squirrel face

Today was a pretty good monkey day. Originally, I thought it would be crappy because I got up at 4:30am after tossing and turning all night and felt terrible. My feet were sore and I was really really sleepy. But I chugged down some coffee, put on 2 pairs of socks, and popped some advil for the foot pain. It seemed to have helped because the day didn't feel like torture. My feet still hurt after standing for 12 hours, but I didn't feel like crying the whole time. So that's good. It let me concentrate on all the other things that happened.

So here's what I saw during monkeyschool today. (Rated M for Mature due to face-eating. Not intended for small children). We were following the monkey group LV. I like this group quite a bit! All of the monkeys are named after food and they live in a pretty cool part of the forest with lots of high cliffs, great breezes, rocks for sitting on, and big trees that make nice shady spots to stand in. This is one of the groups that I will be studying in detail during my time here and my main task right now is to learn to recognize individual monkeys. Anyway, we were following this one adult male named Mostaza (fyi - it means mustard in spanish). We had just started following him and recording his behaviours, when he climbed a tree and found a big nest made of sticks. He made a really loud screeching call, stuck his head in the nest, and emerged with a baby squirrel in each hand. He bounded off to the top of a nearby tree and proceeded to bite the face off one of the baby squirrels. After the face eating, he bit the legs and stomach of the second baby squirrel and basically ripped it apart while it was still kicking. It was really quite gory. Of course I couldn't turn away. Then, over the next half hour, he ate one and then the other baby squirrel. While he was eating, a crowd of monkeys gathered around him, all hoping that he would share (he didn't). When he was nearly finished, four spider monkeys joined the capuchins in their tree. A baby spider monkey was quite interested in Mostaza's lunch, but kept his distance at first. Eventually an adult female spider monkey came over to try to take what was left of the squirrel, but Mostaza made a threatening face to show he meant business and he managed to fend off the lunch stealers. After he finished the dripping, bleeding carcass, the capuchins groomed the spider monkeys in the top of the tree. Then everybody went on their merry way.

This was really cool to see because not only had I never seen monkeys kill and eat small vertebrates (i still feel sad for the babies and the momma squirrel), but I had never seen the two species of monkey interact. It was really something to watch.

Other cool things about today:
- The monkeys spent a lot of time traveling along a dried up river. The river bed is made of huge boulders. It was fun to hop across these boulders while following the monkeys.
- The other field assistant and I climbed a huge rocky cliff! It was kind of scary because it was a really long way down, but we made it to the top safely. And the view was great once we got there.
- I saw a silver spider monkey. Apparently he is very special because all of the other spider monkeys in Santa Rosa are golden brown.
- I learned many spanish words today. I can now say "i don't know", "i don't understand", and "is there any mail for Dayna". I am trying to speak to the other field assistant in spanish as much as possible. Hopefully I will be able to understand a lot by the time I go home.

Not so cool things about today:
- A wasp stung me on my head. It hurts.


That's it!! Thanks for reading!
<3 Day