Patience

My great-great-great grandmother’s name was Patience. I’ve always thought Patience is the most interesting name. My mother claims to have inherited no patience from Patience (but in fact, my mother is a very patient person). Sometimes I wonder if instead it is me who did not inherit patience.

This is unfortunate because studying howler monkeys requires considerable patience. Howlers are very slow and deliberate about everything they do: to move 50 meters it may take them 45 minutes. When they arrive at their destination, they are likely to sleep for 3 hours, and when they decide to eat (what I actually need to study), they may move into dense foliage where visibility is impossible. Before I left to do my pilot study some 2-1/2 years ago, Pablo told me not to get frustrated in the forest. “The monkeys are just doing what the monkeys are supposed to be doing, Melissa,” he told me, and I repeat this to myself several times each day.

But still, I do get frustrated with the monkeys when they have been sleeping for hours and I have so little data on their feeding behavior. Today I was losing patience because the month is now half over and I have no toughness data on the plants consumed by the North group. As I mentioned in an earlier post, getting plant samples from high in the trees is more difficult than I had anticipated.

Well, my ship came in today, I think. This afternoon they were feeding on Laucaena laucaena (a close relative of the Guanacaste tree). In addition to the leaves, they also were eating the broad green pods that have begun to appear on Laucaena trees. I really wanted to get my hands on some of those pods so that I could come home and use the toughness tester on them. As the monkeys ate, I scanned the forest floor for scraps of anything that they dropped, but I didn’t have much luck. Then I heard a snap from where Sophie and Spud were feeding; a whole cluster of pods broke off the branch and fell to the ground. Jackpot. I snatched up the pods and will use the TT on them tomorrow.

No sighting of Wrinkle Belly today, but I saw him yesterday, so he’s still around somewhere. I guess I just have to be patient; he’ll turn up again eventually.

I finally took my camera out to the forest again today and got a few photos of the monkeys. The first two are of juveniles with their mothers:



This photo shows Spud (approximately 2 weeks old) peeking over his mother's (Sophie) shoulder. Notice how blonde Spud is compared to the adults!


Thanks for reading!