Friday, March 11, 2011

Monkey Hi-Jinks

MoBo got very adept at tree climbing. He could climb really, really high and experimented with "free falling" and bouncing around on small branches. The bad news was: he refused to associate with his natural relatives. One evening while we were at the house, he got out of his cage and for the first time attempted to reach the house site via tree limbs. This was a HUGE endeavor for him as a few other squirrel monkeys were in the trees around his cage. He got way up high and started to get a bit panicky and started his "Mama, Mama, Mama" shriek in Monkey language. And then one of the most amazing things happened..... a young female monkey approached him and very kindly and gently reached out her arms to him............he wasn't about to have any part of it and promptly threw a fit and almost fell off the branch. We were holding our breath because at this point there was no way we could rescue him. Again the female monkey went over to him and reached out to him.. and he wailed and thrashed around in the branches. The female monkey was clearly distressed, and she attempted to reach out to him a couple of more times before she realized he was not going to cooperate. Monkey Boy fumbled his way through the rest of the tree branches and made it to the house where he started running towards me and promptly fell through a hole in the floor. ( We had temporary flooring in the pole house.) My heart stopped, but his little head popped up through the hole and he scampered over and clung to my ankles, His favorite clinging location at the time. I was very impressed with the behaviour of the female monkey. It was one of the sweetest gestures I've ever seen in the animal world.
Monkey Boy had gotten so good with his tree escapades, that when a troop of monkeys came through one day, I put him on a tree and encouraged him to climb. He was willing as long as I awas


in his sight, so I backed off and encouraged him to climb higher, HIGHER, HIGHER! The other monkeys were jumping around as they usually do, not real close, but definitely interested in the little baby monkey who seemed oblivious to them. He refused to look at them and would not accept their advances. Several monkeys "closed" in on him and was getting closer when he went into panic mode again and rapidly found a way down the tree, and came hopping like a grasshopper to where I was standing and promptly climbed up the legs of my overalls! He couldn't get any further than my knees and it looked pretty funny with a tail hanging my pants leg. Of course, by this time I was shrieking and pulling his tail to get him out of my pants...

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