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Today’s day off hardly felt like a break. I did get to sleep in, but that was my only relief. The rest of my day went as follows: grocery shopping, massive house cleaning, washing clothes (by hand), showering, data entry (I was three days behind), cooking and eating dinner, making lunch for the next day and preparing my field gear. By the end of that it was bed time. For all the free time I thought I’d have, it all seems to disappear after the required chores are completed.
After my initial day back in the field (and my little accident), the next two days were much less eventful in a positive way. I got to hear my first howling bout, and started to orient myself with the forest and individual monkeys. After three days of observing the Motiepas, I feel pretty comfortable recognizing each of the nine individuals (as long as I can see all of their genitals and/or ossified digits).
Though I’d already spent 30-some hours in close proximity with them, it wasn’t until yesterday that I actually heard the howler monkeys howl from a close range. My first day in the forest I remember waking up early with Chiara and Jason and following them into the forest fragment in the dark, and I could hear eerie jungle noises like you would expect on a movie track. From a distance their calls are creepy, but standing right below them the sound is downright deafening. I’ve heard the howls likened to dinosaur roars, and apparently that’s not as crazy as it sounds. With a bit of research (OK fine, I just went to Wikipedia) I found that the Dilophosaurus vocalizations in Jurassic Park were a hybrid of howler monkey, swan, hawk and rattlesnake sounds.
It is not specifically known why the monkeys howl, and that’s part of the reason why we’re out collecting data. Our professor is trying to determine what provokes the bouts, which individuals participate the most and what their status is within the group.
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