Summertime

29 July

Today was very hot again, 90s, high humidity.  It’s not so bad in the shade when the wind is blowing! The monkeys seemed to be feeling the heat as well – they spent most of the day at the beach.  This made for easy data collection, but bad data.  Ideally, I focal follow monkeys when they are moving around, so I can record patterns of activity.  If they don’t move, that doesn’t give me much to analyze later! 

Which of these monkeys would you rather be?

This is a good look-out point to scan rocks on the other side of the island, occupied here by Kaba the alpha male.

A postdoc who works at Koshima has been coming to the island the last few days so it’s been nice to have a bit of company during the day!  Also, since it is now summer season there have been a lot of tourists coming to the island – small family groups who come and take pictures and leave.  Funny to see how it went to so much traffic from absolutely no access. 

This evening when I was standing knee deep in the water at the beach, holding up my pocket wifi trying to get a signal (I’m sure I look like someone on one of those phone commercials), I saw some people paddleboarding to the island.  The irony, that people can now easily paddleboard to Koshima…

They made their way to the beach – a man and his two daughters – one who was sitting on his paddleboard and one who was floating on a small surfboard tied to the paddleboard.  I think we were both surprised to see each other.  They spoke some English and asked if I was waiting for a boat.  I explained, to their fascination that I was not, that I was camping on the island.  I told them I was there for the summer to study monkeys.  They were from Toi, a nearby town that has a population of wild horses.  They had only been to the beach before, not further up the island.  One of the daughters pointed up towards the outhouse and asked what it was.  I told them it was a toilet and they were quite interested.  They asked if they could go look so I gave them a tour of my luxurious accommodations.  They said I was a “strong woman.”  He took a few pictures of his daughters with me, and suggested that maybe sometime before I leave they come back and bring chicken.  I hope this happens, because that sounds fantastic. 

Paddleboard

Though I could complain about many things regarding the typhoon delays (like, you know, it severely compromising my research project timeline), the one thing that is most saliently unfortunate at the moment is having to get into Koshima shape twice.  By the end of the first week I was exhausted, but I felt like I was getting into pretty good shape and handling the forest terrain quite well.  I tried to go for a beach jog every day to keep it up, but it’s still a heck of a lot harder than if I had only taken a couple days off as planned, not a couple weeks.  The type of workout necessary to stay in Koshima shape is not one that one does for leisure. 

Also, I had to relearn that 99.9% of the time I hear something in the forest or in the dark, it’s a crab.