Fond Farewells and Happy Greetings

As often happens in field projects like ours, we’ve had a shuffle of old and new volunteers and PhD candidates these past few weeks.  We said goodbye to Johanna Rode who has finished with her field work and is back in England to begin the write-up of her results.  We welcomed old friend and new PhD candidate Tatiana Iseborn who will attempt to learn even more about these elusive species.  Our beloved volunteer Jennifer has left to visit family in Surabaya before heading back to America and we greeted new volunteer Matt Leonard who is currently soaking up all he can about lorises.  Many fond farewells and happy greetings for the month. 

T. Iseborn in the field.

Tatiana Iseborn completed her Master’s in Primate Conservation at Oxford Brookes University in England.  Her field studies focused on population surveys and acquisition of local hunting patterns of pygmy slow lorises in northeastern Cambodia.  While there, she closely lived and worked with Julia Hill (our field station coordinator in Java) who was completing her own Master’s project assessing the local knowledge and trade routes of local primate species.  Living and working together in the stressful conditions of the field is not easy, but these two have a strong working relationship and are looking forward to their time together in Java.

Tatiana will be continuing the nightly observations of our lorises and adding a few new research questions of her own.  Her first visit to the forest for observations was very successful and she was amazed by how easily you can spot the lorises here and was able to spend time with our loris Shirley and family.  During her time in Cambodia she was able to see only 5 lorises from afar so you can understand her excitement!

T. Iseborn schooling volunteers on insect trapping.

Great teamwork with T. Iseborn and J. Hill!

Matt Leonard comes to us from Brown University in America.  He will be staying as a volunteer for 6 weeks and assist us with our nightly data collection, education programs and online media outreach.  His enthusiasm and willingness to learn and try new things is exactly what we look for in a volunteer and we look forward to getting to know each other better in the next 1.5 months.  Lucky Matt was able to see lorises his first night in Cipaganti! 

T. Iseborn, Matt Leonard, Jennifer and tracker Aconk.

Consistency is never the norm in field work and we look forward to working and living with our new arrivals while saying a fond goodbye (for now!) to our departures.