Monkeys! (Parque Machia, Part 2)

Our living conditions at the park were very basic, old run-down hostels acquired by CIWY to house the volunteers. Quirky plumbing, moldy ceilings, hard beds, semi-functional kitchen. As it turns out, we didn't mind the cold showers in the slightest because it was so unbelievably hot there we wanted them cold. We slept much better once we decided to put our thermarests on our mattresses. It was so hot that I started using a cold water bottle at night - I took Nate's 2 liter MSR water bladder and stored it in the fridge and took it to bed to cool down!

In addition to having basic kitchen facilities the park runs a very inexpensive vegetarian cafe that serves breakfast and lunch and snacks all day.  The food is good and the prices very reasonable, and you can run a tab for the time you're volunteering and settle up when you leave.  There's beer, too, and usually at the end of the day people would gather at the long outside tables for a beer and and to tell stories about their animals and how the day went. The camaraderie was fantastic.

Nate's experience at the park was decidedly more lukewarm than mine, for understandable reasons. He got quite ill partway through our time there. What started as standard traveler's belly issues escalated to the point that he went to the little local hospital, where they did tests and put him on antibiotics. For more than a week that we were there he wasn't in good health. Nate was placed in the magnificent aviary, with a lot of parrots, 40 macaws, 2 toucans, a few hawks and two incredible eagles. There was a massive cage called the mafia with 80 parakeets. And lots of turtles, all non-native. The problem with the aviary was organization.

Nate and I visiting with Monchito, a macaw raised among dogs and thus behaves a lot like one.

 The refuge is largely run by long term volunteers, with only a few full time paid staff. There are lots of veterinary and biology students who come to learn and work, and passionate animal lovers on their second or third stay. The long term volunteer who oversaw the aviary, a great Chilean girl named Francesca, had returned home for a family visit for the holidays. Things had become rather confused in her absence and it was a source of frustration for Nate. A few key details about the care of the birds only surfaced in the last few days we were there, when she returned from Chile...such as the fact that the birds respond really well to music being played in the aviary. Nevertheless, he was glad we went and it was still a good experience, just perhaps not as glowing as mine.

There are several monkey departments, and the Capuchin quarantine where I worked was healthy monkeys who are hopefully slated for eventual release. It did house a number of monkeys who will live there for the rest of their lives as they are either too crazy or old and lacking the necessary life skills to survive in the wild.  It's a pretty cushy rest home. Our work days were much longer and demanding than walking the cats...we were in by 7-7:30am and seldom done before 7pm, with an hour and a bit off in the middle of the day. There was lots of downtime, though, especially in the early afternoon when the monkeys were much more mellow in the afternoon heat.  We were usually about 6-8 people working in "the Q".  The monkey feeding schedule was breakfast at 7:00, a snack at 10:00, lunch at 11:45, a snack at 2:00, and dinner at 4:30, and a cleanup after every meal. By the end of the day we were knackered, and would basically just shower and eat and be in bed by 10:00.  Their food was fruit and vegetables and occasionally eggs, rice or bread. Their protein was a porridge called api - basically runny oatmeal fortified with powdered milk, honey, and cinnamon, served twice a day.  They LOVE that stuff and would start shrieking with excitement when we'd make our rounds with water bottles full of it.

About five to six hours of our day was spent cleaning up after them, a formidable task requiring brooms and hoses and vast amounts of water to flush all the fruit and vegetable scraps and monkey poo.  As far as monkeys go, capuchins don't smell unpleasant at all, in fact they smell kind of nice, like healthy puppies.  Their urine and feces is also surprisingly neutral - it's pretty likely you'll get peed on almost every day and it really didn't smell like anything at all.  Their feces smelled just like their food, so it wasn't a gross or grim task to clean up after them.  Their little bodies had astonishingly quick metabolism - feed them wedges of papaya for snack and out it comes, twenty minutes later, looking and smelling pretty much exactly as it did before you fed it to them.  Our alpha male, Cesar, had a noticeably strong, sweet musk, but I wouldn't say he was outright stinky.

