Cebus imitator
Drawn from open occurrence records inside Monteverde, aggregated onto a 10 km grid.
Occurrence records measure where people looked and found something, which is not the same as where the animal is. This is a relative likelihood, not a probability.
Records exist for January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November and December. A quiet month can mean the animal was absent, or that nobody was looking.
The white-faced capuchin is the rainforest's problem-solver, a three-kilogram primate with a prefrontal agenda. Troops of ten to thirty sweep through Costa Rican forest like an audit, turning leaves, cracking branches, unrolling bark, testing everything with hands that are nearly as clever as the brain behind them. Capuchins use tools, rub themselves with citrus and pepper plants as insect repellent, and maintain politics complicated enough that primatologists build careers on single troops. They live long, sometimes past 40, and they remember. In parks like Manuel Antonio they have also learned that tourists mean bags, and bags mean food, a lesson that took them approximately one afternoon.
Loud, social, hierarchical troops that mob snakes and raptors. Grooming settles alliances; squabbles are constant and mostly theater.
Mid-morning foraging parties at forest edges give clean sightlines. Fast shutter, 1/1000 up, and watch the hands; the best capuchin photos are about what the hands are doing.
Zip the bag, hide the food, and never trade snacks for photos. A raiding capuchin is a bitten tourist and eventually a destroyed monkey.