Surrounded By Monkeys: What This Photographer Loves About His Job | National Geographic

I've been studying gelat monkeys on and off for eight years now, and I've seen some incredible things. Whether it's the live birth of a gelat infant from just a few meters away, to um some intense fights where I'm just kind of stuck in the middle and geladas are ignoring me and proceeding to tear the faces off of each other.

Geladas um just have very kind of moments that as a researcher you don't necessarily focus on, but as a human being that you can appreciate. Just being frozen solid next to geladas on a really windy day, where you share a hail storm together, sitting under a ledge waiting for um the conditions to change. You get to understand the individual personalities of them, and that is something that I didn't necessarily appreciate before I started working here, uh was how varied individual animals of the same species can be.

Why do I do this? Um, I I it's hard not to talk in cliches, you know, and when someone asks you that, you you're just constantly having natural beauty thrown into your face. When you're sitting up here, like every sunset, every sunrise is breathtaking. You know you're looking out over the rift valley, and you know if you have a bad day, all you have to do is look to the east and realize, oh wait, you know, I'm standing a few thousand meters above, you know this huge pastoral expanse with cliffs right next to me near a herd of, you know, hundreds of monkeys.

Like you know, life isn't so bad. In fact, it's really interesting.