Life and Death in Santa Rosa

I realize that once again it has been a very long time since my last blog post. February came and went so quickly and now March is already a third of the way over. It is incredible how the movement of time here fluctuates. Some moments drag out into what feels like an eternity, while days and weeks seem to pass in the blink of an eye. January was a difficult month. For one, it was hard to come in for a landing after such an extended vacation. It was hard to face the notion that time here was only half finished and many changes still lay ahead. We were so hopeful to move into our new digs at the beginning of January, but of course that didn't happen. Here we are on March 7th and things still look a little grim. This is especially frightening because a National Geographic film crew is coming back to the park on the 10th. We absolutely must be out of the Albergue before then because there is literally no other place to put us or the crew. It stretches my patience thinner than it has ever had to be.

Speaking of patience, as I write this I am sitting in my favorite hotel room in Nicaragua. It is a beautiful morning and from my balcony I can look out over the cove that opens up into the Pacific ocean. While on a normal day I might be quiet and contemplative, taking in the view, at this particular moment I am feeling very impatient and frustrated. The drawback to the room on the upper level here is that it shares a bathroom with another bedroom that is not connected. This bedroom is full of 5-6 little old Nicaraguan ladies, each of whom apparently needs to take a 20min shower this morning. All I want to do is brush my teeth, but I can tell from eavesdropping on their conversations that they have used up all the water and broken the toilet. They are worse than a group of college boys, laughing and slamming doors at 6am. I was finally able to get into the bathroom and brush my teeth and wash my face with water from my nalgene. While inside, they tried to open the door 4 times!! When I got out and sat on my bed they looked creepily over the wall that separates the balconies, into my room to see if I was still there. I know I'm not the only person on this planet or in this hotel room, so why do you think you are? I'm having another Frank Grimes moment....

Now on to the title of this post. Life in Santa Rosa has changed dramatically. There are two more research teams and an endless flow of students, both foreign and Costa Rican, that come through the park doing field schools and other projects. The dry season is in full swing. It is very hot, but walking through the forest it feels like fall because of the crunch of leaves beneath your feet. You may not realize, but it actually a drop in available water, not temperature, that causes deciduous trees to lose their leaves. Life is good and research has really improved due to dry season changes in monkey behavior. January was a sad month though for two main reasons. First, we found a dead infant capuchin on one of our trails. It's location in the park indicated it wasn't from one of my study groups (this was later confirmed, obviously, because I would have noticed a missing monkey). It wasn't badly decomposed, but it's organs were completely consumed and I was unable to even sex it. It didn't appear that there were any wounds that would indicate an infanticide, but then again, taphonomic processes could have hidden these marks. My half-assed necropsy with the equivalent of toenail clippers and a bandanna over my face didn't reveal much. I'll worn you, these pictures might be kind of upsetting.

The infant probably died of natural causes, but it is also entirely possible that it was bitten and killed by an adult male. After the examination, we quadruple bagged the monkey carcass and it is now sitting at the bottom of our deep freezer where we keep the poop and urine samples alongside extra loaves of bread and frozen meat.

I do have more to say on the issue of death in Santa Rosa, but the time has come for me to gather my things and cross the border to get back there. I will have another post up this week regarding other monkey news.

Re-entry is always more painful than exit

As promised, I am putting a new post on this blog today and by gum I hope it is entertaining at the very least. One of the many perks of studying monkeys in the wild (above being pooped on on a regular basis) is that it invariably takes you to interesting locations all over the world. As such, when a principal investigator, indefatigable as we are, decides that he or she would like to take a vacation, paradise is always within striking distance. I was blessed to have my best friend in the whole world, Leah Prandi-Abrams, come and visit me here in Costa Rica. After a few days with the monkeys, we picked up and headed for Nicaragua. I don't have anything against my host country, it's just that Nicaragua is incredibly cheaper, the culture is more suited to my blunt "forma de ser" (manner of being), and it just happens to contain my boyfriend. All plenty of motivation in my humble opinion. So off we went to the Isla Ometepe in the middle of Lake Nicaragua. The island is made up of two active volcanoes, the more imposing and symmetrical of the two, Concepción, is pictured below.

