Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Intruders...July 13, 2011

Poaching is on the rise again. We have heard several dogs and baboon groups alarm calling as well as gun shots very close to camp.  At the same time we are seeing two baboon groups in the our groups range. One group in particular, the Kayai group, has taken up temporary residence in one of our groups most frequent sleeping site. I expect that at one point our group and this group fissioned into two and that they are closely related. Unfortunately for our group, the Kayai group is larger and seems to displace our group who have moved to other sleeping sites nearby. As the Kayai group isn’t habituated it makes it hard to know what is going on. Time will tell .We are collecting as many samples as possible for genetic comparison but the samples cannot be identified to individuals. Luckily none of our females are cycling. They are either pregnant or have dependent, nursing infants so no wiley males can come in and have “sneak copulations” with our females.

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