The Q was divided into two sides, Heaven and Earth. Earth is all caged monkeys, some very dangerous and insane, but mostly just lacking the social skills to be out and about on runners during the day.  The really dangerous ones had fine mesh walls on their cages on top of the large chain-link fencing of the rest, because if a big male were to grab you, even through a cage wall, they're extremely strong and a bite could result in lots of stitches.

In Heaven we'd have about 25 monkeys out on runners in big play areas from 7:30 until about 5:30. A "runner" is rope that zigzags all over the compound play areas, and the monkeys wear a little belt with a leash of about 4-5 feet long with a carabiner that clips into sliding rings on the rope. Careful consideration was made in placing them throughout the various play areas, of their friendships and personality conflicts.  Also, a few of the monkeys out on runners don't like all people, so they`re placed in specific areas where most volunteers could stay out of their way.

Federica eating a branch. Tatita in the background.

In Heaven there is a large cage with 9 babies, all under the age of two. Occasionally a few would escape but they'd just hang out around the Q for a few days until we'd manage to catch them, which is really difficult.  Lulu, Hugo and Wanny were often out of their cage.  The babies are insanely cute.  Some of them suck their thumbs.

I was really surprised how quickly I developed friendships with certain monkeys. Most of them are abandoned or confiscated pets and have plenty of quirks. While we feed them, work around them cleaning, they were always on us.  They're quite small - the biggest male on a runner was Gumi, at about 12lbs, close to fully grown, but the tiny juvenile females were more like 5lbs, with torsos barely larger than a loaf of bread. They have SO MANY vocalizations, many variations of scream and shriek, but lots of quiet ones, little trills and murmurs and clicks.  The conversations that they'd have when grooming sort of sound like an organic version of the communication between R2-D2 and C-3PO, little clicks and squeaks.  My favorite sound was slightly inquisitive and wary...their foreheads would crease, their eyes open really wide and their mouths form perfect little O's.  It was a quick "who-who-who" kind of like a cross between a pigeon and an owl.

Their personalities were as different as those of your friends and family. Tiny Yvonne is introspective and wimpy and easily intimidated by others.  I watched her getting braver and learning to play more, we were excited when she had a successful day playing hard in "the square", a central play area covered with a roof and lots of ladders, swings and platforms. There's usually 6 or 7 monkeys there during the day and lots of the really athletic males like to play there.   She loves it when we bring her pebbles of various sizes and she plays with them and experiments with the different noises they make when she clicks them together.  She'll eat an entire meal sitting on your shoulder if you'll let her cause she's a total chicken about defending her food from other monkeys.



Lilush and Eric napping.

 A gang of adolescent boy monkeys around three years old or so was Lilush, Paqueño and Eric.  These guys were hilarious best friends and so much fun.  They love the sneak attack and dive bomb your head when you'd walk by.  They wrestle constantly and had remarkable self control when wrestling with people, their play bites never hurt, always with the soft jaw. They dangle from their runners and love when you come up to them to play. They love to search pockets and I started tucking treats in my pockets for them to find, like handfuls of granola, dried corn or peanuts.  Lilush had a slight underbite causing one of his lower fangs to always protrude in a rakishly handsome way.  Eric was dark brown but Lilush and Paqueño blond.  Sometimes they'd play too hard with each other and someone would get upset and start to scream and we'd have to separate them for a time out, but they'd be pining for each other shortly after. I have some amazing photos of these guys spooning in their sleep.  Sometimes they'd bully other monkeys and need to be yelled at to stop.

