The Fear of Monkeys - The Best E-Zine on the Web for Politically Conscious WritingThe Large-Headed Capuchin - Issue Thirty-Eight
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The Lar Gibbon  from Christiano Artuso The Large-Headed Capuchin is a highly intelligent New World monkey species found in the South American countries of Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, living in the Amazon lowland and submontane habitats. In Colombia they live in deciduous and evergreen forests, but they prefer habitats with an abundance of palm trees where they eat the fruit. They are primarily frugivorous and insectivorous. They also eat invertebrates-and even eat small vertebrates, like frogs or small mammals. Most of their food consists of fruits, leaves, stems, flowers, and seeds. Their fur is coarse and thick. As far as coloration goes, they are mostly dark: their limbs and tail are a dark brown, while the hair about their backs and shoulders is a lighter shade of brown, erring toward tan, and lighter still on their stomachs. Their faces are rimmed with white hair, with black around the eyes and snout, almost resembling a raccoon. They have long, strong thick prehensile tails which can be used like an additional limb. Males are generally larger than females. A typical adult male large-headed capuchin weighs about 3 kg, though they can be as small as 1.35 kg and as large as 4.8 kg. Adult females range from 1.76-3.4 kg, but on average weigh about 2.4 kg. The body length of these monkeys is typically about 55.9 cm, and their tails equal their bodies in length. They are diurnal and arboreal. They leave the trees to forage for their food, and are known as extractive foragers-they look for their food embedded in the ground, and take the necessary measures to obtain it. Capuchins are the only monkeys other than chimpanzees that have been observed using tools to extract their food from the ground in the wild. When it's time to eat, the dominant male gets first dibs, and those who he's closest with-females or younger monkeys-are allowed to eat while the lower-ranked monkeys must wait their turn. The typical size for a group of large-headed capuchins is around 18 monkeys, though populations in Brazil have been noted to be as small as 7 individuals and as many as 21. Groups consist of more females than males. Large-headed capuchins are preyed upon by large birds, and keep a look-out for threats from above. They are so wary of birds, they fear them all indiscriminately. They attract mates by urinating on their hands and then rubbing them together-a common practice among tufted capuchins. They use various vocalizations, including alarm calls and calls to reorganize the group, while foraging. They also utilize facial expressions. High-ranking individuals will bare their teeth at lower ranking individuals as a sign of approval; lower-ranking individuals will bare their teeth at each other as a sign of friendship. Tufted capuchins (of which the large-headed capuchin is a subspecies) have a gestation period of 180 days. Infants are born one at a time, and are extremely small-typically around 0.25 kg. Because of their small size, they are heavily reliant on their mothers, who feed their young for nine months and carry them around on their backs. As of 2015, the species was listed as Least Concern (IUCN, 2020). Their population is declining, however, which is a result of degradation of their habitat. Also, where their habitat coincides with human habitation, they're hunted heavily, sometimes for food. It has been reported that in some areas of Peru the large-headed capuchin has been hunted so heavily that they no longer occur in that portion of their range. There is also an illegal market for these monkeys, and they are sold for anywhere between 20 and 50 dollars apiece.

   


A Trick My Father Learned in Prison

by

Donal Mahoney

I'm not saying my father hated the English, God forbid. If he were still alive, he'd hate to hear me say that. He'd correct me right away and say he didn't hate the English. Truth be told, he despised the English, especially the Black and Tans. They were the troops the English sent to take over Ireland before, during and after the Troubles in 1916. That was the time when the Irish first fought seriously for their independence.

My father would tell me often about what the Black and Tans did to him in 1920 at age 16 when he was captured while running guns for the IRA through marshes in rural Ireland. He knew the marshes in County Kerry very well because he was reared there as a farm boy. The IRA thought a boy like him would never get caught. But a boy carrying guns was not a common sight in the marshes of County Kerry.

The Black and Tans put him in a cell with a dirt floor. He sat on that dirt for a month after they broke both his legs with rifle butts. They were in no hurry to summon a doctor.

A cellmate gave him a pad of paper and he would sit on the dirt writing his name backwards with his left hand until his signature matched the normal one written with his right hand.

Decades later in America, after he had been expelled from Ireland and had married my mother and settled down with a job in Chicago, I heard many stories not only about his life in a jail cell but his life milking cows and goats on a dairy farm as a young boy. He had to do that if he wanted his oatmeal for breakfast.

I was in grammar school in the Forties when I heard a lot from my father about the Irish seeking their independence. His stories were a lot better, I thought, then paying 25 cents on Saturday afternoon to see a Western with Gene Autry at the local movie house, even if the movie was followed by 25 color cartoons.

One day after school I had some friends over at the house. My father, a man of many moods not identified yet as PTSD, took a pad of paper and with a pen in each hand signed his name forward with one hand and backward with the other simultaneously. He then held the pad up to the long mirror in the hallway and, of course, the signatures were identical. My friends and I, crowded around him, were very young but even if we had been adults we would still have been amazed.

After my friends went home, I asked my father how he learned to do that and he told me about the Black and Tans, their gun butts and that pad of paper the cellmate gave him. Rather than write letters to his family and upset them by letting them know he was in prison, he practiced writing his signature backwards with his left hand. This was one of a number of odd things that my father had mastered, all of them interesting to a child, but not worth going into at the moment or I'd be typing for a long time.

Eventually I grew up, went to college, married and moved to another city and my father wanted to come and visit us and see his first grandson. Fine with me, I thought. I just hoped his affable mood would last and not disappear during the visit. I didn't want to impose on him the nighttime crying of an infant since he had lived through that with me as a colicky child and my mother said he didn't weather it well, having to get up early for work the next morning. So I decided to get him a room at a nice hotel. However, I picked the wrong one.

I made the mistake of making a reservation for him at the Henry VIII Hotel, named after the English monarch. I can still hear my father yelling when I mentioned the Henry VIII Hotel over the phone.

Indeed the Henry VIII was a nice hotel decorated in an English style that would truly have enraged my father. It was torn down not long after he died. But he had never been a guest at the Henry VIII, having stayed at another hotel free of any English taint. And his visit went well, all things considered. No outbursts or commotion.

Had he lived long enough, however, my father probably would have been far more upset to learn years later that his grandson, after graduating with honors from the University of Chicago, went to England to study at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.

Tuition, room and board and books were free but Oxford, of course, was in England. And it was England that had sent the Black and Tans to Ireland and it was the Black and Tans who had broken my father's legs.

Sometimes I think about what it might have been like had he lived long enough to learn that my son had won that scholarship. I imagine calling him to tell him the news. And suddenly I can hear him yelling louder than when I told him about the Henry VIII Hotel. This time he would sound like a muezzin in a minaret on top of a mosque. Only he wouldn't be summoning the faithful to prayers.


One of many nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes, Donal Mahoney has had poetry and fiction appear in various publications in North America, Europe, Asia and Africa. Some of his work can be found at http://eyeonlifemag.com/the-poetry-locksmith/donal-mahoney-poet.html

 

 
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