Word: monkeyed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...parents love are gradually losing their universality. Mary Brigid Barrett, author and N.C.B.L.A. president, says she always has to stop and explain Charlotte's Web to teaching students, since half of them tend not to know it. Curious George too draws curious stares; many are familiar with the little monkey but not his tale. "What is shocking is that nobody in education is willing to say there are writers, poems, essays and books all Americans should read," says education expert Diane Ravich, editor of The American Reader. And less incentive for adventurous teachers to look for new ones...
...takes a moment to realize what I am seeing: a monkey in a tree. To be specific, it is a black spider monkey (Ateles paniscus) swinging through the topmost branches of a ceiba tree in the rain forest in Suriname, the former Dutch Guyana, north of Brazil. Thick-furred, with a red face, the monkey moves by sprawling out and brachiating from branch to branch through the high forest canopy; its long, prehensile tail functions as an arm. It pauses and looks down with the cool expression of a teenager. A monkey in a tree...
...then the thought comes to me that this is the wilderness, not a zoo; the monkey is wild; the ceiba tree spreads its lush green cover in a vast tract of 4 million untrodden acres that constitute the Central Suriname Nature Reserve. Except for the few of us in the camp, there are no other people within a radius of 50 miles, nor is it likely that any people have even set foot in most of this land within the past thousand years. There are plenty of other species in evidence: rain forests contain a disproportionate share of the world...
Mittermeier the scientist is all seriousness and wonder. He has written or co-written several books, including a gorgeous, monster-size photographic work called Megadiversity, and hundreds of monographs on his beloved monkeys. A recent paper on a newly discovered species of marmoset, Callithrix humilis, shows the monkey at age two months: studious eyes, a tight, alert face and an aureole of gray and white hair. It looks a lot like Mittermeier, who would not mind the comparison...
...first wild monkey, a squirrel monkey, small and elfin-faced. One hears a monkey in order to see it: it rustles branches or drops a piece of fruit. One's senses grow keener after a while; the idea of coming to one's senses takes on new meaning. I pick up a scent that the others identify as that of a tapir, a large, smooth, big-nosed mammal the size of a small cow. An electric blue butterfly flutters by my ear. Mittermeier snags a vine snake, green and camouflaged in its habitat. Everywhere is a sign of life...