Palo Alto, California

Here I sit in the main quad of Stanford University with my blowgun. I normally would be in Kenya right now, doing my summer fieldwork with baboons (and, given that my site is at least fifty miles south of the equator, I guess that would technically count as my winter fieldwork). However, things are a bit dicey politically in Kenya right now and the family consensus was that I'm not setting foot on a plane to there.

Thus, the Stanford Quad instead, looking for some primate here to anesthetize, as I would normally bedoing now to the baboons. However, the university has emptied out for summer break, making this task non-trivial—barely a student around, not even the ones whizzing around on bikes or in-line skates, always a particular darting challenge. Hardly even an emeritus professor tortoising across. So for lack of alternatives, I may have to return soon to my lab and catch up on what everyone is doing there.

Robert