Nurturing orphaned monkey full-time job
BOGOTA, COLOMBIA — The tiny night monkey is with Martha Silva 24 hours a day, nestled in a wool pouch inside her coat or beside her while she sleeps. Eight times a day, she pulls out a milk syringe and nurses the 12-centimetre baby like an attentive mother.
The long hours of monkey mothering don’t bother the 54-year Colombian woman, she said, because she already raised two children.
“To me there is no difference. You have to look after each the same. When you give them the bottle, you have to make sure they don’t choke. When I’m working, I make sure he doesn’t get out of the little bag I have. If there is sun, I take him out of the sun,” said Silva, who works with the neonatal unit of Bogota’s Wildlife Reception Centre, part of the capital’s environment ministry.
Silva, who has children aged 20 and 30, began working at the centre west of Colombia’s capital in 2000. There she has nurtured species ranging from birds to turtles to primates.
Now she is looking after a night monkey of the genus Aotus that live in the tropical forests of South America, including Colombia, Brazil and Ecuador. The monkeys got their common name because of their unusual nocturnal habits.
“I carry them with me for a couple of months, in general, or the time that is required,” she told The Associated Press. Her husband and daughter help her with the household chores and cooking while she is occupied with a baby animal.
She never gives her animal charges names so they don’t become seen as pets. In the long term, the centre aims to return them to the wild.
Her latest baby, a male night monkey with dark fur, beige brows and large, protruding brown eyes for night vision, arrived at the centre on Feb. 4, weighing about quarter of a pound. It was brought by a man who said he found it abandoned on the side of a highway in Colombia’s eastern plains near Meta province, said Judith Cardenas, the centre’s chief biologist.
When the monkey arrived it was about five days old and the man said he couldn’t bring himself to leave it to die, Cardenas said.
Biologists at the Bogota centre don’t how this baby ended up being orphaned, but they say the mother may have been killed or lost the baby. Cardenas said Amazon-region monkeys are often hunted for meat, for experiments or as pets.
Silva, a ponytailed woman with nails painted emerald green, made a small bag to hold the monkey, which is still too young to walk. They sleep together and Silva takes the monkey to the centre each day on her bicycle, the baby snug in the wool bag. Every three hours, the monkey must be fed delactosed milk with vitamins added, using a syringe, Cardenas said. In the wild, adult night monkeys eat leaves, insects and small lizards and frogs.