Easter egg hunt!

The tinamous are nesting on BCI, which means there are large, aquamarine eggs hidden throughout the forest tempting the capuchins.  Eggs are high quality food, and all the monkeys are spending a lot of time staring at the ground or following adult tinamous around, hoping to find a nest.  A couple of days ago, three females cooperated to chase a male tinamou off his nest and steal his eggs.  The birds nest on the ground at the bases of trees, so Claudia climbed down the tree and scared the male off his nest, and while Mimi and Betty kept him distracted, she stole all his eggs.  After all their help, you might think that Claudia would share her booty.  Actually, she did, but not with either of the females who helped her out.  Instead, she and Cheverul sat side by side on a palm frond, happily dipping their hands into the opened egg and licking the yolk and whites off their fingers.  

The capuchins aren't the only ones who like tinamou eggs, either!

All the activity we've seen in the last few weeks surrounding these eggs (and especially the food sharing we've observed), got me excited about an art and crafts project and I went on an epic search for easter eggs dyeing kits and white eggs.  Surprisingly, given that the easter bunny doesn't visit Panama, it was easier to come up with the kits than the white eggs.  I have been to every grocery store and every market in the city, and discovered that only brown eggs are sold in Panama.  Everyone seems to remember a time when you could find white eggs, but not any more.  Luckily, it turns out that using the blue dye tablet and brown eggs more or less turns a chicken egg into a reasonably convicing fake tinamou egg.  

I've spent the last three weeks teaching the Princeton semester in Panama class on tropical vertebrate biology, and we used these eggs to create fake tinamou nests.  We wanted to know how close monkeys had to come to see the eggs, and look at the role that dominance and social relationships played in determining who actually got to eat them once they were found.  It was quite funny, actually, as soon as a capuchin saw the 'nest', they immediately started scanning the trees around them to see if any of their group mates were visible, and only then, moving very slowly and quietly did they start moving down to the ground to pick up the eggs.  If one of the adult males saw a female or juvenile moving towards a nest, he'd immediately rush over and take all the eggs, so stealth was key!

Alfredo, taking the eggs that Oldemar found.

Meet Las Moneras!

Anyuri, Me, Nena and Lucia

I feel incredibly lucky to have found the most amazing monkey chasers!  Anyuri, Nena and Lucia started working with me in early January, and after only a week on the job, which was primarily focused on learning to navigate the trail system on Barro Colorado Island and to tell the difference between adult male, adult female and juvenile capuchin monkeys, were promptly tested with a trial-by-fire: Darting!  

Bob came down to Panama again, probably against his better judgment, to help me put radio-collars on the capuchins.  

The batteries in all the radio-collars I used for my dissertation research have died and so, to track the movements of my study groups using the automated telemetry system on BCI, I had to replace the collars.  Catching monkeys is tricky and tiring at the best of times, but this round of darting easily outstripped all its predecessors in terms of difficulty.  Dipteryx, tall canopy trees, had started to fruit, but weren't producing large fruit crops so the monkeys were very hungry and spent all day running from the top of one tall tree to the next. For safety reasons, we can't try to capture the animals when they are high up, or when they are moving, and thus we spent  seven days running up and down hills covered in liana tangles after monkey groups, desperately hoping to be in the right place when a capuchin decided to pause for a few seconds.  We got lucky five times, averaging out to approximately 15 miles hiked per monkey captured.  

How many blondes does it take to collar a monkey?

Because capturing capuchins is so labor intensive, we tried out two new break-away collars that are designed to fall off by themselves (hopefully AFTER the batteries die), so we don't have to recapture the animals to remove their collars.  As you can see, it's a pretty low-tech solution--just a weak point built into the tubular nylon collar material that should eventually rot and fall off.  

Several higher-tech break away collars have been designed which allow  you to program the collar to fall off after a specified number of days, or to trigger them to fall off remotely using radio-signals.  Unfortunately, for the moment, all these mechanisms are too heavy to use with animals as small as the capuchins.  So, we crossed our fingers and (although we knew better), hoped that the capuchins wouldn't pull the collars off the second they woke up. . .and as it turned out, it took the first monkey almost a whole 6 hours to get his collar off (please note, that is half the time it took us to catch him)!  On the other hand, the other monkey with a break-away collar (Ulpiano) was either weaker, lazier or got a better constructed version, because he is still wearing his, almost three months later.

Rose and I putting a collar on Saladino (named after the first Panamanian Olympic gold medalist)

   George and Rose weighing Loretta.

