I am now in Costa Rica for the renewal of my visa; it is valid for only 3 months.  I have taken this opportunity to visit a friend of mine from middle school in Wheaton IL, Caitlin O’Connell.  Having not seen each other for 10 years, we reconnected on facebook, and now are hanging out at this very moment in Costa Rica.  It is funny how things work out but it has been a delightful time so far, following monkey and catching up on the last 10 years of our lives.  Caitlin is researching capuchin monkeys through a UCLA research project in Bagaces, in south western Costa Rica.  Yesterday I went into the field with her to follow a group of monkeys that they have been observing for 17 years.  we headed out at 4:30 in the morning and didn’t get home to 7 at night!  they observe them from dawn to dusk every day.  It was pretty amazing, the monkeys have been habituated, which means they they are not afraid of us humans that follow them around.  they went from tree to tree, playing, coming down to the creek for water, eating fruit, napping at midday, and doing things the primates like to do.  the morning was slow and relaxing, but in the afternoon, a storm hit and started pouring down rain.  then the monkey became more active going from treetop to treetop rather quickly and it was tough to follow them at points.  but alas, come dusk, they settled down in a tree, and we headed home in the dark.  The researchers have a whole language or code to document their behavior, and they take extensive and precise data.  the drawback is that monkeys is such a huge part of their life, its hard to get them to talk about anything else.  But I was able to get a few reminiscent stories out of Caitlin from a time when we were in a very primat-ive stage of life– middle school.  Its nice to know that i wasn’t such a dork after all.

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