Limbe Wildlife Centre

Category: Guenon, Simone de Vries, endangered species | Date: Jul 05 2009 | By: limbewildlifecentre

The rainy season is always a difficult time in the Limbe Wildlife Centre, with many sick animals. This week the rains have been particularly heavy and the results are devastating. Two young moneys, both not even a year old, have died. It is very tough to realize that we have failed to give these animals what they need, but of course what they need most at that age is a mom.

Several times I have written about Bobendina, a young Preuss’s monkey. She was an adorable little monkey, always playing and still sucking her thumb. And although she was with four grown up females who all wanted to fuss over her, she thought she was big enough to take care of herself. A few days ago she was found in the middle of the day lying on the ground. Her breathing was difficult, she was hardly conscious. For about 10 hours the veterinary team tried to keep her alive, but in the end she gave up. The post mortem showed that she had died of pneumonia.

The morning after, Marais was found in pretty much the same condition. Marais came to us as a very small red eared monkey (see blog January 2009). She seemed to have suffered a lot, but after we introduced her to female red eared monkey Aggy, she turned into an almost normal young monkey. Aggy liked to carry her new ‘baby’ and both seemed happy with the arrangement. The only problem was that she refused to take milk from a bottle, so she did not grow very well. In the last month Marais had become more independent and was playing a lot with two young mona monkeys in the same cage. She was quite healthy and lively until that morning. And also for Marais it was too late to help her.

We have buried the two monkeys next to each other with a proper Bakweri ceremony.

It helps to share a ceremony like this with your colleagues, but at the same time I am thinking really hard about the design of the guenon enclosure that we are going to build after the rainy season. The climate in Cameroon is hard, especially for young animals that do not have the protection and warmth of their mom. We somehow have to build something that gives our young monkeys better protection. Should we build in wall heating?

Best wishes,

Simone