Life in Phana

Keeping Busy in Phana

 

The Phana Monkey Project is about to reach a crucial stage. A week from now five researchers, all recent Msc graduates in Animal Behaviour from Exeter University in the UK, will arrive in Phana to begin a project which will provide the basis for the establishment of Don Chao Poo Forest as a research field site as well as educational and informational material for schoolchildren and visitors to the forest.

This team will be carrying out most of the research which the Phana Monkey Project needs at this stage. In addition, they will be conducting some research of their own along lines that they discussed last Friday with Dr Joah Madden of Exeter University.

 

NO APE MUSEUM

As far as the Phana Monkey Project goes, we have not been idle in the last few months. We have held meetings with the Phana Municipality to clarify our role and theirs. At least one of the original intentions has been abandoned: the money is no longer available for an "Ape Museum" to be built in the forest. Although the promise of this was perhaps the key starting point for the then-named Macaque Project, I think all of us who have carried the idea forward see abandoning that particular part of the project as a good thing. There was every chance that had a building been provided, there would have been no money available to keep it staffed and maintained; on top of that, building inside the forest would have been a major disruption. There are already two small buildings in the forest which have been abandoned and left to the monkeys to play in -- their main playthings being ceiling and roof tiles, which they love to pull off and destroy.

COMMUNITY CENTRE

The Tetsaban have suggested an alternative to an 'Ape Museum' in the forest. The old market building is to be converted into a kind of community centre, and it will provide three main spaces. At one end will be a community IT centre with 22 computer stations. There will be a similar-sized space at the other end of the building which we will be able to use to show videos to visiting schoolchildren. The central space will be for occasional community meetings, and we will provide an exhibition detailing macaque information and photographs in that space.

The tetsaban is providing the materials for the conversion of this building but the community will provide the labour. In the following pictures you see the headman of Moo 7 and his wife working on the new floor, which they have completed since the photos were taken.

CLEANING UP THE FOREST

Last week we worked with the tetsaban / municipality and some students from the school they run, to clear the forest of litter. It is amazing how quickly litter accumulates, and monitoring it will be an important focus of the upcoming research, so that hopefully we can recommend some practical ways to reduce the litter produced and ensure that litter is removed frequently. Our monitoring will be made more useful because we have established a 'zero-litter' environment before the monitoring begins. This way we should be able to get a clearer picture of when, where, and how much litter is dropped over a weekend, for example. Already the tetsaban have put a new cleaning team in place to collect and remove litter and we are sure this will be a great improvement on the previous 'emergency' cleaning sessions before big events.

DON CHAO POO FOREST RESEARCH CENTRE

The Phana Monkey project has also been working to provide a centre for researchers to use while they are in Phana, and the team from Exeter University will be the first to do so. The building is almost ready, and the only thing which may prevent them moving in as soon as they arrive is that water and/or electricity may not be connected in time. Details of this centre will appear here as soon as all is ready.

ROAD TRAFFIC FATALITY

Last week we experienced our first recorded road traffic fatality, an adult male killed on the road outside the forest just before 8 am. As it happened, Pensri and I were on our early morning cycle ride, so Pensri put the still-warm monkey in a plastic bag (there were still plenty lying around at the beginning of the week) and took him home. Our first thought was taxidermy but it quickly became apparent that no-one locally had the skill and experience to do this; we soon realised, too, that there was litle point in creating a life-like specimen when we have more than 400 live ones! With advice from Prof Dr Suchinda at Chulalongkorn University, we decided to preserve and display the skeleton. The person in charge of the museum in the Biology Department at Chula sent us some insects (in a box, via the Railway parcels service) and for more than a week now these insects have been nibbling away at the cooked flesh and revealing more of the skeleton. When the process is completed we will post pictures of the skeleton and more detail regarding the process. For the time being, here are a few of the photos we took of our monkey soon after the accident. The monkey had been hit a glancing blow on the side of the head which had fractured his skull but not smashed it. Nevertheless, bleeding was still evident through his nose and mouth, so no pictures of his injury are included here. The blow struck him on the left side of his head, the side not shown here. He was a fine specimen as can be seen from his teeth. (CLICK on the photos for an enlarged view.)

 

We have learned a lot from this monkey and hope to learn more when we are able to examine his skeleton so we have named him "Ajarn Ling" in gratitude. He is not the first macaque to give his life to science, but he will be remembered in Phana, for sure.

( This post has also appeared in a slightly different form at www.thaimonkeyforest.wordpress.com . There is much more about the Phana Monkey Project at that site, so I hope you will visit it sometime soon.)

Portraits at Phana House

Year of the Rabbit, that was

I was born in the year of the rabbit and that year comes round every twelve years. For me, it has come round six times so far. Traditionally, the sixth cycle (and the seventh) are celebrated more than an annual birthday here in Thailand. It is considered quite an achievement, I suppose, to see your sixth cycle. I certainly feel a sense of achievement, partly perhaps because I can still remember thinking that 30 years old was OLD AGE, and I could not imagine living that long.

My actual birthday was back in October, but we decided that the best time to celebrate it would be close to Christmas. We ended up with Christmas Eve for several reasons, the main one being that the family was asembling in Bangkok the previous weekend for the wedding of Liew and Ashley. By family 'assembling', I mean that our children Dominic and Darunee, with Jay and Adam and our five grandchildren would all be in Thailand for the wedding and then staying on for some holiday time. Liew and Ashley would be here from England too of course. Our Thai family (Pensri's sisters and their children and grandchildren and her cousins and their children and grandchildren) were also able to come up to Phana, as most of them do each year for a tam boun for the ancestors.

Most people arrived in Phana on the 23rd, Dom and Darunee's lot with us in the house, everyone else booked into Phana Garden Resort. Food was organised, monks invited, a stage put up in the garden, and a marquee, plastic tables and chairs stacked up ready for use. In the morning we were going to feed nine monks (one forgot to come!) and then have a baci su kwan ceremony with one of Pensri's second (?) cousins the spirit-caller. The neice of Mom, the woman who spent several months with us in England in 2011, had offered to dance the benediction dance, and three other young women were going to perform another dance for the baci.

Hundreds of photos were taken, none of them by me on this occasion. It is difficult to make a selection,but here goes.

Presents, this one from my senior brother and sister-in-law:

And more presents:

Beautiful dancers -- worth waiting 72 years for this picture, I think.

Our two 'children', Darunee and Dominic, and three of their children, Polly, Esme and Kim:

The monks beginning their chanting; the senior monk here kindly told me I could sit cross-legged. He could see that I was likely to topple over otherwise!

Most of the guests sit outside on these occasions:

The woman on the right is well past her seventh cycle. She must have attended hundreds of ceremonies like this one. She used to give me massages when I first came to Phana, and I thought she was really old then. Really old, but her thumbs were amazingly strong, and she gave me some of the most effective massage I've had. It was good to see her again because she doesn't get out and about much any more.

And then when the monks were eating, the su kwan ceremony began:

And then the sacred threads were tied around wrists while blessings were muttered. It is usual to wish the receiver good health and a long life but people seemed to enjoy trying to outdo each other by wishing me 100, 300, 600, 1200 years of life! I'm not sure I wish any of those for myself, but who knows.

Then we all had lunch and everyone except the families from Bangkok, Abu Dhabi and England disappeared rapidly, as is the custom. But in the evening we had an entertainment arranged and I'll post some pictures of that very soon.