Luis takes off his slicker and climbs twenty feet up the tree to where the thick trunk forks. With his machete, he clears an area for the nest box. Andrea tosses him pliers and a coil of wire; Ben throws him a freshly cut branch to use as a crossbar. Then Ben sends the nest box up a rope pulley and Luis wires it into place, fixing a branch close to the doorway so that the monkeys won’t have far to leap.
“Monkey kindergarten,” Ben says. “We’re trying to make it as easy for them as possible.”
The moment Luis opens the door to the nest box, Jenny rushes out. Next out is her daughter, Maria, then the male, Melvin, whom we had captured as a mate for Jenny, then the kids. These last four suddenly begin a harsh, rhythmic chatter at Mom. There’s no question about its purpose. Loud and grating, it has an immediate effect—she rushes higher into the tree and looks truly rattled. The chatter grows louder and more strident. Mother falls twenty feet to the ground.
“Oh, no,” I say, laying one hand up the side of my cheek, as humans so often do when distressed. My instincts beg me to help her, but I stay put.
“Should somebody follow her?” Beate asks anxiously.
“She’s got a collar,” Ben says. “Look, she’s up again.”
Climbing another tree, Mother hurries from branch to branch until she is halfway down the hill. Stoning her with their hard voices, her family continues driving her away. If she runs at speed, we’ll have to follow to keep an eye on her, despite the mud and rain. Middle-aged Jenny is still vibrant, active, and fertile. She has small kids to raise. But she’s a little too old to find another family elsewhere. What will become of her? It’s soul-wrenching to watch her exiled from her family, discarded, banished to the prison of a far tree.
Maria sits on a branch by the nest box and makes alarm calls after her. She has temporarily won the new male, who arch-walks past her to assert dominance, then scent-marks a branch. The kids quiet down and begin scampering around the tree, eating from the comidoro. Not quite out of sight, Jenny begins slowly working her way back toward the family. Seeing this, Maria and Melvin go out on a limb together and yell at her a monkey version of “Don’t come in, lady!” She backs away. Then they return to the top of the nest box. One of the kids makes a hoarse, ear-splitting rasp—the characteristic “infant call” that serves as an appeal to be fed. Sometimes even a fully grown adult, in moments of stress, will make the infant rasp to defuse a tense situation, saying in essence, “Don’t hurt me, I’m really still an infant.” But the kid does something that surprises us: he goes to the stepfather, stares him right in the face, and does the infant rasp again. The father has no food, isn’t eating. “Feed me,” the kid continues to plead, “feed me, feed me.” In this strange new land, with his natural father missing and his mother driven away, the kid must ingratiate himself with Stepfather. The other kid scampers in, rolls over, and begs the stepfather to groom him. Stepfather begins slowly to play with both of them. As the main family quietly eats, Mother sneaks in a little closer. Seeing her, Maria leaps to the top of the nest box, taking the high ground above her male, arch-walks back and forth, and chatters aggressively. Her body language says, That’s my man!
When Mother retreats, the kids, the stepfather, and the daughter begin exploring their new world, gamely, without much hesitation. One scratches with a hind foot, doggy-style, another wraps its whole body around a branch. Sometimes they do the splits between branches or sit back on their haunches like kangaroos. They excel at catching three branches with three of their feet and laddering up, or climbing a vine hand over hand. As addled as we are about Jenny, we’re also gladdened by how well the rest of the group seems to be adjusting.
“This is a group that was used in orientation experiments back at the zoo,” Ben explains. “A grad student would disorient them on purpose—move their nest box while they were sleeping so that they’d wake up in an unfamiliar place—and it really seems to have helped. I’m so excited about this.”
Dealing with novelty or random change is difficult for tamarins. Facing the unknown can be overwhelming. But once change becomes habitual, novelty itself becomes a familiar state of things. Life is still awkward and demanding but not paralyzing; they learn to puzzle things out.