Most precious to me of all was Ruperto, a tiny blond male about 3 years old.  My first day in the quarantine I was a little jittery..I knew that bites occurred, some monkeys are unpredictable, and I was wary.  I was standing watching the moneys play and asked a Japanese-Australian girl named Ai about Ruperto, and she gasped and said "go to him RIGHT NOW".  I offered my arm and he kissed my hand, chirped, and hopped on my shoulder.

Federica grooming Ruperto.

So sensitive and clever, he loved to play the clapping game, grabbing my hands and making me clap, or slapping my hand on the ground.  A serious cuddler with a little old man face. At one point he had acquired a coconut, and it was cracked. He was trying to extract the water from it and was striking it with a rock (Capuchins are considered the smartest new world monkey and devise tools for themselves) when I came along.  I sat down with him and he started shrieking and and made me hit the coconut by holding my hand and trying to make my hand hit it.  I was amazed.

At one point a jerk named Pasqui, known to bite unexpectedly, bit my forehead in a skirmish where I offended him by not feeding him first in the crowd.  It barely broke the skin, it healed leaving no mark, but it put on a remarkable display of blood running down my face and I had to rush off to the vets to have it cleaned up.  I had had to pass Ruperto's perch on my way to the clinic, and when I came back five minutes later he chirped and immediately hopped on my shoulder, put his face within inches of mine and examined me with unmistakeable concern. The volunteers around me were equally amazed when his little pink tongue darted out and gently licked my cut. It was so small it wasn't bandaged, so I had to turn around and go back to Luis, the vet, to have it cleaned again.  I immediately started scheming my kidnapping plan.

A couple days before I left I was hanging out with Ruperto, sitting on the ground playing, and he was right beside me. Right behind him a broom clattered to the ground and he startled, jumped on my arm and bit me, barely hard enough to leave indentations from his teeth. He was immediately aghast, he looked horrified, and curled up into a tiny ball as they do when they're really upset and started crying.  Gabby advised I walk away and let him calm down. I returned a few minutes later with a couple of peanuts and he trilled and climbed on my shoulder and started cracking them with his teeth. To my surprise he really wanted ME to eat them. I resisted, cramming my lips together, and he tried to wedge his tiny fingers between my lips to force peanuts into my mouth.  It's so very easy to anthropomorphize with these soft, furry little people, but it really seemed like he was trying to make amends for biting me.

This is Pepa. She's very sweet. Notice all the bug bites on my arms!

The problem with this kind of interaction is that they're too comfortable with people.  Ruperto, needy little Conejo (which translates as rabbit in spanish), Federica, Pepa, Jonathan, Tosati, were all monkeys who tended to turn to people way too often for entertainment and solace.  Jonathan was tedious cause as much as he was a sweet little cuddlebug he would bite you when you tried to put him down.  It's not going to help them become candidates to form the social groups that eventually get released.  You can't just release a monkey into the wild alone, they won't survive...the refuge stages the release by transferring monkeys to a semi wild context, no cages or runners but where they still stick around to get fed, and establish a functional social group with a ruling alpha male. Eventually they are transferred to national parks around Bolivia. These monkeys that were so fun for me to get to know aren't likely successes in the wild.  The aloof and distant ones like Franca, Claudia and Tatita will be better off.  Unfortunately there is rapidly diminishing suitable habitat out there in the the jungle for them as deforestation in Bolivia is increasing at a tragic rate.

I had no idea how undescribably enjoyable it would be to be groomed by a monkey.  The best groomer of all was Queen, an older female.  Queen hates Bolivians, and by extension anyone of darker-skinned latin American appearance, owing to the bad pet situation from which she came.  She'd bare her teeth and scream at them and bite hard enough to draw blood if they got too close.  Not fitting that description, we got along splendidly.  Queen will never be released, she is way too socially dysfunctional with most monkeys. We'd put her on a runner off in a shady corner alone and she was happiest that way.  If I came to visit she'd trill happily and climb on my shoulder and get to work grooming my head, her gentle, deft fingers picking through my hair, murmuring and chirping the whole time. The problem with a proper grooming session at Queen's Beauty Salon is that I'd be so relaxed and sleepy after that it would be really hard to get anything done.