To get to the island you can take a ferry or a barf-o-matic lancha. We opted for the latter on our way there and it almost cost Leah her lunch. Perhaps we shouldn't have purchased street hamburguesas ten minutes before boarding. Live and learn. We spent a day on the lake's volcanic sandy beach, soaking up the rays and consuming our fair share of alcohol and fried food products. We met an acupuncturist ex-pat who lived in Costa Rica. He had come to the island on the advice of his maid because of some of the brothels that are supposedly found there. Here I would like to note that this particular bit of information was wholly unsolicited. The next day we took an overcrowded ferry back to San Jorge. We parked ourselves next to a surly pre-teen boy with enough product in his air to incinerate the boat and all its passengers. He had no interest in interacting with or moving his selfishly placed bookbag for a couple of dopey looking gringas. I resorted to the gentle shove method, which I have also seen employed getting on and off buses. Worked like a charm. We made our way to Granada and checked into the Casa del Agua. At first it seemed like a great little place. The inner courtyard had a swimming pool, a living room with free cable tv, and a well-stocked courtyard kitchen. Our room was comfortable but incredibly hot because we opted to have fans instead of A/C to save some money. The proprietor was Irish and as it turned out surly, a commitment-phobe, homophobic and generally an unpleasant drunk. Suffice to say I won't be returning there, but not for lack of good pricing and nice facilities.

We went to the market. We went the spa. We swam in this pool guarded by these three ducks. It was a lot of fun, but it didn't particularly feel much like Christmas. That is except for the giant metal "tree" sponsored by the cell phone company that sat in the parque central. Or perhaps the church service that we dropped in on, along with some loud obnoxious urchins and a man with his pitbull. Dogs in church? Perhaps this a concept we should be importing into the USA. From Granada we moved on to San Juan del Sur, a slightly gringofied but still relaxing beach town just 45 minutes from the border. It also happens to be where my boyfriend works so we had the added benefit of hanging out with him. I only wish Leah spoke Spanish or that Luis spoke English better, but así es. Regardless, featured below are two of my favorite people.

Now on to the title of this post. Leah and I finished our vacation in Liberia at the Best Western, gorging on chocolate and reality television. She had to leave very early in the morning and though I got to to give her a hug, when I woke up several hours later I had a very deep sense of emptiness and longing. One of the drawbacks of studying monkeys is that it separates you from the people you love for extended periods of time. Sure there is always skype, which makes awkward silences on the phone even more awkward than they would be in person, but it just isn't the same as sharing the same space as someone else. Along with PBR and fried oyster po-boys, I would love to spend an afternoon on my porch in NOLA with my best buds around me. If only I could be teleported. I went back to Nicaragua spend New Year's Eve with Luis, which was an awk-fest of immeasurable intensity, but that perhaps is something left unblogged in detail. Suffice to say I met his family and spent three hours in an evangelical church service. It took me 5 hours to get through the line at immigration to re-enter Costa Rica and then missed the last bus to Liberia. It was alright in the end, as I likely would have had to walk the seven kilometers from the park entrance to the Albergue in the dark with no flashlight. I hired another pirate taxi as Ronny had a family emergency. I arrived back in the park to a world completely changed. All the rooms here are now filled. I have two new assistants, two old friends also working on their PhD's and their assistants. A film crew is here in the park and we'll be working with them in a few months to capture the night activities of the monkeys. Everything is different, just as I knew it would be before embarking on an epic adventure with my best friend.

So here I sit, reflecting on all the joys and pains of working in the field. The separation, the anxiety, the joy, the isolation, the bug bites. Yesterday was marked my seventh month here. The half-way point. I can scarcely believe it. Only seven more to go, and with hope, I'll have at least double that number of blog updates by the end ;)

 

Scorpions

Wellllll, in reality it has only been a little over a month since my last entry, but I realize people out there are updating their blogs once or twice a day. I don't have much of an excuse, only that doing dissertation research is very complex and trying....so is going on vacation with your best friend, but in a good way! So I'll try to pick up where I left off, somewhere in Vietnam as I recall...