One of the kids tries to walk on a thin palm leaf and skids onto a branch. Ben calls a running commentary on all their movements to Andrea, who jots it down in a notebook. Mother continues to keep her distance, moving slowly among the branches of a nearby tree. That she is moving at all is a good sign. We’re afraid she may stop at any moment, forfeit the battle, become helpless, give in to despair, and starve or fall to a predator.
Sitting on the forest floor, we humans vocalize to one another and swat at mosquitoes. The monkeys ignore us—we are part of the leaf litter; we are background. Sometimes they stare at us and hold our gaze for a slender moment, but the moment passes. They do not search our faces for familiar traits. They do not need to bridge the distance. They would not understand our loneliness as a species. Ben speaks in three languages: Portuguese, English, and scientific code. One moment he says, “She’s driving the hussy away!” and the next, “CB-Three solicit-grooms LA-Five.” The daughter is all intimidation, the mother all guile and diplomacy. The daughter stands next to the male, strikes aggressive poses at the mother, and shrieks. The mother waits till the male is alone, then approaches him seductively and asks him to groom her.
“Good ploy,” I say.
Ben cautions me against crediting them with intuition. “They’re like Swiss watches,” he says. “They just react. Their hormones tell them what to do. They don’t think about it.”
He doesn’t like attributing cognition or emotion to the monkeys, or calling them by name, or regarding them aesthetically. So it makes him wince when I say that the cowering mother seems “intimidated” by the daughter’s display, or when I describe one of the kids as “cute.”
“Look at it like this,” I finally offer good-naturedly. “As a higher-primate female, I’m hardwired to respond to the young of all mammalian species as cute, especially lower primates. Think of it as part of my evolutionary program.”
Ben smiles, runs an open palm over his beard, nods. “Fair enough,” he says.
For hours, we watch the family feeding and playing, while Andrea carefully notes even their smallest actions. Observers are taught a complex shorthand, with which they must record many data about many individuals at once. Sometimes they also choose an animal at random and simply follow its actions for ten minutes solid. The best observer does a good “scan”—a mental snapshot of where every monkey is in time and space. Coolheaded observation is crucial to the project, which is collecting reams of data about the tamarins’ habits, family life, and nutrition. But workers like Andrea are far from uninvolved.
The Golden Lion Tamarin Project is a hands-on enterprise. For ages, people have taken rare or exotic animals out of the wild and kept them in zoos. Now zoos are sending animals back into the wild. Most scientists and naturalists live by a prime directive only to observe animals, never to intrude in nature’s ways, even if it means watching a favorite animal die of illness or fall to a predator. Abstinence is a central ethic among scientists, for whom “Observe but do not interfere” reigns as a strict commandment. But zookeepers are used to handling animals, doctoring them, breeding them, protecting them, and moving them around; they live by a different code.
“When I began doing business in 1970,” Ben says, sitting down under the shelter of a palm leaf, “zoos were right on the cusp of change. Up to that time, zoos had largely been consumers—taking animals out of the wild in order to stock their collections. But most of the enlightened zoos recognized that it was irresponsible to go into the wild and wantonly take animals for collections. Zoos had to begin to produce self-sustaining populations of animals. It wasn’t only a question of self-interest. The zoos’ collections of animals were an extraordinary scientific resource for behavioral research. They also had a responsibility to encourage conservation in th
e wild, either by buying up and protecting reserves, or by sending experts into the field to assist researchers and wildlife managers. And they realized their tremendous obligation to educate the public. If world conservation is going to be successful, we will need to move resources from the affluent, developed countries—largely in North America, Europe, and Japan—southward into the tropics, where countries are developing. Zoos have the responsibility to teach people about biology, ecology, conservation biology, world economics.”
“Is it best for animals to live in an artificial Eden?” I ask.
