Four Taboga Field Assistants (Wil, Elena, Vasco and Lorena) visited “Escuela de San Luis” in Cañas to run an activities morning with the students. The school consisted of 60 extremely energetic students aged between 5 and 11, eager to learn about the world of capuchins. We made a presentation which included various videos demonstrating the different behaviours exhibited by white-faced capuchins and then using vocalisation recordings, we ran a class on how to speak the capuchin language. This included a competition of who could do the best lost call, food peep, twitter and coo impression which when combined with a lollipop as a prize, lead to very enthusiastic competitors. There was something very heart-warming about hearing all the children vocalise a “coo”, the sound used by capuchin infants to call their mothers. 

We ran a game to teach about capuchin diets by giving each student a photo of a food item which they had to choose to either stick onto the poster of a monkey or the poster of a rubbish bin. Food items included fruits, plants and various junk food products. Many students were horrified to learn that capuchin diets include small mammals such as squirrels. In order to teach the lesson that even if a food item is monkey friendly, humans still should not give the food, images that included a human hand with a banana, were to be put in the bin. 

After, a very animated game of Taboga Monkey Bingo was played. Through this, the students learned a bit about how we differentiate each monkey by facial features. And finally, a capuchin face colouring session took place which produced a range of blue and green faced capuchins from the younger years and more realistically coloured white-faced capuchins from the older students. 

Overall, it was a very rewarding and fun morning for us all, seeing children enthusiastic about a species that we care so much about is always refreshing. And hopefully we met some future candidates for Taboga field assistants. We look forward to reaching out to more local schools and running more outreach activities such as this.