The Howler Monkey Brain Dump from very, very high. Karen Rowan, 12.05.10….from the plane ride back to Denver.

The Howler Monkey Brain Dump from very, very high.

Karen Rowan, 12.05.10….from the plane ride back to Denver.

(Feel free to comment and add information or correct inaccuracies -- corrections already made to the "Lisa" section)

General information about Howler Monkeys

A troop is made of an alpha male, several females and their offspring.  

Female Congo Aullador, Howler Monkey

Former Alpha Male Congo

When a male child gets big and wants to be the alpha he challenges the alpha.   If the alpha remains the alpha, the challenger will go off to make his own troop.  If the younger male wins, the older male is retired and goes off on his own to die.  A congo cannot survive alone.  This is the natural process, as much as we might want to create a retirement home for old alpha males.  Infants ride on their mother’s backs until they are old enough to try climbing alone. 

Congos do not appear to have a mating season any more than humans do.  There are always babies.  There are always adolescents. The congo tail is like a hand or foot and has similar grabbing muscles and texture.  

If a congo is separated from the troop, it will generally wait for her, howling from the trees.  A congo that is hurt and separated from the troop by someone who is trying to help should be prepared for angry attacks.  When that same congo is reintroduced to the troop after medical treatment, females are more likely to be reaccepted.   Congos eat all manner of leaves and fruits and know what to eat to calm an upset stomach.   20% fruits and 80% leaves. Their choices are very specific.  Congos who are fed foods that their digestive systems are not used to need vitamins and medical care to reestablish their natural digestive processes.   The alpha male either leads or follows the troop.  He leads the way and then hangs back to make sure everyone stays together.  Congos howl to advertise to other congos that this is their eating and drinking territory.  They cover only a short distance each day, usually only about 400 meters.  They are diurnal and one of the most sedentary (in terms of daily forward geographical progress) animals.   Although I have been told anecdotally  that congos throw poop at people when they are angry, I’ve never seen in happen.  I have, however, seen congos pee from high branches.  On purpose and with pre-meditation as a warning to humans who are interfering in their space.   The females I have seen have a slight orange overcoat and the males tend to be a little darker.  The bright white balls of the male congo can be seen from great distances.   

Abnormal Congo behaviors

It is abnormal and entirely out of character for a congo to walk on the ground.  They can… but doing so is unnatural and puts them in danger from cars, humans and other animals.  Any contact with humans is also abnormal and ultimately dangerous to the congo troop.

Dangers to Congos

By far the most dangerous threat to Congos right now is the proliferation of electrical wires.  Congos travel by grabbing a branch with a hand and using the tail for balance or to hang.  Using this same strategy on an electrical cord and metal attachment or transformer, congos are easily and quickly electrocuted.   Sometimes congos lose their tails, and then are at a great disadvantage while traveling with the troop or are temporarily stunned.  Often, they are killed. 

Monkey Bridges

Originally designed by Vanessa at the Monkey Park on the way to Tamarindo and successfully used at the park, Monkey Bridges were created by the Playa Hermosa Association, among other groups, and placed throughout northwestern Costa Rica.  They can be seen from Playa Panama down to Tamarindo.  They are green because the Monkey Park discovered that monkeys were more likely to use green ones.  They are never black because hopefully congos will learn that black cords are dangerous and green ones are safe.   ICE hung the bridges provided by the Playa Hermosa Association first and later decided to make and hang them themselves.  The Playa Hermosa Association has stopped accepting donations for Monkey Bridges since ICE has started making them.  Donations for congos now go to emergency vet care for rescued Congos. 

Bridges can take up to a year to be found and used.  Some Congos have now been seen in Monte Paraiso in Playa Hermosa using the bridges.   I found pictures on the Playa Hermosa Association website.

The Monkey Park on the way to Tamarindo

Vanessa works at the barely supported Monkey Park, an animal rescue center.  They have big cats that the big cat rescue park was unable to take, injured birds, spider monkeys, white faced monkeys and congos.  They have a medical facility to care for seriously injured animals, but minor injuries are best treated at a local vet clinic so that the animal can be returned to the wild as quickly as possible.  When I asked what kind of donations they need she said bird seed.

The Monkey Park primarily focuses on rehabilitation.  I am not allowed to enter a three part, large enclosed area.  The first area houses what will hopefully become an alpha male.  The second houses a female adult.  The third houses two babies.  None of them are related to each other or from the same troop.  Alpha males will kill congos from other troops.  The goal of this rehabilitation is to convince these congos that they are in the same troop.  The female and the babies can see each other an communication through the mesh barrier that separates them.  The babies are allowed to enter the female’s area for brief periods, while under observation.  The alpha male and the female can also see each other through their own mesh barrier.  When the staff is confident that he will not kill her, they will be put in the same cage.  The alpha will not be put into the same enclosure with the babies until he has already bonded with the female.  This is the riskiest combination.  If it works, the family will be released as a troop back into the wild.  Congos cannot survive alone.  Each enclosure has monkey bridges hanging in it and the congos use them.

