Monkeys in Reserva Playa Tortuga

One of the animals they have at the reserve are monkeys. The job focused on the monkeys is walking through the jungle finding monkeys and once you find one you have to follow it for five minutes tracking what it does every 15 seconds. 

While I was on the monkey walk, we didn’t find any monkeys but we have seen them while we were doing various other tasks. One day during free time, while some others from our group where coming back from another job, we saw them in trees that were visible from our rooms. Another day during breakfast, they were right outside of the main entrance, and the last time we saw them, we where collecting the videos from the cameras in the forest and there were lots of them playing around in the trees.

When we were on our monkey walk, some of the things we were looking for were if they had babies with them, if the babies were on there backs, where they were (how high on the tree they are), and what they were doing. Some examples of things they could be doing are eating, sleeping, climbing, etc. and we had to update it every 15 seconds. 

From what I’ve seen capuchin monkeys are very playful jumping off of one tree and grabbing a branch from a near by tree while yelling as loud as they can. Other times they will be fighting like siblings or even running away from all the other loud monkeys to get a break. 

The two kinds of monkeys we were looking for were capuchin and howler monkeys. Both kinds have a life span of 15-20 years. Their main diets are also mostly the same with flowers, nuts, fruits, and leaves but capuchin monkeys also occasionally eat small birds and other things like that. I have only seen capuchin monkeys so far but hope to see howler monkeys soon.

-Hunter