Dr Nancy Priston

Two of the troops I study live in secondary forest or a forest-farm mosaic landscape. This means they spend quite a lot of time on the ground and I can get fairly close (within 10m). The third troop live a couple of hours into the forest – a mix of secondary and primary forest. The trees are taller here and the monkeys have little reason to come to the ground. This makes finding them and observing them that much harder!
I use two local guides an we split up to maximize our chances of finding them and we communicate with radios. That’s great when it works but the terrain is hilly so often there’s no signal. We listen for the monkeys – when they’re traveling as a group they call to one another to keep in contact. We listen for these ‘coo’ calls to locate them and the shaking of branches etc. This troop is large though so they often split up into smaller sub groups to forage for food which makes them harder to find! We also use smell – you can smell the monkeys when they’ve been through a patch of forest and we look for their poop!

With this troop the most common view (as they’re about 40m up a tree) is of their butt!