This is what a good day looks like!

I realized that many of you don't know what our day-to-day life is like here in Azrou. Here's what a good day is like for the team from yesterday:

• Wake up by 5am, stretch and ready to go
• Breakfast: hot, strong coffee and peanut-butter and jelly
• Get out of the house by 6:15am
• Drive up through the park - all the while hoping to avoid road closures if its snowing
• Park as near as we can to where the monkeys were settling down the night before
• On good days, we find the groups still sleeping where we left them
• On bad days...it can take hours to track them down!

• EXPERIMENT TIME! We've been running a novel object experiment to see how different monkeys react to a new stimulus in their environment, and whether social standing, age, or sex impact how strong their responses are. Our novel object: a Spiderman-themed child's punching bag
• Despite our hopes, none of the monkeys seemed to care for our Spiderman punching bag; they continued with their regular morning schedule without much more than a curious glance. Oh well!
• After a quick attempt at the experiment, we're off to the Blue Group - fortunately, we get there in what I like to call the "magic hour"
• If you didn't know already, something special happens to the monkeys' digestive systems from 10-11 in the morning - they poop. When it's your job to collect one faecal sample from each monkey each day, 10-11am is the hour to shine!
• Speaking of poop, in the past 2 days I have:
• Scooped green goop off of the side of a tree 
• Followed a monkey for 5 hours to find out that it only had a dirty bottom
• Determined which monkey was most likely to have deposited a poop sample  based on the temperature of the sample in the tube (that's right - temperature)

As you can tell, I've had poop on the brain for some time now...MOVING ON!

• Behavioural focal follows
• These days, now that I'm more well-trained by Patrick and Liz, I'm able to do 6 to 12-half hour behavioural follows per day
• Today was a relatively calm day, as I only needed to follow 6 monkeys today starting at noon
• The monkeys were lovely; the bloody tourists were not!
• I love that the park can bring in tourists to come and visit the monkeys - I just wish that they weren't so disruptive. Massive tour busses will pull up along the side of (narrow) road at the first glimpse of a monkey, opening its doors to allow bustling loud tourists to pour out into the forest armed with biscuits, cameras, and shouting. Much like a group of toddlers overstimulated by toys and fuelled by sugar, tourists inevitably make tracking the monkeys' behaviours rather more difficult.  

• Even when there aren't tourists bustling through the forest, the monkeys are never boring. Here are some of my favourite observations from the past few days:
• Saw a lady named Rebecca self-suckle - this is seen rarely and the reason for this type of behaviour isn't clear
• It isn't the season for mating right now, so you can imagine how many times we've seen the male monkeys masturbating. More often than not, this is followed by consumption of the resultant ejaculate. Waste not, want not!
• Noddy (one of my favourite monkeys - a darling old man who appears senile and adorable), shook himself so hard during a scratch that he knocked himself over
• Nico, Sarah's daughter and a pampered member of the group (and by pampered I mean well-fed - she's bordering on obese due to the attention and feeding she receives from the tourists) faced some social hardship. This morning, she was tormented by a cheeky subadult female, Joplin. It went something like this - Nico was terribly upset at Joplin, baring her teeth and grunting, but every time she lunged out to Joplin aggressively Joplin would gracefully clamber up into narrow tree branches. Needless to say this left Nico sitting angrily like a ruffled sausage, restricted to the large basal branches.
• For some reason, young male monkeys frequently stick their faces into the older males' crotches. Any explanations for this would be welcome, but at this point the sheer number of face-to-crotch interactions between young and mature males is slightly alarming!
• Don't let these fun experiences fool you, though - most of the day is spent running, picking up poop, and generally lamenting the exasperation of chasing monkeys around the woods. 
• So. Much. Poop. So. Much. Running. So. Many. Crazy. Monkeys. 

• I also found some interesting dead things today!
• 1. A complete dog skull on the side of the hill! I won't be able to take it back to Canada with me, but for for now I've smuggled it back to the flat wrapped up in one of the many, many plastic bags that float around the tourist sites (seriously, the amount of litter here is horrifying, even in the more remote areas frequented by the Green group)
• Auto-mummified bug! Speaking of litter, there are hundreds of alcohol bottles. Inside of one I found a dung beetle, perfectly preserved in the alcohol! Naturally, it came home with me along with the skull.

Sorry for the brevity of this update, but our days are getting longer and the work is getting more tiring. I'd expect these posts to become fewer and further between until I get home to Canada.

On the plus side, now you all have evidence that I'm alive! Three cheers for cellular respiration!