didn't give a sh@t! Then I saw Babootie, who was been groomed by 3 adult females 'WTF, girls? He is useless, stop that and go to support your fellows' But, once again, ignored me.

20 minutes after, the fighters got tired of agonistic displays and went to their corners to get involved in an orgy of grooming, just to restart some minutes later.

The baboons came over. I guess that the e evolutionary roots of disease are deep, but at least the baboons instead of coming running and screaming 'fight, fight' are far more elegant and pretended that they just came to feed...but I saw you looking, guys!

When we thought that the issue would last forever, a peace-mediator came: Gunter. He appeared running crazily, slobberying all on his way and making the two parties to split and run away to their sides.

Daily life at Lajuma

Now that I'm almost leaving I wanted to share some of those things that I don't normally write about that are the daily stuff that happens when you are not following monkeys, doing phenology, checking camera-traps and so on.




Visits of the Neighbors

When you live in the middle of the field site, is common that your subjects of study decide some times to hang out at the entrance of your house.


Barn and House troops of samangos had always being regular visitors, jumping on the roof, messing in the pile of ashes of the braai and Babootie, the adult male of House troop, pretending to be Bonnie the cat to enter into the Barn and grab some food. Additionally, this place is part of what we call they grey area, where both troops territories overlap and, therefore, we were able to enjoy some inter-group encounters in the afternoon.

Less often, but also in a regular basis, the baboons come over to enjoy the grass and the sun of the place, even when the samangos are about.

Additionally, a family of greater bushbabies sleeps just behind the Barn, which is good because normally they move away to forage during the night...but is true that sometimes they decide to have a concert on the roof in the middle of the night. They are cute animals, but their vocalizations are f^Œking ugly! But we cannot complain. At Bush camp, they not only suffered the concerts almost daily, but for months had a bushbaby getting into the kitchen and stealing food.

Certainly, Bush camp is a much better place to get acquaintance with the local fauna. Since I arrived they have been the only ones on having scale guests, such a bush snake in one of the assistants room or a twig snake close to the fire place. Spiders are also more common and diverse there, we only had a couple of relatively tiny rain spiders so far.

However, we do have some dassies behind the Barn, who sometimes climb to the trees giving the fake impression of being samangos and, when the place is quiet, even some bushbucks dare to graze about.

Domestic animals, such as the feared Gunter and the horses visit us sometimes and now, daily Ozi, the cat of the PhD student. This cat comes mainly to eats Bonnie's food and flirt with her (I know this kind of guys...) in a kind of aggressive way.





Gas and Water issues

Our living conditions are really comfy, indeed, even in the middle of the bush but, of course not everything works always.

One night I was outside when one of the Germans was having a shower when, suddenly, one of the pipes outside exploded, flooding all the entrance of the Barn. Quickly, I closed the gas bottle (it was starting to smell already) and looked for the key of water, but I couldn't find it, nor the PhD student when he came to the rescue. He went to call the Handyman while, fortunately I finally saw the key and couple stop the water of flowing.

The fridges work with gas too, and they have the problem that, when the bottle is coming to the end, they don't burn all the and the Barn becomes a gas chamber, no matter how many windows you open. This is how I ended up camping with the Germans outside some days ago.

The water supply comes from the streams that cross the property and it's quite reliable. That's why we are lucky enough to have a 'washing' machine...that you have to empty by had and that, no matter how many times you rinse the water is always orange or black. At least it removes the smell to sweat...though in some occasions it replaces it by latrine one!



Braais
Braais, the SA word for barbecue, occur at least once a week and are the wildcard for any occasion, no matter if it's a birthday, a farewell or just Friday, a fire is always convenient, specially because the smoke covers quite effectively any bad smell that the 'washing' machine left on our clothes...



Town days

As a general rule, we go to town on Mondays to buy food, pick up new people, etc. Most of the people here hate town days and try to avoid them giving their shopping list to anyone else but for me it was the only little window to SA culture that we had and also my opportunity to have a nearly complete day off.

The journey takes 1h and a half, mainly because of the 7 bumpy km that separate us from the bottom of the mountain. Then breakfast at Café Rosa, a kind of very corny place but with cheat good food and portions big enough so you don't have to eat any more the rest of the day.

