Guest Post: Caleb from GSU

This past summer we had a student from Georgia State come work at our field site for several weeks to gain field experience. Here is a post he wrote about his time at Taboga:

 

My name is Caleb Truscott. I am a student at Georgia State University in my third year of studying Biology with the desire to work with animals and study their behavior. I started working in a primate research lab that was doing noninvasive research on social decision making when I first started college. While working in the lab, I have gotten the opportunity to work on many projects and research presentations and have learned all about and sometimes more than I wanted to about brown-tufted capuchin monkeys. After two years of working in the lab, I got a fantastic opportunity. One of the lab’s post doc’s, Marcela Benitez, offered to take me to the Capuchin de Taboga field site in Costa Rica and work there for a month. This opportunity was perfect. I had wanted to try out field work for a long time and to work with white-faced capuchins. So, I went to live and work at the field site for a month.

It turned out to be an amazing month. I lived in a small house with five assistants, three from the states and two from Costa Rica. They were wonderful people to work with and whom I grew to respect greatly. They taught me all about the local flora and fauna and of course the monkeys or monos as I learned to call them in Spanish. In the group of monos that we studied the most, there were 16 individuals. I spent much of my time in the field learning to identify each monkey with binoculars and taking lots of pictures! My favorite was named Tio. I also learned how to use an Ipad program called Animal Observer that is used to record behavioral data on the monkeys, and by the end of the month, I was helping to collect data.

Aside from the actual fieldwork experience, I got to live in a country that spoke Spanish as the primary language. My Spanish is pretty bad, so I had a hard time communicating effectively with the locals but by using lots of hand gestures and many awkward smiles I survived and had a wonderful new cultural experience that I would repeat and extend in a heartbeat.

When I came to the field site a month seemed like an age, but after surviving the swarms of mosquitos, oppressive humidity, and chirping geckos, I found myself wanting to stay for much much longer. Before I knew it, it was my last day, and I was saying goodbye to the monos and the great people that I had lived with. It was a very bittersweet moment. I was happy to be able to go home and use my new experiences at the lab and to continue my education but on the other hand part of me wanted to stay, get up at 4:45 AM, and go out for another day in the field.