“Zoos need to rethink their philosophy,” Ben says. “At the moment, it’s to protect every individual animal and spare it stress, spare it hunger, spare it climatic extremes. We carry around with us this notion that the wild is somehow a romantic paradise, but look around you. The wild tamarins are half-starved; they’re infested with parasites. They don’t have veterinary care; they don’t have reliable food sources; they’re subjected to wet and cold; there are predators stalking them every minute. It’s not paradise at all. And zoo-born animals are ill equipped to deal with these kinds of challenges. If we are to maintain selection for genetic adaptiveness to deal with such challenges, and if we are to provide experience for zoo animals that will enhance their adaptiveness, we are going to have to intentionally subject them to stress, for the sake of their species. This is going to be a real problem, because zoos are used to thinking only of protecting the individual. And visitors to zoos get to like individual animals. But, you know, conservation isn’t about Bambi. We’re trying to save a whole species, a whole ecosystem in which it lives.”
In the palm canopy, a young male with a Don Ameche face searches for insects. Suddenly he falls, spread-eagled like a cat, and bounces on the ground thirty feet below, sniffs, grabs a low branch uncertainly, and climbs back up. Although he seems a little unsteady, he’s not favoring any of his limbs. It’s the first time he’s been more than a few feet from the ground, and the long drop must have been quite a shock. Walking back and forth on a branch, he leaps to a tree closer to us, then sits and scans. He seems to know where he wants to go, but he’s reluctant to jump onto thin, fragile branches to get there. Stepfather quickly leaps over to the stranded kid and shows him a safe route back to the nest box, and the kid follows.
“Excellent, excellent,” Ben says. “Lesson one in the forest—be able to find your way home. We’ve sometimes had an animal sit there all day long and be unable to work it out.”
Back at the nest box, the kid reaches into the comidoro and crams a wad of banana into his mouth until his cheeks bulge like a trumpet player’s. A minute later, he holds a piece of apple in his fingers and delicately nibbles.
“In a sense,” Ben says, “this biological reserve is also a zoo. It’s only about twelve thousand acres. It’s got gates with locks; it’s got firebreaks; much of it isn’t forest but the remnants of old ranches; it’s got some cultivated fruit trees; it’s got roads; airplanes fly overhead; trains go through it; there’s a dam on one perimeter. We’ve got monkeys with radios on them; we’ve got people out studying small mammal populations at night. So it’s not really very different from a zoo, is it? More and more, as we look at national parks and wildlife refuges around the world, we’re finding that they need to be intensively managed if they are to survive. The best we can hope for is to save ten or fifteen percent of an ecosystem for posterity.
“This has resulted in one of the most amusing ironies in my professional life. When I got into the zoo business in 1970, there was a certain arrogance among people who studied animals in the wild. They looked with disdain on people who worked with animals in zoos. It was less real; it was less normal; it was less natural. And indeed, it is less natural. But now, twenty years later, as national parks and reserves become key refuges for wild populations, wildlife managers are facing problems that zoos have already solved. For example, if you need to move a male rhinoceros from one reserve to another to breed, because it no longer can migrate normally, you’ll come to a zoo and say, ‘I never moved a rhinoceros before. How do you do it? How do you get it into a crate? What sort of crate do you use?’ Of course, in time, everyone will realize that it isn’t necessary to move a rhinoceros at all—all you’ve got to do is move his semen. But meanwhile zoos have mastered many techniques of breeding and handling wild animals.”
When an owl flies over, the monkeys automatically flatten themselves against a tree. With land predators, they act differently. If a snake, ocelot, bamboo rat, or wild dog showed up, they would mob it. There’s safety in numbers, as schooling fish and warring humans know, and the kids, who hang back a little, learn to recognize dangerous animals.
“What are the chances for this tamarin family?” I ask.
“Over the years, we’ve reintroduced ninety golden lion tamarins. Thirty-five of those still survive in the wild. Some have to be fed every day. Some are totally self-sufficient. Those reintroduced monkeys have given birth to forty-five live offspring, of which thirty-three are still alive today. And some of those have also reproduced, so we have second-generation births. For a reintroduction program, that’s about average. The record for the Arabian oryx in Oman, or the red wolf in the southeastern United States, or the eagle or falcon, is about the same. But success in conservation is a posthumous wish, because we’re not concerned only about what we achieve in this decade or in this century. Conservation really is a timeless concept. You’re conserving forever. You’re conserving so that evolution can proceed naturally. I personally will never know whether the Golden Lion Tamarin Conservation Project was successful. All I can look at are short-term goals. One goal is reintroduced GLTs that are totally self-sufficient. We have several such groups now, and I would say they are wild. But I’m also glad that the golden lion tamarin has become a powerful symbol in Brazil, not just for the conservation of the Atlantic coastal rain forest, but for the country’s wilderness in general.”