Another cage holds two spider monkeys that were kept in a small cage together as pets for so long that they went crazy.  They can still keep each other company and are now in a much larger cage than the box-sized one that had been held in previously, but they attack anyone else.

A small cage set far apart from everyone else holds two babies who were rescued separately.  They now cling to each other as though each is the other’s mama.  One is missing an eye and looks warily and fearfully from the other while clutching the baby who is smaller than she is.  They are both terrified.  The Monkey Park does not think that the one-eyed Congo will be able to survive in the wild, so they will not rehabilitate her.  Even so, they have found family in each other. 

Vanessa used to rescue monkeys on her own, but she found that the people who were keeping them as pets or befriending and domesticating wild monkeys were resentful when she took them and would retaliate.  They just didn’t understand, she said.  So now she calls the municipality to investigate and bring the monkeys to her.  They will not be taken anywhere else.  She is the only accredited Monkey rehab park in Costa Rica.  It receives almost no funding even though it is the official rehab location, and relies heavily on donations to feed the rescued animals.

Vanessa runs through the list of rules for living near Congos.  Do not name them.  Do not touch them.  Do not feed them.  Cover their eyes to reduce premature death caused by extreme stress if you do have to move them or treat them medically.   Turn them into pets and remove them from their troops and they will go crazy in the same way that we would go crazy without social contact.  They will become violent.  They will become abnormal.

Congo Stories

The baby girl lays on her side, tiny hands clutching small stones.  I touch her, willing her to just be shocked, not already dead, but she does not move, does not respond, does not breathe.  

Her family howls from a nearby tree, willing her to get up, too.  

They will not leave until they give up hope completely.  They will not give up hope yet.  The alpha congo moves agitatedly in the tree whenever someone approaches, hanging menacingly, protectively.  I take pictures from the ground where she lays under the transformer, electrical wires and metal connectors on the pole several meters above her.  

The trees here have been cut back.  Branches are gone to encourage the congos to go another way, but it does not work.  I step back and I see, in the tree immediately above this little girl, one lone congo, not howling with the rest of the troop a few trees away.  They are surely howling for the baby.  They are also howling for the mama to come along.  They will not leave them.   The mama will not move.  

She has been watching me taking pictures all along from her hidden perch high above.  She makes little noise.  While the daddy howls, she makes small noises that sound more like crying.  When I stand beneath her, she pees.  I back up.  I get the message.  When the young man who works nearby comes to bury her, I call him off.  Give her more time, I say.  He knows she can’t be left for very long or she will begin to attract animals and insects.  In the heat, she will begin to smell.  She fell in the early hours of the morning and it is still before 9.  Give her more time.  I point up.  He steps back and scans the trees for more, knowing he will not move her if he fears angering the congos.  But this mama is not angry.  She is just not quite yet resigned.  She watches and waits.   We stand quietly talking and he tells me there were 7 who shocked themselves all at the same time recently.  I take a picture of the number on the pole so that maybe a bridge can be placed here.

Lisa, the Congo with a name  (including corrections and additional information that was sent to me in response to the first version)

Yesterday someone had said to me that the congo Lisa has a better life than most of the dogs around here. (Not a Tico.) Congos are not dogs.  They are not pets.  As I watch this grieving mama, I see how much more like us they are than a pet.  I ache for her and for the protective alpha daddy hanging from the tree to warn me to back away. 

Life imitating art, which imitated life.  There is so much more to say and show than what came out in the book Isabela quiere un congo.  As I capture video of these howling, mourning brothers and sisters, I think of Lisa.   

“Lisa” is a Congo whose mother died on a “cable de alta tension”.   Lisa still has a scar from that fall.  When she arrived in Hermosa Heights, at first she was fed grapes, but after much reading and research by those who were caring for her, she came to be fed only small portions of papaya so that she would still have to go into the mountains to seek the rest of her diet.

Lisa, sitting on the ground

When I see her for the first time, I am startled, but am encouraged by someone who works there to reach out my hand.  In a flash she has grabbed my hand, climbed my arm like it’s a branch and is sitting on my shoulder picking imaginary bugs from my hair.   Is this creature still a candidate for rehabilitation?  I’m thinking the head sitting isn’t going to go over with the other congos in the troop.

Lisa, climbing and playing in a low bush

She walks on the ground, hangs from trees taunting people as they enter the restaurant, reaches for people to play with her, grabs their hands and playfully bites them.   She approaches people and tries to touch them and attracting the affection attention of groundskeepers and employees nearby.

