Howler Monkeys

Occasionally, we are awakened very early in the morning (just when it's getting light) by a very strange sound.  It is a deep, guttural, alien-sounding noise.  The source of this noise, it turns out, is howler monkeys that live in the canyon behind our condominium.  There is a tree right behind the building next to ours that they really like - perhaps because it has nice, thick branches that extend almost horizontally from the trunk.  I guess it's a comfortable place to sit and hang out.

Here's an audio clip of the sound the howler monkeys make (you may need to turn up the volume of your speakers to hear it more distinctly):

These monkeys are noisy buggers and given the ominous sound they make, you'd expect them to be quite large.  However, they are pretty average sized for monkeys.  One recent morning the monkeys were being active and I was able to get a few pictures of them:

To complete the audio/visual presentation, here's a video of one of the monkeys making his (her?) way down their monkey tree path:

Mind you, these pictures and the video were not shot on a jungle safari tour, they were shot from our bedroom window.  I just used the zoom lens on our simple little pocket camera - nothing fancy.  It's really fun and interesting to have wildlife, like these monkeys, as well as many different kinds of birds right behind our condo - an added bonus for our experience here in Panama.

Posted by Mark