Toward nightfall, Mother returns to the family and, though subdued, begins to feed with them. Relieved, we head back to camp. On the way out of the fazenda, we stop to say hello to the manager, who surprises us by explaining that he’s changed his mind about the location of the monkeys. Now he would prefer that the nest box be on a different hill on the other side of the estate. Heartsick, Ben, Beate, and Andrea try to persuade him to let the nest box stay where it is, but he’s adamant, and there is little they can do. Nothing is on paper. The project relies solely on the goodwill of the landowners. But this will mean moving the family once more, and with the mother and daughter quarreling, the last thing we want to do is to shift them to another neighborhood. Also, there is the problem of the African (“killer”) bees, which have already invaded one of the nest boxes on the opposite hill. Last year, Andrea and the others watched as bees stung to death a mother and her babies. When the male fell to the ground with twenty-three bee stings, Andrea grabbed him, rushed him back to camp, and gave him steroids, which saved him.
“Let’s see how they’re doing tomorrow,” Ben says as we bounce over the muddy road, travel a few miles down the highway, and wind our way back to the main house, where we find the others going about their chores.
One quickly adapts to the routines of camp life. Because towels never dry, I get into the habit, after washing my hands, of drying them on my hair. Clothes will dry only if hung in the generator house, but then they smell strongly of diesel fumes and, by midweek, also of the possum carcass someone has hung up. Toilet paper is never flushed but tossed into a basket beside the bowl. On patrol, the best way to fight the mosquitoes is to clothe every inch of skin. When peeing in the forest, it’s a good idea to wave both hands near your butt to keep the mosquitoes away. On rainy days, the mud roads grow slithery as soap, and one must always be ready to push cars out of ditches. One sweats mightily climbing in the forest, and it’s easy to become dehydrated, so whenever we pass a wild fruit tree, we stop and pick papaya, jambo (a red, pearlike fruit), passionfruit, or coconut.
> Dressing on the porch one morning, I find small UFOs clinging to my boots and realize that I have inadvertently become a dispenser of rain-forest seeds. A few men and women of the reintroduction team arrive with a three-toed sloth they’ve found, and others with baby opossums. No sooner are they gone than a large ferret with a white chevron on its forehead runs across the yard, chasing a large rodent and harassing the chickens.
“Get the rooster!” Joleen urges him, and we laugh, because the rooster has jackhammered into everyone’s sleep.
Setting out at last, we head first for a hill where a tamarin family from Omaha lives. They’re not at their nest box, where we leave bananas, apples, and fresh water. Putting on headphones and holding up a large aerial, we locate them to the south and set off. First we follow them across a stream into a dense swamp of bamboo, white ginger, and thorn bushes. Tall, curly-haired P.C. machetes a way through the undergrowth; then the monkeys change direction and flee uphill all the way to the top. For us, the climb is steep and muddy, with clutching vines, thorn-wrapped trees, large spiders, and stinging insects. We must orient ourselves fast as we rush from branch to branch, guessing which ones will hold our weight, which will send us tumbling into thorns. There is something wonderful about being forced to brachiate through the trees, something thrilling about climbing and leaping at ground level, as I know the tamarins are doing in the canopy. Falling is also a fear for us on so steep an incline, and every handhold may conceal a fire ant, poisonous spider, or girdle of thorns. Dashing in three dimensions isn’t easy, and all of us end up skidding, sliding, slipping, revising, straining muscles, getting small scratches and bumps. Two hours later, we see the monkeys at last, quietly eating bananas in a low tree. Making a few notes, we return exhausted to the main road. There we stop to eat the sandwiches, bananas, and cookies we packed for lunch, and I take the opportunity to study the rain forest’s insect parade (one reason the ground isn’t a safe place for tamarins).