Novios

Anastasia, bless her heart, was up bright and early to go with me to the forest. Although I’d had dreams all night long that I couldn’t find the monkeys, we found the North group without too much trouble. Everything seemed to be going well: we were up on Spondias Lane, Wrinkle Belly was there, and I felt like I was getting fairly good data on a non-lactating female. I felt a little bit sketchy about this particular female; at first she appeared to be a little bit apart from the group, but she had a “novio”—that is, a boyfriend. The two of them had mated a couple of times and were kind of hanging out by themselves. The female looked young, and I began to wonder if she wasn’t actually part of the group—if she was a young adult who had dispersed from her natal group and was shadowing this group, trying to join it. I was much relieved when she and her novio joined the others to eat Spondias fruit, and afterwards, they rested in a tree with several other monkeys.

Then all of a sudden, this female began moving, and before I knew it I was at the barbed wire fence where I had once encountered the mysterious North-West group. She crossed the fence. She continued traveling along a very thin corridor of trees (surrounded on both sides by fields), and there I was, with the North-West group. It turns out this group is pretty small—only 6 individuals total. But still, the mystery remains. Were Wrinkle Belly’s group and the North-West group together all day and then they suddenly separated at some moment? Or had this female left her own group to seek out her novio (actually, several novios) in the Wrinkle Belly group? There were two males in the North-West group, and they both seemed interested in her as well. I guess for this particular female, there was no shortage of novios today.

I’m not sure how useful the days’ data were, if I wasn’t even observing a female from the right group. But it was interesting nonetheless. Maybe Martin and I can write a paper together now. Tomorrow I’m planning on spending the day with the South Group, so we’ll see how that goes.