The Tamarin Chase
There’s something about a chase that grips me every time. It hardly matters how tired I am, or frustrated at spending a whole day unsuccessfully trying to bait the tamarins, for when I see them and can keep on their tail, everything is better. My GPS is chugging along, recording a point every 30 seconds. Every ten minutes we take a scan sample. We mark all the trees they rest in or feed in. we tag the feeding trees so someone can help us identify them later. We try to photograph each individual in a group and take recordings of their behaviours. Sometimes we see exciting things like mating, which means there will be babies soon. Other times they curl up in a tree and fall asleep in the middle of the day for hours and we settle down on ponchos and try to stay quiet and awake.
Of course, this is when we find them.
There are the days on which we walk for miles and…. Nothing.
After a few long and unsuccessful episodes such as these, we decided that we needed to change our strategy. We spent an afternoon at camp, making a whole series of minor trapping platforms, just a couple of sheets of wire mesh, tied between four trees, about eye level. We set up these traps all over the home ranges of two groups, and put some of our official 6-compartment traps out too. Then, we baited them, every single morning at 5am.
Now, instead of waiting each day in front of a baited trap, we could continue to find more groups and just check the traps at the end of the day.
Perhaps we’d get lucky…
After much poring over maps we delineated five circuits that we hoped to walk, both forwards and backwards, in the morning and afternoon each day. Within a week, we’d have completed all the circuits, with a couple mornings off for breaks or maybe just data entry.
The key thing, however, was to find the groups, not complete the circuits.
And so we began. Circuit one took us right along the Madre de Dios River, up by the airstrip and then across it, looping back towards camp. We met a bunch of raucous spider monkeys along the way that literally flew through the canopy and off the side of the embankment down towards the swamps near the river. They are the largest primates around and therefore, are the first to go if hunting is common in an area. About eight years ago, when CICRA was a mining camp, a lot of the larger primate populations were under severe hunting pressure and some have never recovered. Their small size serving as a real advantage, the tamarins remained untouched it seems like and we have a burgeoning population in and around the camp.
Circuit two was far more fruitful. No sooner had we embarked on the first trail with Sarah, who wanted to see what monkey follows are like, than we bumped right into a group of 6 saddlebacks, chirruping and bouncing through the trees. We tracked them for about four hours, and after they heard the low rumbling thunder that accompanies most afternoons at the field station, they huddled up in a tree and blended in so well that we could hardly see them. We decided to call it a day and get back to camp before the rain. We just about made it back to camp.
The following day, we set out to conquer circuit three. This one we were fairly sure of, having traversed most of it repeatedly to trap the group whose home range it encompassed. Only this time, we’d venture a little further along the trail as usual before looping around.
The forest around CICRA varies widely along the trails. Some areas are beautifully clear of scrub and are great to follow primates in. Others however, specially those areas with bamboo, are pretty much impossible to get through. And then there’s everything in between, fallen trees that need to be circumvented or climbed and deep ravines that have you sliding down to the stream running through them and then heaving and hauling yourself up the opposite side.
Circuit three began with beautifully clear forest. We walked slowly and carefully, ears open to the high-pitched long-calls that the tamarins utter when the group is moving through the canopy. However, we heard nothing and soon had walked from the Madre de Dios river next to camp to the Los Amigos river that runs east of it. We stopped for a moment to take in the spectacular view of undisturbed forest and then reluctantly moved on. At this point the forest began to get a little bit more closed in. Things went very quiet, except for the occasional tree that had so many little birds in it that it felt like being in a very crowded aviary. Soon we heard the familiar creaking of bamboo and cursed silently under our breaths.
Bamboo not only obstructs one’s view of anything a few feet beyond one, but it also creates a major obstacle to movement off trail – it has thorns, it grows long and tall and falls over with ease, it is so thick that almost anything could be watching you without your notice and finally, it’s hard to tell what a bamboo patch will do if you use a machete on one branch anywhere in it. Everything could just come crashing down on you.
Therefore, we began to use our ears more to try to hear the tamarins and relied a lot less on our eyes, since our view of the jungle surrounding us was very limited. We turned a corner only to find an utterly blocked trail. It appeared that no one had taken this one in ages, and the jungle had slowly taken back the land that once belonged to it. Huge bamboo trunks had collapsed onto the trail that was barely visible under them.
I dropped to my knees and evaluated the situation. “We could climb through,” I diagnosed, “It’ll be bloody uncomfortable and full of thorns but I think the trail continues beyond this point.”
“We can’t crawl through that with our packs!” Gideon declared, unsheathing the machete from its safety cover and wielding it like the feller of trees he is named after.
Soon we were trying to break a way around the bamboo patch, with Gideon about 20ft ahead of me in case his machete slipped out of his hand and came flying my way. Our feet sunk into the ground, often in tiny spaces between the interlocking bamboo poles. We crunched our way through the bamboo, Gideon hacking away in front and me hoping he didn’t hack some integral piece of the infrastructure of the bamboo patch so the whole thing remains where it is instead of crashing down, which would be uncomfortable to say the least.
After about ten minutes of concentrated work, we had, in our opinion, come around the worst of it but for some reason, we just couldn’t see the path.
