I'm from Winter Springs, Florida, and I study Biology and Environmental Studies. I started climbing trees at New College with Professor Meg Lowman, a tree canopy scientist. I was fortunate to have an opportunity to work with the National Geographic Expedition Project in Panama, where I did all of the canopy rigging on a documentary.
One of the great things about New College is you get a chance to do a thesis. I was able to use my love of tree climbing towards my thesis and actually catch sloths in Panama. I worked with the Smithsonian's Tropical Research Institute and to work with professors who are mammal specialists and I got a chance to climb trees for a couple of months at a time and radio-track sloths. I caught them and brought them down out of the trees, put radio collars on them and took blood, hair samples and skin samples. It's really neat that I was able to combine my passion of going up really to high places with my thesis.
In Panama, there are many different species of monkeys that live in the trees, and the biggest are called Howler monkeys. One day I was climbing this huge tree, the largest in the rain forest. I was about 210 feet up --that was the first time that I climbed that high-- and I got to the very top of the tree and sat on the branches. I was very tired and I looked next to me and there was probably 35 of these Howler monkeys just staring at me. They've got pretty large teeth and I was a little afraid that they were going to bite me, but they just started 'hooing' me, 'hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo.' Then one of the babies walked towards me on the branch and came sat in my lap and was just so intrigued at my clothes. The baby kept looking at me and just sort of smiled and laid around and walked away. After that, all of the monkeys were very nice to me and they didn't bother me at all --- they thought I was pretty interesting!
