Kids are funny.  Especially kids entirely covered in hair with superb motor skills.  Some of my favorites:

Akamera:  Yesterday Akamera found a weird type of food called misoke.  Misoke kind of looks like what you would have if you scalped a dirty-blonde rastafarian.  In fact, that’s exactly what it looks like: dreads that hang in odd directions, flopping about.  The good part of misoke is the hair roots (or whatever you would call them), but they are a bit difficult to extract.  Akamera put the food (fruit? vegetable?  I have no idea…) in her mouth and gamboled up a tree, dreadlocks swaying and smacking her, the whole thing almost as big as she was.  She sits on the tree and tries to bite off some root.  She struggles.  She twists.  She almost falls out of the tree.  She fails.  Frustrated, she begins bounding up and down the tree, shaking the thing like a dead rat, swinging it in her jaws and hanging from a branch at an odd, gravity-defying angle.  I keep hoping she’ll wear it as a hat.  Eventually, she gives up and just spends several minutes cuddling it in the crook of a tree before dropping it to the ground.

Unarasika (and friends): Three juveniles sit intently watching the ground.  They are transfixed.  Sufi and I walk closer to see what all the fascination is about and find a hairy caterpillar-y thing inching along the ground.  Unarasika, possibly the most generous baboon I know (baboons are not known for their generosity, per se), not sure what else to do, begins to groom the thing.  Mind you, this caterpillar is approximately three inches long and half an inch wide.  It is not huge.  But there is stuff stuck on its little hairs and, by God, Unarasika is going to help it with them.  So, she picks the little nits out of the caterpillar’s fur, happily chomping on her spoils as she goes.

Ukita: Ukita thinks he’s a badass.  Next to Yai, he’s by far the smallest member of AC troop, but he doesn’t seem to know it.  Or care.  The other day two groups met each other — AC and DC, if anyone’s been keeping track — and it’s not uncommon (or uncouth) for the older boys to get together and wrassle.  Adult males can’t do this because males from other groups are sworn enemies, like Batman and the Joker or dairy and physical exertion.  But juveniles can have a heyday.  So, the older juveniles begin to tussle, Yanani and Yagobi being the only ones of any size capable of playing from AC (DC has a bazillion juveniles, so they brought a small army).  And then suddenly Ukita appears, bounding over, and just sort of jumps on the biggest juvenile he can find.  Surprises the guy so bad, he runs off a bit.  Ukita weighs about as much as my shoe, I’m sure.  He then parades around the other big boys for awhile, before getting bored and trotting back to find his mother so he can persist in whining for the opportunity to nurse (he’s been doing this for three weeks now).  Failing that, he eventually jumps on one of the big males, humps him as a sign of dominance (he’s straddling the guy’s back, barely able to hold on, nowhere near the normal dominance-humping-position), and then collapses, lolling on his stomach, along for the ride.

Wambura: The tiniest living baboon that I now study, Wambura belongs to BA troop.  Wambura’s mother, Wizara, comes from the school of hard-knocks (or so she pretends), and isn’t into taking guff.  In reality, Wizara is pretty high on the totem pole, but she has things to do and males to groom (well, Sufi…she likes Sufi…a lot).  Wambura, being a typical infant (just enough black hair to make you think she has mange, bits of pink skin showing up in the weirdest places), likes to play.  She’s testing out all her new appendages and spends a lot of time running up tree branches and launching herself, full-force, onto Sufi’s face.  Sufi, thank God, is a patient male.  Wizara, on the other hand, could use a few lessons.  I have seen her swat her own child aside so many times, it’s a wonder she still HAS a child.  She’ll tug Wambura by the leg and chuck her aside, swat her in the face, send her flying, but Wambura just gets up and jumps on Mom again.  Brain damage, I’m thinking.