a cure for a foot fetish.

this is what 13 hours of following monkeys through swamps will do to your feet. the other foot model is mike lemmon, fellow capuchin researcher. for those of you who like feet, scroll and be cured of your sordid ways.

my feet.


mike's feet.


my turtle toe.


our feet.

cyute.

mostaza

+
nutella

=
VBFAAF!!!

"waking up at 5 isn't so bad..." wait, what?

so today, i caught myself saying, "waking up at 5 isn't so bad," excited that i didn't have to get up at 3:30 the next morning to wake up monkeys. i never thought those words would have ever come out of this mouth. i suppose it's all relative.

some highlights from the past couple of days are-- that i saw a juvenile tapir and that cayenne ate an adult magpie-jay. how about THAT for bloodsport2008.

cayenne (alpha male pretty boy)


cayenne eating the jay and refusing mostaza and nutella's advances


picture of the jay corpse after cayenne picked its bones.


plus nutella (who i now refer to as nutjob) keeps eating soil. he also won't let me focal follow him. i now can id all adult males and females within seconds of looking at them. i mean i guess you get to know your monkeys pretty fast when you spend 13 hours a day with them.

tick? or scab?

lately i have been playing the game called tick or scab? it usually ends up being a tick though, so its amusement has faded a little bit. **edit.. so mike, another capuchin field assistant from another team, found a tick UNDERNEATH a scab. apparently the tick was on there so long that it scabbed over. things just got interesting again.

i have been assigned my troop-- los valles, the food group. their name is intuitive because their range is a massive area overridden with hills. lately, lv and i have been playing a tiring game of hide and seek. jeffrey (a fellow field assistant) told me that i should have shouted ollyollyoxenfree on day two. i'm too stubborn to let the monkeys haze me like that. but today, on this epic day, amanda found the monkeys on the main road. when i heard the news i put my field clothes on in an exuberant rush to meet them. nutella was so awesome today-- even though it was pouring down rain he came down to the ground to say hello and eat some soil. which is a very rare behavior! also.. i am pretty sure that blanquita is pregnant..


so start thinking of food names (preferably spices, condiments, or sauces says the pretentious doctorate person who habituated the group) for the infant. my favorites so far are beef cake, garbanzo, noodle, aunt jemima, and heinz.

here are two monkeys from los valles that i have taken a liking to-- nutella and weirdo. nutella has a snaggle tooth that makes him look like a half vampire.


and weirdo has this funny spaced-out face on all the time. he kind of reminds me of that slightly dumb jock basketball player.


mostaza (i like to call him mustard or frankenmonkey)is a model, apparently.


here are some FUNgus pictures that i took when i was finding and not finding monkeys.








some gooey pod insect covering thing.


some stinkbug egg stuff.

perdon, su serrucho esta en mi estomago.

yesterday, upon returning from coco beach, where i completed an open water scuba course (a green sea turtle came to check us out,) i was taking a snooze on a bus heading towards liberia. i woke up after drooling a little on my shirt and noticed a tico getting on the bus with an enormous hand saw (which had a safety cover on only PART of it). immediately visions of dying by way of saw to the stomach came to mind, slicing and eviscerating my internal organs. then, nightmare became reality when the bus hit a giant pothole when said tico was seconds away from my seat, after which he started doing the whole WHUuP-whuup-woooahhh-trip thing bobbling the saw around inches away from my flesh. it reminded me of some kind of twisted, gory cartoon like celebrity death match or something. what a way to die huh? huh.