Robert has tied strips of orange ribbon to mark where he will stop and talk about the forest, the natural cures, poisons dispensed by plants or animals, and the monkeys. Robert explains howler habits while we gawk hopefully upward. There are six types of howlers in the world. The black howlers exist only in Central America. They live in troops of one dominant male, females, and babies.
Howlers can reach up to four feet and fifty pounds, with a life-span of possibly thirty years.
Troop sizes range from four to ten. By 1994, the sanctuary population was large enough to enable transferring more than sixty howlers to the Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary, eighty miles south. The population in the sanctuary seems to be growing by about ten percent a year. That percentage matches statistics for the other Central American country developing ecotourism, but any comparison between Costa Rica and Belize ends there. In Costa Rica, local peasants were never consulted about conservation or educated about ecology, and farm protected land out of necessity.