Update on our Trio

Zena here again - I thought you would like to hear about how our trio is fairing in the forest. Well, they are becoming gradually accustomed to their environment - foraging well, and July is making loud calls as the leading male should, and often acting as a sentry-- the two females sticking for the most part very close together. They have suffered no mishaps when moving around the forest--- apart from the smaller and younger Bebi who has fallen twice in the first week - once free falling 20 metres to the ground! She jumped from a large tree to a liana and missed, and landed in soft mud on the ground seemingly none the worse for her fall. Perhaps lucky...

We have just received the following update from Sylvaine, who made a quick trip to Calabar recently and who has been following the released group since the 1st of November 2007 - and we are happy to hear that Bebi has not fallen since. Read on to find out how they are all doing!

From Sylvaine...
" We have always succeeded to find them early every morning on the same location where they have been left the last evening. The radio collar systems are still well functioning. The monas stay together as a bonded group, and there is no trend to a group split or individual emigration.
The day of the release, led by the male July, the group reached a place in the forest which they started to explore first. This place is a mixture between swamp liana forest (note - causing many hours with soaking feet for the observers!) and elevated forest on drier ground with some emergent trees up to 50m tall. The grid system previously marked out allows us to report the location of the group easily. So far, the relative estimated size of their home-range is between 1.5 and 2 ha, but it has taken them 3 weeks to range this far. They have progressively extended their home range, exploring mainly on a west-east line of about 100m and then extending to a north-south direction of 200m to the west and 100m to the east. In the past week, we have observed that the group has visited 4 extreme points of their home-range in a single day, starting from their usual sleeping site (a fruiting tree named 'Kubn' in one of the local languages, Agoi, which has currently many ripe fruits), stopping at 3 different places on tall fruiting trees ('Kubn' and 'Tese-esang' trees) and returning quickly in the late evening to where they began their morning. It was the first time they seemed to have visited all the known locations with rich source of food in their current home-range in a single day... ..They travel all the usual ways to move from one point to another, using lianas in the low canopy, where fruits are not as readily found, but many insects, larvae, cocoons and others arthropods, and moving more rapidly in the upper layer in the late evening, where there are large crowned very tall trees, before finally reaching an high place to spend the night. It is a very exciting and remarkable time and we look forward each day to what it will bring next - if not to the 500 am wake up!"

Stay tuned for second installment to come from Sylvaine