This is Dos Leches, an old female in LV and her expression sums up how I generally feel/look most of the time. Deep in thought and concentration, so much so that my tongue is hanging out. The dry season has most definitely officially begun! Woohoo! It means a limit on mosquitoes and other water-borne nasties, however it apparently means a gross increase in the scorpion population. Scorpions of all sizes and colors. One as tiny as my pinky nail perched on the zipper of my backpack to one as broad as the back of my hand scurrying across my path to the bathroom at 3am. Upon returning from an exhaustive search for LV I came home to find a total of SIX scorpions spread out from the bathroom, kitchen, all the way to the edge of my door. Some kind of sick, stinging arachnid parade. Suffice to say they have all met the same fate at the bottom or my boot heel. In all honesty one was smashed with a metal frying pan, but he was a surprise for me in the shower once I was already nude and soaped up. Bastard. Something about a scorpion is so unnerving and creepy. I don't know if it is their little pinchers or that fast-moving stinger but they could go extinct for all I care. We heard that if you light a ring of fire around a scorpion it will sting itself to death rather than be consumed by the flames. I wonder a) how this could be explained through evolutionary theory b) who the hell first discovered this was a common, predictable behavior. I mean I don't like scorpions any more than the next guy, but to go so far as to light a ring of fire around one just to see what would happen...that seems to me to have the makings of serial killer written all over it.

And then there was Leah. What a dream it was to have my absolute best friend on the whole planet come for a visit. Luckily she got a little face time with the monkeys and only had one scorpion in the shower with her. I have more adventures to illuminate, but as of now, my brain is shutting down.

The most exciting piece of news from the last 5 weeks is that I got my Leakey grant!!! Absolutely amazing, and apart from the pride and validation, the best part is I don't have to beg my friends and family for money. Though anyone who still wants to help out, every little bit still counts. Leakey covers exactly half of my overall expenses, so as we say in Spanish, vamos a ver. More to come tomorrow, I PROMISE!!

Adventures in Vietnam

I may perhaps be one of the worst bloggers out there. It isn't necessarily that the content is boring or my writing style unpalatable, it's more that I just don't do it! At least, not with the frequency that I probably should. I don't know what the rules are on these things. We just finished up a round of data collection with CP group. For those of you who don't know (which is likely 99%) they are the most annoying and disliked out of the capuchin groups here at Santa Rosa. Perhaps people also dislike Exclosure group because they are so small and boring, but that's neither here nor there. What exactly makes CP group so distasteful you ask? For starters it is their territory. In order to get into the heart of CP territory you have to walk through the park's campground. Usually this isn't an issue, unless it is the wee hours of the morning and you are going to wake up monkeys and you trip over the line to someone's tent. Or perhaps you pass a sizable mound of human feces laid delicately in the middle of the path. From there you walk down A-trail and after about 100 meters enter what I like to call, "the death zone." Not to be confused with "the death zone" of mountain climbing, i.e. around 29,000ft (or 8,000 meters, after all I am basically a scientist), the imminent danger in this area is most certainly pumas. Surrounded on either side by head height razor grass, the path turns into a gelatinous ooze that has the power to suck the boot right off your foot. No joke, this actually happened to my courageous assistant, Meg. When one passes through this danger zone at 4:00am or 6:00pm the threat of pumas seems all around. The fact that it takes all of your strength and at least 3 seconds to pull your foot from the mud and place it down again makes you an easy target. It's the classic nightmare of being pursued by something deadly and having your feet stuck to the floor. Only this time, there really COULD be a puma lurking in the grass. This is unlikely however. The logical side of me knows that the puma has plenty of its natural prey (deer) to consume in the forest. It is also unlikely that the puma would approach a smelly, upright creature with bright light shooting directly out its forehead (our headlamps). Finally, the fact that Meg and I have taken to singing show tunes at the top of our lungs probably aids in banishing all living creatures from our immediate vicinity. We both love "Les Mis" and "Phantom of the Opera." Their protagonists often feature in our ever-popular would you rather (know, in the biblical sense) game, i.e. would you rather, Phantom or Javier? I said Javier, because Phantom would definitely cry afterward. But I digress, beyond "the death zone" plenty of other natural surprises abound. Leaf-cutter ants, for example, build impressive nests. They are underground farmers (they cut leaves to grow the fungus they eat) who remove all the iron around their gardens and bring it up to the surface. Not only does this make the ground a rusty color, but it leaves the earth below even more disturbed and cavernous. So much so that you might just put your whole leg through what previously looked like solid ground and end up in a pit of water, mud, and ants with large, unfriendly mandibles. This AFTER passing through the death zone at top speed (2.5 steps per 10 seconds) and then tripping on a liana and losing your water bottle. Oh yes, and remember it is 4am.

