The Howler Monkeys of Petén, Guatemala
Each year I co-teach a January-term class on tropical ecology in Guatemala and Belize.
One of my favorite experiences when I return to Guatemala is hearing the howler monkeys at night. Their voices travel for miles through the forest, it seems. My students are often alarmed by the noise, because the monkeys will approach silently and then begin to howl in the treetops overhead with voices that seem to belong to something much bigger than a mono aullador, as they are called in Spanish.
During one of my last trips I made this video. We were setting up camp in the Mayan Biosphere Reserve, or Biosfera Maya, en route to Tikal, when several troops of howlers began to sing nearby. We followed the voices to one of the nearest troops so we could get a closer look at these gentle beauties, our placid arboreal cousins. Enjoy the sound.
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| One of the wonders of the Mayan Biosphere Reserve |
During one of my last trips I made this video. We were setting up camp in the Mayan Biosphere Reserve, or Biosfera Maya, en route to Tikal, when several troops of howlers began to sing nearby. We followed the voices to one of the nearest troops so we could get a closer look at these gentle beauties, our placid arboreal cousins. Enjoy the sound.
If you're interested in bringing your students to this fairly
well-preserved rainforest and arranging local guides, you might check
out the Asociación Bio-Itzá, an indigenous Mayan group dedicated to
preserving their forest, their ancestral knowledge, and their language.
They have a small rustic facility on their rainforest reserve and a
Spanish-language school for foreigners (with very reasonable prices) on the north shore of Lake Petén
Itzá, not far from the airport at Flores and from the beautiful ruins of
Tikal.
*****
(A friend tells me he extracted the sound from this video of mine and uploaded it to the wikipedia page on howler monkeys.)