It is amazing how much a dedicated volunteer researcher can achieve in a short time. Laura Brodey was with us for just under three weeks but she left a substantial body of work behind her when she left earlier this week. She located and tracked eight nursing mothers and analysed their interactions with other monkeys. She was particularly interested in seeing to what extent they were willing to entrust their babies to other monkeys and how far they allowed the babies to roam from them.

Here is one mother who interacted with another female for some time during which the two groomed each other: (as always, CLICK on an image for an enlarged view)

You can read Laura’s analysis of these monkeys’ behaviour by clicking on the RESEARCH PAPERS page above.

Laura also began a study of the termite mounds that she located within 10m of part of the “Buddha Path”. She used our hand-held GPS (Garmin Dakota 10) to help her map their location and she also recorded data about each mound. Here is one of them, an active mound and one of the largest:

Laura also photographed a range of fauna in the forest, this being our first sighting of what appears to be some sort of orange-tailed skink:

We had seen this red-necked keelback snake before but these are better photos than we had got previously:

We have been seeing Indo-Chinese ground squirrels for a couple of years now, too, but they are very shy creatures and again this is a better shot than any we had before:

And like Elliot Capp and Liz Cassidy before her, Laura was always keen to photograph the butterflies:

Like these monkeys, we shall miss Laura in the forest and in Phana!