All of this agony and turmoil to get out to a group you don't even like that much! Now I realize for most non-monkey researchers, all monkeys look exactly alike, however this isn't the case....except with CP. For literally the first 5 months, these buggers were borderline indistinguishable. Meg and I would limp along with our binoculars:

Claire: I dunno, waddya think?
Meg: Well I don't see the spot, but that kinda looks like Ariel
Claire: That's what I was thinking, doesn't her left eye look smaller than the right?
Meg: I never can see that, doesn't she look kind of small?
Claire: Not too small to be Ariel, oh wait, *&#$% that monkey has balls

Things finally clicked in this last round with them. We got a fair amount of data and all the poop samples we needed. However, we got to spend the whole time in our favorite part of CP territory, a warm and fuzzy little place we like to call Vietnam. Now we aren't referring specifically to Vietnam, the country, just perhaps the ethos, the sentiment that someone might have experienced during the Vietnam war. No doubt melodramatic, but said with all due respect. For starters, this place is chock full of that head-height razor grass. You don't know if you are stepping on vines, snakes or the occasional turtle. You can't see around corners, hell, you can't even see your field assistants. The grass is literally slicing up your hands and arms. There are also a wide variety of squatty trees, with long, convoluted branches. All of this tree have razor-sharp thorns of various length and durability. There are Acacia tree, which are also thorny but as a special treat, are the home to aggressive stinging AND biting ants. Each step is like a fat mans squeeze between acacias only to tumble forward into a thorny tree or some razor grass concealing a wasp nest. Oh yeah, and its flooded up to your mid-calf, providing a fertile breeding ground for mosquitoes and black flies. Plus it takes about 45min walking to get to this little paradise. The nice thing about Vietnam is that the monkeys are right up close to you. This way you can really see the blood on their canines when they are threatening you.

All in all, it's been a good week in monkey watching. Today we started a round with Guanacaste. They started ranging really far to the south and west. Lo and behold, we were in a painfully similar environment, only with less grass and more acacia trees. If CP crap territory is Vietnam, then Guanacaste crap territory is Afghanistan.

Without further ado, I will now post some pictures of monkeys that belong to neither CP nor Guanacaste, but the beloved monkeys of LV, who also forage on the seeds of the razor grass, but at least their version of Vietnam is within 2min walking distance.

Nutmeg

Poppy

Sassafrass and Sage

Sage and Sassafras

Grooming

Today we skipped our tropical forest adventures for a trip into Liberia, the capital of the world, according to Ronny (pictured above with former assistant, Peter), our beloved pirate taxi driver and surrogate Costa Rican father. That looks like a run-on sentence, but I digress. We did a massive shopping trip and then everyone was kind enough to wait around for me to get my hair cut, which was a blast. Something about living in the forest makes you stop caring about your appearance. Probably because your appearance deteriorates rapidly under these extreme conditions. Bug bites, spider bites, lizard bites, the occasional human bite, and the scratching. My God, the scratching is intense and often completely unconscious. I'll wake up the middle of the night, clawing my legs like the girl from the Exorcist. I know it scabs and scars, I know it just makes everything worse, but I just can't help it! Anyway, living with crooked bangs and scarred, scabby appendages takes its toll after awhile. Even the most adventurous, hard-ass women need a little beauty in their lives from time to time. Pretty much I just wanted someone to run their fingers through my hair. My family is heavily into contact and I definitely go into withdrawal when I am far away like this. Luckily Meg is snugly (I cannot believe that is how that is correctly spelled, but that's what google is telling me) and we can groom each other. It'd be nice to get the monkeys in on the grooming session, but they play a little too rough for my tastes. Sometimes I feel bad for the infants, who get pinned down WWF style by juvenile females who want to "practice" their mothering skills. Much like the way certain girls may have dressed their cats in doll clothes when they were younger, these juvenile females don't realize they are inflicting pain. Yet they jerk the little baby heads around with enough torsion to pop open a champagne bottle. The infants, wide-eyed and helpless, must submit to this rough grooming until the juvys lose interest or their mothers come along to rescue them. I prefer the gentle touch of human hands, but perhaps I could enlist these females to help scratch my bites. Now that, would be immensely satisfying.

 My fresh haircut. Taking pictures of yourself is more challenging than the hipsters on facebook would make it seem. I just couldn't seem to get it right, but this expression best encompasses my general state of being: joy, interest, surprise, and of course, confusion.

Costa Rica 2010-2011