Field School Arrives

The University of Calgary Primatology Field School 2010 has arrived at BFMS. Personally, I am very excited about spending the next month with these people. There’s something so totally awesome about sharing in the experience of brand new ‘Africa Virgins’ to Ghana. As a Program Assistant and fairly experienced Ghana traveler, I can act as a guiding light, a security net, a safety blanket… I get to reassure them that the scorpions in the grass will not harm them unless they get too close, that the geckos in the students’ rooms are good as they actually act as predators for their other major concern, the bugs, and that although it’s sort of gross that the monkey situated right above their head urinated on their arm, they will likely not get any strange zoonautic disease from it. More importantly though, my role as Program Assistant is to help teach them about the forest and about behavioral data collection (scan sampling, focal animal sampling, etc.). For many of these people, I get to be there for their first monkey watching experience in the wild! Through them I practically get to re-live my own awe inspiring moment when I first watched nonhuman primates roaming freely in their natural habitat. So great!