How I Spend My Days

I still love that Annie Dillard quote, "How you spend your days, is of course, how you live your life." So how do I live my life? My life is a whole lot more than spending time with baboons, but at the moment it's an important part. If I'm lucky (today I wasn't - so I have time to write) I follow the baboons all day. I use to use a "Rite in the Rain" notebook and take my notes by hand. I rather miss my notebook, but I've finally joined the 21st century and traded it in for a IPac. I note the weather, what kind of baboons I'm following (males, females, juveniles, infants) and where did I find them. Every 15 minutes I also note what the group is doing. The basic categories are; foraging, locomotion & social. What I'm most interested in is what are they eating, but I need to keep track of all their behaviors so I have an idea what percentage of their time they spend foraging. Why am I interested in what they eat? I believe baboons and other animals maintain their health primarily through their diet. They have no pharmacy, so what do they do to stay healthy? This kind of research is called, "Self-Medicative Behavior". There are many ways animals maintain their health, perhaps I'll talk about that another time. In relationship to plants, they can eat plants rare to the diet. This is done when they have a health crisis. The other category is plants that they eat regularly and are a part of their dietary repertoire and crucial to health. Some people refer to this as nutritional wisdom. Many dietary items contain secondary metabolites, which may help the individual stay healthy.
One of the biggest problem animals face is parasites. I also collect fecal samples while I'm out so I can monitor the groups' parasite burden.
The troop here is very interesting. I'm finding that their diet is very high in the secondary compound, condensed tannins. It's the stuff in red wine that makes your mouth feel dry. We usually describe it as astringent. Tannins are a two edged sword, their astringency can give you a stomach ache, but they can also kill parasites, bacteria and more. Not that the baboons are eating items high in tannins conscientiously, but because they do they can keep their parasite burden down. To combat the stomach ache at this site, they eat clay. I need to analyze the clay they consume, but believe it will be kaolinite, which is the active ingredient in Kaopectate.
So, all day, every 15 minutes I document the baboons' behavior, take a GPS point so I can see how they moved throughout the day and hope that each day a little more about their secret lives will be revealed to me.