She seems bored and listless most of the time, but entertains herself playing with birds and passing groundskeepers.  Maybe this is what normal congos look like, too.

Rehabilitation is still possible if this does not work, but Vanessa sighs when she learns she was fed grapes.  Congos don’t eat grapes.  Do you see grapes here?, she asks.   She scrunches her face when I guess at her age.  It has been several months since she appeared in Hermosa.  At that point, having little information about Lisa’s story, I assumed the grape feeding was a daily occurrence.  

Fortunately for Lisa, the humans around her are doing their homework.  The municipality was called and has been involved for the last month.   What I saw was a named, touched, fed Congo that resulted in a creature that was so dissimilar from a Congo that she exhibited almost no natural Congo behaviors.  

But what the experts saw was different.  After seeing her playing in trees and eating flowers and knowing that she still disappears into the hills at night, they came to the conclusion that may still be able to reunite with a troop.  She is going into “heat” and may eventually go with a male.  They think there is a possibility that as she matures she can still get back into the troop.  There are now signs up saying not to touch or feed her, which must be excruciatingly painful… for her human friends who greet her on their way in and out of their offices.  She is impossible not to be attracted to.  

I am told of two other stories in which a congo who used to hang around eventually took off and went back into the wild all on his own.

We await a happy ending.

From my observer position, knowing that I didn’t know enough about either Congos or Lisa to do anything, I didn’t do anything.  I did nothing but take pictures for the same reason I don’t buy lottery tickets in Costa Rica.  People walk around selling them and after simply declining many times, I finally started answering my real answer.  “No, thank you.  I do not want to be the American who won the Costa Rican lottery.”  And I do not want to be the American who thought she knew enough about Lisa to know how to help her.  I do not.

She may very well be better off and better taken care of than any dog.  If we think of her, though, as an orphaned baby or if we think of her with the emotional capacity of the mama in the tree mourning her electrocuted baby, depriving that baby of a family is ultimately not compassionate.   She has access to veterinary care and she is doted on by the people around her, but she is lonely.  If she doesn’t leave, she will never mate.  She will never have her own baby.   She will not know what leaves to eat when her stomach is upset.   She will not learn to avoid danger by staying off of the ground.  She will not have a healthy fear of humans.   The only thing to do at this moment is to hold our collective breaths and watch for a young, good-looking male congo who goes crazy out of his mind for Lisa, loves that she’s a little different and wants her to sit on his head and no one else’s.

What happened to this baby that made the troop not stay and howl for her when she wandered away?  When her mother was electrocuted was she injured?  Did the troop stay with her or abandon her?  Did she abandon the troop since her mother wasn’t in it anymore?  Was she abandoned because she exhibited abnormal head climbing behavior from infancy?

We feel responsible for and compassionate toward so many animals, but the congos have a special place in our hearts, I think, because we feel culpable.  It is our use of electricity that has invaded their natural habitat with dangerous high tension wires.  We are more affected by stories of orphaned congos because we need that electricity to live here…. And so we rescue and we save and we rehabilitate and we donate and we build bridges because it is no longer an option to bury these cables in the ground and it is most definitely not an option to live here without electricity.

But we do.  Every once in a while there is a pop that sounds like a canon being fired and sparks fly from a transformer.  At that moment, we do not feel resentful that the lights and the modem and the air conditioning and the stove are dark.  In that stillness that means that a congo touched a wire and blue a fuse, we are quiet.   We look outside and walk to the transformer hoping to find nothing. Nothing means no one was hurt and the congos moved away. 

I have seen Alpha Congos reaching out to touch a wire before leading the troop over it.  It takes higher level thinking skills to essentially exhibit the same behaviors he would if there were a posted sign that said, “Dear Congo Troop, Please do not touch this wire.   Doing so may cause severe shock resulting in serious injury or even death.”

If they can mourn, if they can communicate their wishes clearly by peeing on our heads from high above,  if they can be aware of the danger of electric cables, then we are more responsible, more culpable, more inclined to pay back that debt by trying to build alternate highways from green rope.

The story here isn’t that Lisa is here, the story is that she is here because her mom touched a high tension cable and died.   The lottery ticket that needs to be bought here is the one that will keep Lisa and her future babies safe from a similar fate. 

