July 2009 Update
We've had a busy summer that is rapidly drawing to an end. Our travels complete, we're back in Chicago, working on the project full-time with an emphasis on all the exciting bits, like ordering supplies and designing protocols and traps. Fun, fun!
A quick note about the summer: Gideon and I have spent the last two months traveling through India, meeting the ever expanding Watsa family and getting a great dose of spicy food and culture. We deviated from the plan for two weeks and visited Indonesia, avoiding typical tourist haunts and opting instead to try to find the elusive orang-utan in Borneo and tarsier in Sulawesi. Through a steamy, tropical, 3-day boat ride through the Tanjung Puting National Park in southern Borneo, we were able to visit Camp Leakey, set up by Biruté Galdikas of Trimate fame. One of our favourite moments involved meeting Siswi, a 36-year old female orang-utan who leisurely (orangs do everything in this slow ponderous fashion we soon learned) wandered over to meet us right at the dock. We were also fortunate to meet Tom Cruise, 26 years old and in his prime, twice the size of Siswi and loving it. Both (I think) were captive-born, rehabituated animals who visit the camp often for some extra food. Feeding time brought many other females with infants down from their hiding places in the canopy to the bananas placed enticingly on the forest floor. Most were unafraid of humans, something I hope will not come to harm them in the future.
In Sulawesi we made our way to the very northeastern coast to spot the elusive tarsier in the Tangkoko National Park. Armed with a reference for Yunus, a field guide (who was terrific) working for Dr. Myron Shekelle, tarsier expert, we took buses and mikrolet to the park. As the sun went down, we geared up and headed out to find the tarsiers. These incredible animals, besides holding an intriguing spot somewhere in limbo between anthropoids and prosimians, are entirely nocturnal, make lovely high-pitched flute-like noises and can turn their heads around 360-degrees with owl-like intensity. We found them in a surprising way that evening - surrounded by tourists who had traveled from surrounding cities on day-trips just to see them. The guides and rangers in the forest charged exorbitant prices to show these tourists the animals but consistently took them to one particular sleeping tree with a family of very, very stressed out tarsiers. And no wonder - they had to suffer people slipping their cameras into the crevices in the tree to use their flash to take photographs of an animal that was clearly hiding from them. Yunus told us that these guys suffered a higher infant mortality rate than the other groups in the forest. We walked on and checked out a few more groups, keeping our cameras safely tucked away in our pockets. The next morning I staked out one tree and was able to witness the fascinating sight of a family returning to a sleeping tree right near my room. First came their pretty calls, and then suddenly they were there.. one barely saw them fly through the trees. Then they began to doze off, like little extraterrestrial creatures exhasuted from surveying a planet they so clearly don't belong to.
After Tangkoko we went to a couple of islands for the entirely hedonistic purpose of getting some quality beach time and were utterly swept away by the sheer variety of marine life visible at the vast coral reefs near every single beach. One barely had to wade out waist high to be surrounded by starfish and octopii, gently wriggling over ones toes, ducking and schools of fish churned up the water around them. We swam with spinner dolphins (almost 200 of them), saw giant tuna, turtles and some poisonous coral. It was terrific and we were very sorry to leave.
In the meanwhile, things have been heating up for the project. The last grant resubmission is in a few days and Mini is working on that full-time. Our supplies list has been thoroughly fleshed out and we're paying attention to the details now (like whether our field assistants need nitrile gloves in case of latex allergies:)). We managed to buy plenty of medical supplies in India, shaving a bunch off of our costs and now we're slowly ordering the really big items, like radio collars and microchips. Soon we'll begin to put together the traps (designed by Gideon and Bob Erkenswick) and over the next two months we hope that things will slowly come together.
Our permits, as usual, provide us with endless ours of frustration that one can only handle by laughing at the ludicrity of it all. We submitted our permit application in October 2008. In December, INRENA, the park service was subsumed by MINAG, the Ministry of Agriculture. All the rules changed, the staff changed, the location changed and as a result the whole lot were behaving worse than a chicken with it's head off. Chaos ensued and requests were sent back for letters of every possible kind, from every type of veterinarian, academic, and student imaginable. Upon submitting more than 17 different letters of support we were informed in June that they were abandoning the application because our forms were outdated and no one had "attended" to them in 30 days. So, we're re-applying, with some terrific and very patient people helping us in Peru, with new updated forms. That is, whenever the lawyers of MINAG are able to agree upon a good format for these forms. However, we're assured that processing times are down to 1 month and that we have nothing to worry about. Sometimes, I wonder....:)
Before we let you go, just a few quick things for you to look forward to in the coming weeks: an updated vaccine list for anyone planning to work with or visit us, more instructions on the best times to come and see us, pictures from the above travels, and hopefully, some final travel dates for everyone.
Thanks for listening!
Mini and Gideon
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