We begin our mission to spot an endangered monkey not at the gates of a National Park but by a corrugated iron shed that pongs of cow manure.
Agapito, a thickset Panamanian rancher wielding a machete the length of his leg, is leading the way. This is his agricultural land and has been in his family for generations. As we wend up a steep-sided hill blanketed by cowpat-studded rangelands, Agapito thwacks down any sprouting seedling in sight with a flick of his wrist.
His land is for cows, not primates. And cows don’t eat trees.
We’re here to see the Brown-headed spider monkey (Ateles fusciceps), a threatened primate with a narrow Y-shaped range spanning Panama, Colombia and Ecuador. We’re at the topmost left tip of the Y – the furthest this monkey’s range swings into Panama before being replaced by the Central American Geoffroy’s Spider Monkey.
Our expert guide Alex is listening out for the characteristic calls the monkeys make as they navigate the strips of gallery forest encircling these cow lands. The sound of a chainsaw ripping down forests roars up from the valley below us – an omnipresent reminder of the the key threat brown-headed spider monkeys face: habitat loss. According to a report by the IUCN, if forest loss continues at the same rate as previous years (2004-2019), close to 20% of this species’ forest habitat is likely to be lost by around the mid-century.
For a while, we worry that we’ve come too late. Agapito says he heard the monkeys yesterday, but this morning, the landscape is almost eerily quiet. With each passing minute, the thinning fog reveals lonely, remnant trees – former spider monkey forest habitat – standing festooned with epiphytes amid ankle-high grasses.
Our luck changes when we swap pasture for forest. Ducking through a razor wire fence is like entering a different world. At once, the homogeneity of grazed hillsides is pierced by sort of complexity only present in a tropical forest. The understory bursts with seedlings. The midstorey is a mass of foliage, with tree trunks girded by mosses. And the white sky, which for so long overcast our journey up the hillside pasture, is now almost fully concealed by a wind-swaying canopy.
It’s not long before the spider monkeys are all around us, their booming calls swaddling our senses. One male drops down gracefully onto a low-hanging branch and begins to rattle the tree, warning us back. Agapito tells us that in the past, groups of hunters trespassed onto his land in search of monkey meat. Perhaps this group remember being hunted, as it’s clear they are not happy with us this close.
We head back down the hillside. Leaving the forest is like swapping 4K footage for a black-and-white photograph. As we descend, a herd of cows charge down below us. All told, Agapito has about 90 cows over 45 hectares of land. He tells us that each cow will sell after a year or so of being fattened on these pastures for between 800 and 1300 USD.
What strikes me as the startled cattle herd continues its downward surge is that I’m look at up to $USD 117,000 stampeding pell-mell down the mountainside.
That financial fact makes Agapito’s land an expensive place to conserve forests. But one variable tips the balance in favour of the spider monkeys. So far it’s not tourism. We’re paying Agapito 50 dollars for a few hours on his land – and, as pretty obsessive biologists, we’re the first to ever come here in our peculiar search for monkeys.
Instead it’s water that is defending the monkey’s forest home. Agapito tell us that when the dry season comes, the lands of those farmers who cleared riverside forests runs dry. They have neither water for themselves – nor for their cattle. They have to pay to have water pumped into manmade ponds.
On Agapito’s land, the rivers run year round, filtered through the roots and mosses that adorn his forest-flanked waterways. Water – not tourism – is conserving monkey on Agapito’s land. They are the happy by-product of a landscape better managed.
