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