“In the blink of an eye, six of them hurtled towards my tree”

Woolly monkeys in the Colombian Andes

- BY MANUEL FONSECA

TWENTY METRES UP, THE CANOPY looks like a highway. Different shades of green, yellow and grey leaves fuse, creating the illusion of an endless rainforest.

I spent most of 2013 in the canopy of a cloudforest in Colombia, collecting insects and arachnids from inside bromeliads and mosses. I was studying how their availability influences the diet of the Colombian woolly monkey. Despite being one of the largest monkeys in the Americas, this species invests almost one-third of its diet budget foraging for insects. In contrast, large primates such as chimps invest about 4 per cent of their diet budget looking for this sort of protein.

During the course of my research, I sighted the monkeys from the ground every day, and they likewise saw me following them. In time, I learned to recognise them as individuals. I dreamed of encountering them up in the canopy, on their level. Would they approach me? Or would they run away? These are the sorts of questions that keep a primatologist up at night.