Hilde cleaning my hands.

Hilde has very expressive eyes.

It's amazing that I got to know them as well as I did in such a short time, how quickly it felt completely normal to take care of 70 monkeys every day. That I knew some of their food preferences, even. I loved watching them catch flies in their fast little fists.  Once I found a fat yellow caterpillar when I was shucking corn for their dinner and I took it to Ruperto and he shrieked with pleasure and ate it. Eric loves papaya seeds and sucks the gelatinous coating off them and spits out the black part. Marco is kind of indifferent to bananas. Tatita isn't big on papaya. Gumi loves cucumber and eats all the flesh right down and leaves the green skin.  Gentle, sweet Hilde, a caged female on the Earth side, loves cucumber seeds and I would collect them for her when they fell out of reach of her cage.  She's a hilarious manicurist, she loves to groom hands, gently picking at flecks of dry skin and cleaning around your nails. Chuki, Hilde's big male cage-mate, has a broken jaw that healed crooked and has the most fascinating adaptations to how he eats. At first I perceived Chuki as scary and aggressive, but I realized it's all an act. If he tried to bite you with intention his jaw doesn't line up anyway.  When people come to fawn over Hilde he hollers and bangs the walls of his cage, but he's jealous, and if I always greeted him first and held his hands, cooing at him for a minute, he'd be calm as can be.  Actually, in general the monkeys love to hold hands. Their little soft palms and amazing perfect fingernails were really beautiful and it's a really pleasant hand to hold.  Sometimes it made me sad when you'd walk past a cage and they'd extend their hands and just want you to hang out and visit.

Health risks of working at Parque Machia are not what you might expect, bad bites are rare, and no parasites.  The animals are all vaccinated. What we did live with are is lots of bug bites and sunburns, though.  As volunteers are handling the animals continuously and getting licked a fair bit, we weren't permitted to wear DEET, any natural repellant containing eucalyptus oil (toxic to them if ingested) or sunblock...we just had to cover up.  The mosquitos weren't bad, it was the evil little sandflies.  A quarter the size of a mosquito, you can't see them or feel them bite and thus slap them to lessen the impact of the bite...it takes a few hours for the bite to form a welt and it then becomes a little blister far itchier than a mosquito bite, and lasting for more days.  At one point we were working in a raging thunderstorm and my rubber boots were full of water and I just decided to give up, be wet, and work in my Chaco sandals and shorts.  It's the jungle so the rain is warm anyway. The sandflies reproduce like crazy in wet conditions and by evening I looked like I had chickenpox on my legs, but hadn't realized what was developing until my legs were a mess. It was a really rough few days.  At least they don't transmit Dengue or malaria, and they're too small to bite through clothing.  It's so hot that all  manners of prickly heat rashes abound and I heard about a few nasty fungal foot issues from working in sweaty rubber boots all day.

The social atmosphere was a little reminiscent of Lake O'hara in how quickly people become friends working hard together.  We were an eclectic bunch, from all over the world ranging mostly from early twenties to late thirties.  We met a lot of really interesting people, hailing from Canada, USA, Italy, Holland, S.Korea, Sweden, France, Israel, Germany, Chile, Bolivia, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Scotland, England. When we arrived there were about 30 people, and with daily arrivals and departures the numbers were usually about 35.

People hanging out at the CIWY cafe.

