The Tití the Group Left Behind

José Marín had been walking through the dry forest for a good while when the wilderness offered up a surprise. It was past midday and the trees already wore that gaunt, stripped look of the seasonal transition — white trunks, bare branches, the ground blanketed in crackling leaves — when, during one of his routine sweeps through the reserve, along the trail that skirts the southern edge of the Fundación Loros, a quick movement in the branches caught his eye. It was a tití cabeza blanca (Saguinus oedipus), alone. And just like that, everything else — including a carpintero gigante he had recorded earlier at another point along the route — was pushed to the background. The individual was male, apparently young, and was moving at great speed through the branches with no group trailing behind him. For Marín, with all his years in the field, something about that didn't add up: the tití is a family animal, a creature of the troop, the kind that doesn't stray even when the forest is calm. Finding one alone suggests it was driven out by its group — behavior unusual enough to warrant close monitoring. The five photographs he managed to take show the dry landscape and the individual threading through the branches. The video was still uploading when the day's survey came to an end.