“This is ridiculous G, I don’t even know where we are any more. The path should be right here!” I said, deciding to retrace my steps to see if I could even tell how far we had hacked our way through the bamboo. I clambered out, a little scratched but glad to be back on the trail. Dropping to my stomach I poked my head under the bamboo, spying what appeared to be a cleared trail about 15 metres away. Crawling slowly and carefully under the bamboo, I began to try to break away a few branches to clear a path for my backpack and myself. Once I was fully wedged in there though, I started to here sounds of Gideon hacking away disturbingly close to where I was. Struggling a little I tried to speed up the crawl, at one point painfully getting held back by a bamboo thorn through my ear.
I finally reached a point at which I could stand up, although I still had a few more bamboo branches to vault. The sounds of Gideon thrashing around were closer and suddenly, they got doubly frantic. He started to yell and curse and I yelled back and for a while, nothing made much sense.
Soon I heard him yelp, “There are bees all over me! I’m coming back out.. are you through to the other side?”
“Yes!!”, I yelled back, stumbling over the last few branches and ripping my trousers in some highly delicate areas. Once on the other side, however, I really was able to hear Gideon to my right much more clearly.
“They’re in my hair!”, he screeched.
And then, “Oh fuck! I’ve dropped my glasses!”
After his last two bee stings, Gid’s had a slightly more allergic reaction each time and so I was frantic with worry. I shouted encouragement, urging him to forget the damned glasses and just get out of there. The bamboo on my right parted a little and I could see the swarm of bees about five feet from me, unaware of my existence but certainly stirred up.
“I must have stepped on a nest or something, I’m coming out!”, yelled Gid, thrashing away like a mad thing trying to get the bees out of his face and hair. “One’s in my ear…aaaah!” was his next frantic yell.
I was almost beside myself with worry and about to dive into the bamboo, bees or no bees, when I spied his head coming through the bamboo on the trail. Rushing to give him a hand, we managed to get his machete resheathed (which are dangerous things in panicky situations). We sprinted about 25 metres down the trail only to find it blocked again. Mercifully there didn’t seem to be a swarm of bees following us at all.
We dropped our things, which had by now become entangled with all sorts of plants along the way. Cameras and binoculars lay scattered on the ground. My data sheets on a clipboard lay at our feet, as Gid hurriedly began dusting bees off of himself. I fished out a pair of gloves we carry with us for exactly such insect-invasions of our property and selves and began to pluck the little orange bees off of him.
Now, I’m no expert but after seeing him relatively alright and yet covered in bees, it slowly dawned on me that we mightn’t be dealing with bees after all.
“Are you stung?”, I cried, ready to reach for the epi-pen should he even so much as look slightly inflamed.
“No!”, replied Gid, “What the hell kind of bees are these anyway?”
“Alright,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief, “Let’s get the hell out of here!”
Quickly we gathered up our things, and were about to start down the trail when Gid declared that his glasses were missing! We searched everywhere, and then had to admit that after he’d found them in the bamboo he must have dropped them while crawling under the bamboo on the trail.
“Shit!” he cursed, “I have to go back!”
“No!” said I, trying to be brave for I loathe swarms, “I’ll go, you might be allergic!”
“They’re not stinging Min, in case you haven’t noticed” he declared and dove head first into the bamboo again.
That’s when I found the first live bee/wasp/stingless flying object in my hair. Shuddering I grasped it firmly and yanked it out. It lay there on my palm for a moment and then zipped off, completely unharmed by the experience.
“What the hell…?” I muttered, carefully feeling around in my hair. Before I knew it I was pulling two, three, four more out. On my left now, the swarm was still buzzing merrily on the other side of the bamboo but I soon realised that every so often, one would leave the swarm and come through the bamboo and dive right into my hair like it were a swimming pool in the Sahara. I still don’t know what on earth they were doing in my hair, but frankly, I don’t think I much cared! They were everywhere and even thirty minutes later I was finding them in my hair. Once removed forcefully they just buzzed around me merrily and possibly, reinserted themselves right back in my hair.
We finally made it out there and I’m afraid, Circuit Three wasn’t well covered afterward. We had to struggle through several more bamboo-covered bits of the trail and were thoroughly cut up by the end. Both of my ears got hooked onto bamboo, which leads me to believe that they must stick out much more than I am aware.
Back at camp we made sure to report the section of the trail with the bamboo on it. Hopefully they will clear it out soon but I’m not about to be the first one to test it out, I can tell you.
The finale was, of course, Roxana the entomologist’s reaction. “Aah,” she said, “I have heard of this wasp that has a nest on the ground. My friend said that it also likes to take bites out of people’s hair but it doesn’t sting. I don’t know why it likes hair though…it’s pretty cool that you saw them!”
I can’t say I’m that thrilled. It’s been a week since it happened and it just isn’t funnier in retrospect.
We took the afternoon off to recuperate and planned to spend the evening regaling all who would listen with tales of the dreaded stingless wasps with hair fetishes.
However, it was not to be, for a far more captivating topic would overwhelm our conversations for not just that night, but many days to come.
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