Leeches in my Pants!

I imagine it will take me the entire year to get a half decent picture of a langur. They are too far away for my lens. One of the rangers has a 500mm lens that is huge! How nice would that be?! But, of course, he also carries around a tripod and devotes entire days to taking pictures when he doesn't have to concentrate on collecting data. It is frustrating because I never have my camera with me when I see the cool stuff in the forest. I just can't carry it with me everyday, it gets in the way. A REAL photographer would slog through it and lug everything around I guess, but so far I haven't been able to convince myself to do that everyday. I had an unexpected day off (April 20th) because the previous two days I spent thirteen hours each day in the forest following a langur group. Although most of that time is spent sitting and waiting for them to move, being ever alert and aware of their presence is very tiring. Anyway, so I used my day off to tidy my room and catch up on typing emails. It still works like college where I live in my room and throw stuff in piles until it gets to be too annoying and I'm forced to do major cleaning and laundry. And, like college, I started with little physical stuff, but things seem to accumulate.

Did I tell you about the problem with my pants? Most of my field pants have mesh on the insides of the pockets (and some of the shirts have vents on the backs with mesh). The leeches find this and have easy entrance to your pants! So, I've been wearing a shirt under my long sleeve shirts to tuck in and that helps, but I can't do much about the pants. I don't want to sew the pockets closed, that would be stupid. I also tried duct-taping the pockets closed for the day, but it is too humid and the tape doesn't stick. So, now I'm all paranoid about checking my pockets and crotch periodically during the day for leeches. Who would have thought that would be a design flaw!