16 August 2013

Coming down from the old growth plot, I heard some chattering ahead. It was a group of spider monkeys coming from one direction, and a group of white-face capuchins coming the other way, and they were scolding each other fiercely. When their dispute had finished, the white-face monkeys cut across the ridge and disappeared deep into the trees, and the spiders continued down along the ridgeline. The trail I was following traced the ridgeline as well, and so I found myself tip-toeing along through the leaf litter and the fallen branches along the trail, moving along under the spiders as they lazily swung through branches, dropped from canopy to canopy along the steeply falling ridge, and paused every now and again to watch me a hundred feet below them on the ground.

The fog had come in by this point, although not so strong as to obscure the canopy through which the monkeys were swinging, and so they seemed to be moving through trees that had nothing on the other side, as though this ridge were the only bastion of forest in an unbounded cloud.

Such is life in the cloud forest; a constant sense of floating unanchored on some broken-off island in the mist. The monkey part of this story is a bit novel, though - they’ve been highly migratory since a large windstorm took down many of the fruiting trees they relied on some years ago. Since then the sightings have been few and far between, so despite the commonality of monkey-sightings in Costa Rica, seeing them up here still carries with it an element of exciting discovery.

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