A Monkey In The Hand Is Worth Two In The Bush

This beauty on my lap is Coonga. She was a rescue monkey at the Centre but now is wild, well wildish! She is still keen on human cuddles and hand cut fresh fruit and comes down the tree from her now natural habitat to spend time with the humans and rescue monkeys on their daily outing to the jungle. Today she sat on my lap for half an hour. She is very cuddly and we think she is pregnant too!

Every day the 9 rescue monkeys get taken to the Jungle just outside the Centre for their two hour play come rain or shine. There are a couple of older females in the group that are almost ready to go wild, and they are around two and half years old. There is a male howler monkey that sits and waits for them and he is we think the father to be of Coonga's baby as we have seen them being intimate. Anyway this fellow is pictured on the right, with the white balls! He is definately a male. He comes close enough to check us out and all the rescue monkeys playing, but never close enough to humans to touch. We just admire him from afar, whilst he admires all the teenage female monkeys in our troop! The younger monkeys are really scared of him and they all go a bit crazy when he appears, so we have to hold them tight by their tales until they calm down!

Also today, I was looking after a baby squirrel, who's mother got killed by the electricity wires, and he - Leno is now care of the centre until he is old enough to fend for himself. The picture is not that great but he is really tiny.

Oh and today I got bitten by one of the naughty monkeys, on the arm. It's okay though, no permanent damage done, we just have to be a bit careful when they reach that funny age. Same as teenagers really, you never know what to expect!