My Frist Days

I had pre-written a whole thing on my travels to Kenya and my first 2 nights here, but forgot my flash drive at home, therefore I will have to catch everyone up on those adventures later, as I have a lot of other things to tell you all about today. I'm going to give you all a little background on what I'm doing so that future posts will make sense.

My first task for the project is to learn all the individuals by distinct features, such as face, ears, brows, tails, nipples, etc... There are 2 separate groups of monkeys I have to learn, and I am the first volunteer on this project that have to learn both groups. Usually each volunteer only learns one group, but since I will be here for several weeks by myself I have to learn both so that I can teach Kate, the other monkey volunteer coming in May, one of the groups. The 2 groups are K-Group which is comprised of about 50 individuals. The second group is S-Group which has approximately 20-25 individuals. I am learning the adult females first and then will learn the juveniles and infants. After I have learned to recognize each monkey then I will begin learning the data collection methods, though I have already started on this a little. Apparently I am learning the monkeys much faster than anyone thought or has before, which is very good for me, since the 2 volunteers here with me now will be leaving in mid-April. The other 2 volunteers are Crista who works with K-Group and Kelly who works with S-Group.

Now let me begin some of my stories. My first story is a rather disturbing one. I must begin by saying that my first few days in the field were going very well. I was spending half the day with one group and half with the other just trying to learn distinguishing characteristics of each monkey. Nothing too exciting happened my first several days here, other than meeting a lot of new people, taking care of errands, learning the monkeys and Swahili and of course swimming in the ocean after work! On Thursday things began to get more interesting. Thursday morning I spent with Crista and K-Group. Now let me preface with this, K-Group spends a good portion of their day out in the open, and only some of their day in the forest, but rarely deep in the forest. And when they are in the forest it is in the middle of it, not on the edges which border farms with crops like corn. S-Group on the other hand spends 95% of their day deep in the forest and the majority of their territory borders these local farms, where S-Group raids the crops of these farms frequently.

There is one other piece of information I must share before I begin the disturbing story. On my first night here Kelly was telling me how she used to follow S-Group into the farms when they went there, but doesn't anymore. I asked her why she no longer does. Her reply was because she found a scary note in the fields last time she went back there. The note was written in English, not Swahili, so it was purposely intended for her to read. The note said: "Private Property, Trespass again and one day XXXXXXXX." Kelly has found several of her monkeys in traps that have been set by the farmers for the monkeys to kill them so that they don't keep losing their crops. Kelly has freed the monkeys every time she has seen this. Freeing the monkeys is probably not something that she or any of us should be doing, but it is a major moral dilemma for us. It is very hard to walk away knowing that you could have saved the monkey but didn't. At the same time though you are interfering with these people's livelihoods by freeing them. Then again hunting/killing of any species is illegal in Kenya, so technically the farmers legally cannot set these traps.

Now for my story. So Thursday morning I was with K-Group and around 11:30am Crista gets a text message from Kelly saying: "Dead monkey in the forest, very bizarre, meet me at the office." Crista and I go running out of the forest to meet Kelly who was very shaken up. She tells us the monkey is not one of her's, it's one from another group that also lives in the forest we work in. We study 2 of 6 groups that live in the forest. Kelly proceeds to explain that the monkey is hanging in a tree upside down dead. She informs us she has never seen anything like this, and she thinks it may be tied up in the tree, which would mean a human came into the forest just to kill the monkey, which is very illegal and means they were the one's trespassing this time. Kelly wanted us to go back and look at the monkey with her. Crista and I did not want to go, but we did to provide support for her, and because we were slightly curious. When we arrive at the scene it was the oddest thing I have every seen. Animals do not die in the position we found the monkey in, and what I am about to describe cannot possibly do justice to how it actually looked.

Basically the monkey was dead in a handstand pose. It's right hand was fully gripped around a branch (which was the oddest part of all this), one leg was sticking straight up into the air, the other was sticking straight out to the side and the tail was not limp and hanging, but was also sticking straight up. It looked as if the monkey died and rigormortis took place immediately, which is not possible as far as I know. So we tried forever to figure out what happened, how she died, ect... We did not see any twine or rope holding the monkey up there, but it seemed too hard for the body to just be balancing on the branches. She had a large gash on the back of her right calf, a slash on her neck and a small wound on her tail. We determined she probably died from the gash on her leg that had cut a major ligament, causing death. We all went home that day trying to block the whole scene out and still utterly confused as to what happened.

On Friday (yesterday) I spent the entire day with S-Group and Kelly. Her group traveled past this dead monkey again, and it was still hanging in the tree upside down, however rigormortis seemed to have passed as all limbs were now limp, except for one leg that was still sticking straight up in the air. We decided that we had to bring the monkey to the ground in an effort to determine how the monkey was hanging there in the tree. If it was humans that tied her up it was clearly a message to us and we were not going to stay back there or go in this section of the forest again. Kelly found a large branch and cut it to use to shake the monkey out of the tree. She prodes and prodes and the monkeys sways but does not fall, so she keeps prodding, finally the monkey falls to to the ground with a loud thud of dead weight and on the way down huge chunks of skin and hair fall off everywhere. Decomposition had really taken force over the night and the face and body were badly mutilated by flies and other insects that had begun eating the flesh. The smell was putrid hanging heavy in the forest from the extreme heat of the day. From this we discovered that she had been hanging there by a branch was stuck straight through her calf, holding her firmly in place. Now it is possible that she fell and accidentally landed on this branch and was too weak from the wounds she had to free herself. However, monkeys fall through the trees all the time and never get stuck on branches like this. And the branch her leg was stuck on was sticking out to the side, not straight up, so for her leg to pierce the branch would be impossible from the angle she would have fallen at.

As I looked at the wound on the back of her leg I also began thinking that only a ponga (a machete type tool here) could have made this gash, not teeth from another monkey. We originally had thought she got in a bad fight with a monkey or was bitten by a snake and fell because she was so weak, grabbed the branch she was clutching and couldn't free herself because she was too weak and just died there. The gash on her leg was just to large and long to be made from a tooth, and if it was from a canine that dragged along her leg as she tried to run, there should have been a mark from the other canine as well somewhere, which there wasn't.

Honestly we don't know what happened, but more and more things are pointing to human intervention. Regardless, it was one of the creepiest things I've ever seen and now I'm completely terrified every time I go back into that part of the forest because we aren't sure how the monkey died, if this was a message to us, to the other monkeys or was just an accident. We'll have to see if more develops over the next week...