This morning we went back to Lake Manyara National Park to do some data collection. Our assignment was to do an ethogram about the behavior of the olive baboon. We drove around until we found a group of baboons and we started recording what they were doing. They spent most of their time foraging for food items and there was a lot of the young baboons playing. 

He stopped mid-bite to stare at me

 Once the baboons walked away, we would drive around to find another group to observe. We did this for two hours and recorded our observations every 5 minutes. It was a fun exercise and I was with a great group of people. Somehow we spent almost 30 minutes singing the parts we knew to various VeggieTales songs. I still have "The bunny, the bunny, oh I love the bunny" -King Nebuchadnezzar's song stuck in my head.

Mom trying to eat and ignoring her baby

 We saw a lot of babies and their mothers this morning. Baby baboons are so much tougher than human babies. They fall out of trees, get pushed around by older baboons, and their mothers do to not hold them. They have to hold onto the mother's back or belly themselves.

This little guy is trying to eat the sap from the acacia tree

I will say that spending all morning looking at baboons has made me like them a little more. I still do not trust them but they are pretty amazing animals.