Wageningen Day 30-36 Allison

So, we have been here over a month now, and I am a little sad to see it go by so fast. We just finished our observations of the apes today. We have really been having up and down weather, but luckily it has been fairly nice the last two days.

Our infant survived, and is back under the close watch of the zookeepers. We were very pleased with what we were seeing, up until today. The mother had been keeping the baby with her most of the time, which allowed the baby to get enough to eat and be able to sleep some. However, today a higher ranking female in the troop decided that she wanted the baby, and kept her for nearly the whole day. When we were finishing up, we were relieved to see the mom with the baby until the same female tried to take her back again. We are now worried that this may become a problem because the mother feels that she cannot take the baby back because she is lower in rank.

It was amazing to be able to watch the baby grow up for even just a short time because she developed so much. She has started trying to imitate the adults in eating and communicating, and she has been roaming around and exploring more on her own. We even saw her ride on a male's back today. They are so much like humans sometimes, and it we really got to know each personality. We have even been concerned lately with the health of a couple animals because they both had unusual injuries. I think that we have almost been a help to the keepers, notifying them when there is a problem. It seems that this zoo has a very "let them be" attitude though, and a lot of the care is just monitoring. I thought it odd that they did not know the pregnancy status of this particularly fat monkey, but they just explained to me that it would be stressful to the animals to be handled.

I think we could recognize the animals as well as the zookeepers can. I will miss them now that we have gotten to know them, and I will be curious about the fate of the infant for a long time.

We begin analyzing our data starting tomorrow and then we will go back into the labs again after the class is over. I enjoyed that we are able to see so many different things while we are here, and I think it will allow for a good perspective at the end in 199.

Other than that, we have been having fun chatting with our classmates, posing for our professors camera (they make a DVD at the end for the whole class), and relaxing with our neighbors. This is a quiet little town, but I feel like we have been having a good time with it.