There was an exception to the normal age requirement of eighteen when an Italian family arrived, a mom and her seventeen and fifteen year old daughters.  The park director Nena made a judgment call that the teenagers were in the right frame of mind. The fifteen year old, Giuditta, was with us in the Q and their mom, Gloria, in the aviary with Nate. We were initially apprehensive about Giuditta cause the monkeys can be scary at times and the workload is huge, but they're a farm family, and it was immediately apparent that she's one rock solid teenager who knows how to work hard.  I really enjoyed her attitude, and my respect for her was forged one afternoon when a curious dog decided to enter the quarantine compound.  Of the three resident big black dogs, one can be a little testy, and a few of us were trying to herd it out of the area, but hadn't physically grabbed it yet.  He was really curious and did not want to leave. The monkeys were going bonkers, and had given the call to go to the absolute top of all cages and runners, screaming like crazy.  Giuditta barged past us and up to the dog and grabbed it by the scruff of the neck shouting "PERRITO, NON!" over and over again. Perro is the spanish word for dog, perrito is an affectionate diminutive...like doggie. That huge dog cowered before her, lost all its bravado and she dragged it out of the area.  It turns out that there are eight dogs on their farm and she really feels confident with dogs. Paul (Holland), Elin (Sweden) and I were handling the situation with minimal success until she came along.

 On the day we left I had to make three visits to the Q to say goodbye to the monkeys because it was so hard. Monkeys immediately started making appearances in my dreams as soon as I started work with them and my monkey dreams continued for a full week after we left the refuge.  I have mentioned to Nate numerous times that I think I will need to go back to CIWY again some day for a longer stay.  Many volunteer wildlife refuges in SE Asia are very expensive, but this was only $200 and I loved every minute of it.

Gato! (Parque Machia, Part 1)

So much time without writing! I have so much to catch up on. We are now in Copacabana, on the shore of Lake Titicaca, nearly finished our time in Bolivia. I need to empty the bathtub of words in my head about my time working with animals. We will arrive in Cusco, Peru, tonight.

Our time with Comunidad Inti Wara Yassi (CIWY), the animal refuge at Parque Machia, was unforgettable.

We arrived on Christmas day, and I was given the unexpected news that they urgently needed a female volunteer to walk with Gato, a 16 year old male puma. The felines and the Andean bear, Balu, are walked for 8 hours a day through the jungle by volunteers.

Normally two week volunteers don't work with the felines or the bear, as it takes time for the animals to trust and adapt to the people handling them...so they ask for a one month minimum. I knew this, and had put the possibility of working with a cat out of my mind. Gato only works with women. As his trails periodically cross the main tourist trail through the park, he is always walked in teams of two, one person wears a belt with his 10m lead attached to it, and another to herd people if they encounter them on the trail. Hannah was working alone, and I came along at the right time to be placed with them out of necessity. I was elated. I had read about Gato's story on the website, and was deeply affected by it, and was astonished that I would get to meet him and spend time with him. I never had Gato on his lead, I was the support walker.

At CIWY you are placed in a department, or with a specific animal, and you don't normally meet any others or spend time in other departments...this is for the health and stability of the animals.

Gato's story is very sad...he was orphaned at four months old when his mother was killed by a hunter for her pelt and he was sold to a circus. The circus attempted to train him to jump through rings of fire by striking his legs. The combination of the abuse and an outgrown cage stunted the growth of his legs and he has noticeably disproportioned legs and feet...for his torso he's kind of short. When he was two the circus passed through Villa Tunari and Inti Wara Yassa successfully had him confiscated from the circus with the help of the police. When he came into their care he was in terrible shape, aggressive, emaciated and he couldn't stand. He was severely malnourished from being fed a diet of milk and bread. A Canadian volunteer on a two week visit to the refuge was so overcome by his condition that she vowed not to leave until he was healthy, and she stayed for nine months. CIWY credits her for his remarkable recovery.

Gato cooling off in a creek bed.

