The aspiring -ologist: And the fieldwork begins!

We started our field work on Monday at 5am, which means we had to leave our house at 4:15am. I woke up at 3:45 to make sure I had ample time to get ready. It was the earliest I've ever had to get up for work in my life! When you go to bed early enough, it's not too difficult.

The drive is a bumpy one but we drive through the Asante Sana game reserve (where we live), the Mount Camdeboo reserve, and then to the Samara Game reserve where we work. This place is gorgeous. Each of these game reserves compose a large, flat area of semi-desert surrounded by small mountains. It kind of reminds me of being in somewhat of a bowl or a fortress. There's one way out by road, and that's to the south where there is a break in the mountainous border.

Our daily commute is nothing to complain about. We drive just before dawn, which means the air is cool, and we pass many types of animals along the way. The rhinos consistently hang out in the same area, so we see them every day. Often we'll see a bunch of different types of ungulates and ostriches and things. It's worth getting up early for.

Once we pull into the work site, we grab our bags, radios, hats and sunscreen and head out to find our monkey groups! There are 3 troops that we are mainly concerned about, namely, 1) Troop, 2) Picnic, and 3) Mob. For Monday and Tuesday, Jon and I followed Derek around while he collected *scan data. In between scans, Derek would help us learn the ID's. Basically, this means memorizing unique characteristics for each individual and their corresponding names.

Troop is the largest group, which means we need to be able to distinguish between 36 individuals. Luckily it's mostly just adults that we need to identify and not including subadults, otherwise it would be a very daunting task! After looking at their faces for 12 hours, you learn to look for physical giveaways such as the patterns of the pink below their chins, the brightness of the whites around their eyes, the shape of their hair/eyebrows, the kinks in their tails, the nicks in their ears, etc. Between Jon and I, we can probably identify ~15 consistently.

Tomorrow, I take a break from Troop and start learning the ID's for Mob, while Jon moves onto Picnic. Lucky for me, Mob is the smallest group with about 15 individuals. Jon and I flipped a coin, and I won the smaller group, however, Rich said I'll end up having to learn all of the groups anyways.

So what's the point of all this? Eventually, Jon and I will be taking over for Rich and Derek and collecting the scan data ourselves. This data collection process is part of a long-term thermoregulation project conducted by Peter and Louise at the University of Lethbridge who are corresponding with a South African uni.

There will be more details about fieldwork in further posts, but I think that's enough for now! I don't want to talk your ears off, so we'll just leave it at that.

*Our scans consist of recording the behaviour of 5+ individuals in a given moment at 30-minute intervals. We also want to collect the corresponding ambient temperature, how high off the ground they are, what type of vegetation they are sitting on, and the proximity of other individuals. Each time we record a behaviour, we need to identify which individual it is. This means we have to also be able to recognize who's who within the group.