Feeding the monkeys

Here you see a white faced Capuchin monkey who is taking a piece of banana from my older son. I like the eye contact between the two of them. The monkey stared at my son from a tree branch, assessed that my son did not pose a threat and was making a friendly hand out offering of food, then the monkey quickly scampered to the end of the branch and quickly reached out to take the banana piece right out of my son's hand, keeping eye contact with my son the entire time.

Monkeys would take banana pieces out of my son's hand so quickly that it was hard to get a photograph of the moment of contact. I told my son that getting a photo of the point where the hand of man and the hand of monkey were reaching out and making contact was a bit like the central scene in the middle of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

My son was standing on the bow of a boat on a wildlife excursion on the Tempisque River in Palo Verde National Park. It is a wetlands area that flows into the Gulf of Nicoya just east of the Tamarindo area. The boats will pull up to a particular part of the woods where the monkeys have trained humans to stop and, if you are so inclined, you can feed the monkeys.

Tomorrow I will show a photo of what happened right after the above exchange of a banana piece.