We had a frustrating week of darting. I'd been hoping to get new radio-collars on monkeys in my original six study groups and, perhaps, if we were lucky, add an extra group or two. Field work requires flexiblity though, and by the second day it was clear that these goals needed to be adjusted.  In the end, we captured 5 monkeys from three social groups, and felt like we'd succeeded. I get to work with amazing people:  even after 7 exhausting, frustrating and somewhat disappointing days they still smile (and speak to me).  

L to R:  Bob, Nena, Oldemar, Anyuri, George, Carrie, and Lucia

(Actually, they were smiling because I'd just promised them we could go home to rum and cokes!)

(I'm smiling because I finally get to take the heavy backpack off!)

Alarm!

I finally got recordings of alarm calls! 

After weeks of always being just a couple of seconds too late, or having other monkeys crashing around in the trees obscuring the vocalization, I finally managed to record alarm calls today! (click the "video" above to hear them--the website won't let me upload audio files, but will let me upload video clips, so this was my solution!) 

Now, to be honest, these vocalizations aren't from one of my study groups.  The only group I could find today was Scarface (named after their severely disfigured alpha male), so I followed them in part to figure out if they might be a good group to study in the future.  They aren't very habituated, however, and these alarm calls were actually made at me!  A female with a small baby on her back took one look at me and started alarm calling, and then ran away.  

I am pretty excited to have gotten my first recording of an alarm call--it almost makes up for yesterday, when I was sitting interviewing potential field assistants in Panama City, and a friend called me from the forest on BCI so I could listen to the intergroup fight two capuchin groups were having right in front of her.  

Who is the who?

This is my dilemma.

I've spent the last month trying to figure out the best way to recognize individual capuchin monkeys.  Is it the slightly different shape of the intersection between the black and white fur on their foreheads? or the size and protrusion of their brow-ridge?  How stable are these traits?  will a juvenile I recognize today look similar three months or a year from now?

Sometimes, when I get really lucky, individuals have scars or moles, which makes it much easier to tell who is who.  For example, this male from TB group has a nice mole on the right side of his face.  Very convenient, as the other big male doesn't have any moles.  

Unfortunately, the mole is very small, and as soon as he turns his head--you'd never know it was there.  

I'm not convinced I'm going to be able to recognize even distinctive individuals in the middle of hectic intergroup fights, so a good part of last week was spent reading about various methods for marking animals.  Ear tags, tatoos,  flash freezing their fur--all these require catching the monkeys, so I've been considering the super-soaker and hair dye approach.  

My time online has introduced me to a very strange pet-subculture:  

I have learned that there are many people who seem to spend a lot of time on online discussing how best to dye their pets strange colors.  My personal favorite post was the following:

"My pet Pekingese is starting to go unfashionably grey and it is seeming to age him prematurely. He's become quite reclusive and shy about his appearance and refuses to go out. We've been dying his hair with boot polish and it appears to do the trick."

Ahhh, the things you learn while doing "science."

Santa Rita Ridge

Last weekend, I took a vacation from BCI with some of my friends, and went to visit one of the STRI staff scientists in his weekend home near Colon (on the Caribbean side of Panama).

Dave has a beautiful house on a hilltop in Santa Rita, with a pool and gorgeous views out to the ocean. . .

. . .which is a good thing because we had to brave the Transismica!

The Transismica is the road that runs more or less along the canal from Panama City (on the Pacific side) to Colon (on the Caribbean), and it is in excruciatingly bad shape. Excruciating because more of the road is pot-hole than not, and a 35 minute trip took four hours.

Please note the sign that says "excavacion profunda": what they mean is "we dug a hole that will swallow your car if, for any reason you get to close to the curb.

Dave studies stingless bees, and keeps a lot of colonies at his house in SantaRita.

They live in boxes, like these--and you can lift up the lid and see what they construct. It was very cool!

There were great some moths around the house at night:

Panamanian road kill--averted

There has been a lot of road-kill on the Gamboa road this fall.  I don't know if it is related to the time of year, or the general lack of food in the forest at this moment, but lots of animals seem compelled to travel, crossing roads and often getting hit by cars. Somehow, when it is an "exotic" animal like a monkey or an ant-eater, this seems even more tragic.  The sloths are particularly heart breaking, as the slowly, deliberately try drag themselves across the wide strips of pavement.   

It made me happy, therefore, to be able to save at least one.  We came across this sloth on a drive back from the beach at Galeta on the Caribbean coast.  

After a few photos, we looked both ways and gave it a lift to a tree on the other side of the road.

Election day in the canal

Thanks to streaming internet video, we watched election results live in the BCI lounge and

unlike when I was here four years ago, were able to celebrate with the rest of the country!

One small difference, perhaps, being that we opened our bottles of champagne with a machete--a great party trick courtesy of Meg Eckles!