After that, it comes the shopping and those things. Maybe a visit to the Robot Electrical, an all-in-one shop, to buy some beads and make jewelry in the few time off or Mister Price for cheap. Any of these if you are not in the difficult situation of getting a visa.

If that's your case, you will have to visit Home Affairs. There, after going along the corridor, always full of people waiting, you go inside the international affairs office, where the workers are behind some bars, like a prison (we don't know if is to protect them from the frustrated people that they attend or for protecting those of them). Then you ask to one of the nice ladies there who, with a mixture of boredom and disgust will probably say something like 'It's not possible' 'I don't know' or 'It's not my problem'.

I remember the first time I went to check if my visa was ready. I asked and the lady checked on the computer and then went to the closet from where she took the stick of the visa. 'This is not going to be that easy' I thought. Of course not. As soon as I looked at it I saw that the visa expired 10 days before I had to take my plane, even if I gave them a ticket of the booking when I applied for the visa and that I had counted scrupulously the days before purchasing the flight. They had extended my visa from the moment they received my application instead from the day the one was going to expire. I explained to the lady, who quickly told me that she couldn't do anything. Next week, I came back. I knew that could be fixed, the Scottish and the Post-doc had had that problem before.

Fortunately for me, that time there was a different lady. At first, she tried to persuade me that it was too difficult to fix it, but I counter-attacked with Bambi-eyes and saying that I had no money to buy another plane ticket. After having a look to my dirty 2-sizes-bigger trousers, she sighed and told me 'ok, but don't blame me if you don't get it'. Fair enough. I still had some more than 2 months and a half, so I wasn't too worried. 3 weeks later, finally, I got a new (and right) visa.

But apart from this theme park of the African bureaucracy, it's true that there is not much to do in town. There is a market with stalls, where no white SA has ever been seen and where most of the people sell tomatoes, avocados and some more veggies. I have no idea if all of them manage to sell something having other 100 people around with the same products.

In general, when you get bore of messing inside the shops, you throw yourself to drink. Well, just one or two ciders, don't think too badly. Then is when we end up at Mike's, close to the PickNPay, where we buy the groceries, or to the Grasdack, my favorite. Savannahs don't taste better any where else.

Naming The Monkeys

Some weeks ago, as I said, a different research group came to trap samangos to take genetic samples and to see how isolated this population is to all the other ones around. As a part of their job, they tagged on the ears all the monkeys already caught. As a result, now I've got in my troops some individuals that I can recognize individually for certain (Finally!). So, what better than starting to give them names. As the tags are two colors on the ears, we have named them on the data collection as the initials of those, so we have BB (blue-blue), RR (Red-Red) and so on...but I though that would be funny to give them real names. So, I started, even though I only got a couple of days left and I only have 3 names!

Babootie (BB)

The samango with the honey badger aptitude

Babootie was the male that I used to call Greg, name that I didn’t really like but that made sense given that was the male of House troop. But with the BB tag I thought that Babootie, a typical SA dish, was much funnier and appropriate! Babootie is like that famous honey badger of youtube, a pretty bad dumbass. He doesn’t give a sh&t about humans, and sometimes, if we are distracted, he comes inside the Barn and steals food. When most people try to scare him away, he open-mouths them (but not me, I open mouth him first and he just looks around and pretend to be a good monkey munching grass…guess that my macaque style is kind of gansta). The other day I surprised him looking on the containers of the workers; he ended up with a huge piece of bread on the top of a tree eating for one hour and a half. We are trying to fix the situation, but it’s hard to make everybody to be careful all time with the food in their own houses.
But he is not only a nightmare for humans. Some days ago the Belgian was quite upset because Babootie had attacked one of the females of her troop and the poor monkey was bleeding from an arm! And two weeks ago, I was following the troop, that was around a road, which is great, cause you see them really well, not too frequent, and then some baboons appear. They were feeding around and all seem to be peaceful between the two species, as usual…until some came too close to Babootie and he, of curse, lunged and open-mouthed them, made the baboons to run away.

Roibos (RB)

 Juvenile male

 

Pap (PP)

An Adult Female