On to the present, Gato is now a 40kg sixteen year old. Wild pumas have a life expectancy of 10 years, captive pumas closer to 20. I like to call him a silver fox, past his prime but still sexy as hell. He can be stubborn, occasionally lazy, cranky, but also surprisingly spry, energetic and youthful. He's a lovely golden color with dark markings on his face and a creamy white belly and chest. While he's far from being outright tame, he knows which of his trails are his. He occasionally tries to venture onto other cats trails and responds to basic commands when we have to insist that he can't. He responds to flattery - when we're trying to convince him that it's time to go home to his (approx 30 x 10m) cage at the end of the day many exclamations in spanish about how sexy and beautiful he is sometimes get him going. When we really needed to get him moving he would ignore us, pointedly grooming his paws. Singing "Vamos Gato! Vamos Gato!" in a really high pitched, whiny voice and blowing raspberry noises in his ears irritates him and also gets him walking.  He still has all his teeth, and of course all his claws.

Hanging out with Kishwana, a female spider monkey that often came to visit in the afternoon during Gato's nap.

The park has a huge network of trails. There are the official public tourist trails, and a vast network of secret trails marked by colored tape that corresponds to the animals. Some animals can't and don't ever cross, therefore their trails are in totally different areas of the park, whereas others overlap because no big crisis arises if they're near each other. For example, Gato and one of the ocelots, Millie, share some trails and if we'd hear movement in the jungle we would holler "Hola!! Gato!!" and Melissa would holler back "Hola!! Millie!" and we'd stall to let one or the other pass. It's quite impressive to walk the trails and observe how the trails have been designed for the animals interests, too. Millie has decent hunting skills, and loves to prowl creek beds looking for water snakes and rodents, so some of her trails follow shallow creeks. Gato doesn't hunt at all, his trails cross a couple of creeks but don't follow them.

The park is located about 300km south of the what's referred to as the Bolivian portion of the Amazon basin, but it was already very dense, humid jungle. I have never sweat so much in my life. It was extremely beautiful and lush. Incredible butterflies and birds and lots of capuchin, spider and squirrel monkeys. Luckily Gato takes a solid nap every afternoon, anywhere from an hour and a half to three hours, and he sets a very manageable walking pace as he patrols his trails. The first half of the day was more work as his energy level was higher and he covered more ground. The cats, the foxes and the bear have big comfortable cages hidden deep within the jungle, far from where a hiking tourist could stumble upon them. It took about 20-30 minutes to hike to his cage from the casa, the refuge headquarters at the entrance to the park.

I loved how transfixed Gato was by leaf cutter ants. He would stop on his trail and watch them for a few moments, very curious about them marching by with their big pieces of leaf. Occasionally he would try to smell them and get a bunch of ants in his nose and sneeze many times. It was really funny.

I found myself sad around him on numerous occasions. We were under orders to be very consistent about feeding him at 4:30 every day, and sometimes it's really hard to get him back to his cage. We'd coax and cajole, and he'd park himself on a trail and decide it was the time for a thorough groom. We'd make some progress and he'd protest again, sometimes growling and hissing at us. I'd look at him and feel overcome, that this is not the life he was supposed to have. I wanted to oblige his every whim...allow him to prowl Millie's trails looking for the pretty girl-cat he could smell. It's so good, however, that there is a place for him to live out his life, loved and cared for, as he never learned the skills from his mother to live as an Andean mountain puma in the wild.

Gato in his cage.

While we progressed to a familiarity where I could stroke him, even his face and head, I've seen photos of him with his head in Francesca's lap. His purr is so beautiful, it practically makes the ground vibrate.

We worked for three days when a Chilean veterinary student arrived who would be staying for much longer than us, so I was bumped to the Capuchin monkey quarantine, where about 70 monkeys live. I worked with him for another day to help get Frani oriented. I was crushed to be moved, and the park director, Nena, was really apologetic, but I fully understood that they want the animals to have the most consistent day-to-day life possible. What I didn't foresee was how much I would adore working with monkeys, and how much fun they are. About halfway through my time with the monkeys, Hannah, Gato's primary walker, had to leave Bolivia and head back to England unexpectedly. I was asked to come back and walk with him for a couple more days so it's nice that I got to see him again .