Theodore Roosevelt Reincarnated

Weeks after two of my study infants (Obama and Remus) were killed by infanticidal males, I was still feeling pretty low. Honestly, I had not expected that I would be this affected by the death of two monkeys (they are only animals after all... but then again, so are we), and I was having a hard time trying to cope with all that I had seen. For a few weeks I had unpleasant dreams about what happened. Even during the day, while running or while following monkeys in the forest, my mind often wandered to flash-back images from those few days; me cutting into Obama’s tiny body with a razor when I collected the tissue sample, watching the infants struggle to hang on to their mothers while travelling, watching them fall from trees, etc. I am actually quite baffled by the extent of my reaction to all of this... Even as I write this blog and I bring back some of those memories (almost a month after the infanticide) my tear ducts are still struggling to remain tearless. How pathetic eh? To use one of Katie’s favourite sayings, “I need to get my shit together”! Lol
In addition to the emotional repercussions, the infanticidal deaths also negatively affected my study. For the purposes of my Masters project, the infanticide had seriously hurt my infant sample size. Without Obama and Remus, I was left with just two smaller grey infants in group Odum (Kante and Nietzsche) and three older black-and-white infants in Wawa (Chomsky, Marx and Imanishi). By late July, no new infants had been born and I was beginning to panic a little bit. However, it seems that the local deity, god Dowarro of Boabeng and Fiema had answered our prayers because on July 30th we found a brand-spankin’ new infant in group Odum. He must have just been born the night before because he was rather pinkish in colour than white, and his eyes hadn’t even opened yet! Katie was the first to spot the little guy. I immediately began jumping around, hugging Katie, and making a lot of unnecessary noise, which likely would have scared all the monkeys away had we been watching a less habituated group, and had I not noticed my irrational behaviour and subdued my ecstatic outburst in time. Since the new infant’s mother is named Trotter, a name starting with the letter T and following the current name theme (spiritual, political, philosophical, anthropological critical thinkers) needed to be chosen for the new baby. Katie suggested Theodore Roosevelt and I always liked the name Teddy, so the new ursine colobus monkey baby was baptised Teddy Roosevelt. We have been collecting behavioural data on Teddy for the past three weeks now. His mother is quite skittish and Teddy is sometimes hard to see because Trotter spooks easily and hides from us more often than other colobus mothers have done in the past. Teddy is already growing so quickly! A bit of his fur has started turning grey (around his mouth, ears, eyes, and on the top of his arms and legs) but he is still predominantly white and – in an extraterrestrial sort of way – he is cute as a button!