Recently, we have been placing camera traps in the enclosures of several of our Owl Monkey families. There are many interesting behaviors and events that we can observe without actually being in the jungle. Every ten minutes, the camera traps shoot 30 seconds of video when a monkey passes in front of its motion sensor. The benefits of using the camera traps to observe the monkey's behavior are quickly adding up. For example, four months ago we were able to capture video on the night of the birth of Connie and Gustavo's new baby! Here is a video clip from that night. Everything is in black and white because the camera traps use infrared cameras so as not to disturb the owl monkeys throughout the night.
You can see the infant with its parents here!
We have a camera trap set up in Connie and Gustavo's cage almost every night so that we can observe the growth and behavioral development of the infant. At this point, we have collected almost 20 hours of video observations, and have observed several developmental milestones such as the infant leaving the protection of its father and moving about on its own.