Playa Huevo

The troop is gone.  This formerly alpha male sits in complete stillness in the low branches of a tree.  He regards us dispassionately as we take pictures.  A congo cannot survive alone.  There is no reasonable explanation for a male congo to be alone other than that he is the ostracized former alpha.  Congos are never alone.   They cannot survive alone.  He does not play.  He does not eat.  He does not move.  His head turns from right to left, but he seems disinterested in what he sees.   My friends express concern.  I express wonder that being here allows me the privilege of watching this part of the congo life cycle.  I am as in awe as I would be if I were watching a congo birth… an experience I hope to avoid.    There is no mourning for a natural death.  It is the unnatural, early deaths of young congos that stops the entire troop in its tracks.  The family refuses to accept that the baby is dead until there is no choice but to be resigned because sometimes shocked monkeys get back up and stumble back to the troop. 

From 12.14.09

THE SHOCKING STORY OF THE CONGO AULLADOR (HOWLER MONKEY) 

We are leaving for San Jose in 14 hours. We should be finishing packing and going to bed early. Instead Kassidy is hurrying with such drive her feet remind me of when she was little and we would spontaneously drop everything to seek whatever adventure her imagination was captured by that moment. We are walking to the guard station in the dark with a camera and a head lamp and a cell phone, to try to figure out what you do with an electrocuted monkey. The congo aullador fell from a branch and grabbed the live wire on his way down. Our friend Heather pulled up with her three small children and we all quietly marveled at him. He was moaning and trying to get up. He looked exactly as one might imagine a drunk monkey. Confused and disoriented and compelled to get in his car even though someone had taken his keys already. One of the three kittens that lives down there, too, was apparently curious and sat a meter away from him, staring calmly. The congo would get up and stagger and occasionally notice her, but no matter how close he came, the kitten wouldn’t move. He tried to climb the rake propped against the guard house, thinking it was a tree. The guard caught it on its way down. Hmm… that’s not a tree. Are you a tree? We called a neighbor who said she would call the monkey rescue place, but he was already responding to the deep howl that was calling him home. Since we had been there, we had been hearing the howler monkey in the tree. It’s the alpha who hollers so that everyone can stay together. Once they lost this one, they stopped and waiting and howled. He took several breaks on his way to the tree. He would stagger and then stumble and rest on his chin for a few seconds and then try again. He never appeared to be even peripherally aware of us watching. He climbed the tree and rested on the lowest branch. Hurt as he was, he would make his way back to that howl and the howler family would sit and wait and howl until he did. 

Stupid kids with a bee bee gun. 

When the young congo falls from the tree near Lily’s Soda, instead of handling it, the neighborhood kids run for Bridget, the veterinarian who spends her days at Aqua Sport.  She supervises the rescue.   He is hurt and needs medical care. In short order the congo’s eyes are covered with a towel to reduce stress.  Handlers only touch him with towels.  As he is moved the alpha male jumps down from a tree, swings to the ground and waves his arms menacingly.  He does not understand that they are trying to help.  They continue howling for the baby as he is driven away in the back of a truck to the vet’s office.  There he is treated with antibiotics and the wound is treated topically while he is gently held with only towels so that he will not hurt the vet. If the family moves on, it is harder to find the right troop and return the baby, so speed is essential.   It is possible that if he is not returned quickly enough that he will be rejected by the troop.  A solo monkey cannot survive.  He is returned within a few hours to the same tree where the family is still howling and has not moved.  They come down the tree to bring him up.  He is wounded, but will recover, thanks to a couple of kids who knew to go get help from someone who knew the monkey rules but no thanks to the couple of kids who thought shooting a baby monkey with a bee bee gun would be a bright idea.   After some serious threats to report them if they are ever caught doing anything so stupid again, they are reportedly contrite.

Some combination of the bee bee gun congo and the shocked congo inspired Isabela quiere un congo, the story of a girl who comes to Costa Rica and decides she wants a pet monkey who will sleep in her bed.   Her misguided attempt to attract one results in the monkey being shocked.   She learns that monkeys are not pets and helps to build monkey bridges.  The setting is the fictional town of Playa Perfecta and the unnamed restaurant bears an uncanny resemblance to Aqua Sport.   Isabela’s behavior is understandable from an over-zealous 9 ½ year old.  The rest of us should endeavor to tell the difference between a dog and a howler monkey and act accordingly.   Myself included.  I am grateful that I was encouraged to let Lisa approach me and that the result was that she climbed up me because following her story became an educational and fascinating journey into how to gently return a Congo to the wild, as these people are trying to do.    

With gratitude to the Playa Hermosa Association, from whom I heard a lovely story, too, about a shocked baby that was rescued and kept safe until it woke up and then was returned a short distance from its family so that they would not see that the baby had been with humans.  She said she soooo wanted to cuddle the baby, but didn’t touch it and just sat beside it.  It was a beautiful demonstration of the combination between compassion and education. Congos walking on green hanging bridges are a just reward for a spectacular effort. 

If we could just hang signs next to the electrical wires and teach them to read….