Posts Tagged ‘monkeys’

Dec
23

Gift of Grub: Primates

Posted by in Feeding Our Animals,Primates

We all eat to live (although some of us live to eat) and primates are no exception. In fact, if you go to visit monkeys and apes in nature, what you will probably see is foraging and lots of eating.

Here at the Houston Zoo, we spend as much time preparing animal food as the animals do consuming it. From the Commissary, where the dietary items are delivered and freshly prepped, to the primate kitchen, where the ingredients are made into individual diets, we are busy nearly all day making sure our animals are well fed.

Primates are primarily vegetarian, so we have a great assortment of beautiful fruits and vegetables to turn into monkey meals.

They get most of their essential nutrition from their primate biscuits: dense little packets of grains, vitamins and minerals that we feed early in the day, when everyone is the hungriest —  sort of like making sure children get their spinach before they can have dessert. Then, throughout the rest of the day, our animals are working hard to look for the rest of their diets, just as they do in the wild.

Part of making sure that our primates stay healthy is making sure they expend calories prior to taking in calories: they work for a living by looking for food that is scattered or hidden around their enclosures.

The bulk of their diets are made up of the many leafy greens that approximate the vegetation that they eat in the forests of their native habitat. The remainder of their food (depending on the species, of course) is usually fresh produce: from blueberries to avocados, these animals get the best, the most healthful and the most delicious of assortments. And, of course, we throw in a lovely array of insects that are the smattering of protein that many of our primates love to crunch on. Mealworms, waxworms, crickets and goliath worms are a tiny bit of dining entertainment that our animals have come to appreciate.

The best part of being a monkey (at least an Old World Monkey, from Africa or Asia) is that most of them have cheek pouches.

These handy pockets are useful for cramming as much fruit into your face as possible and then going off to eat it leisurely and privately, without competition from more dominant group members. For the keepers and guests, watching the animals literally “stuffing their faces” and enjoying their food is the best part of the entire diet process!

Written by Lynn Killam, Primate Supervisor

How much does it cost to feed your family for a year? At the Houston Zoo, our annual grocery bill adds up to more than $600,000! With a bill that big, imagine the impact that your support could have. Your gift might help purchase a tasty steak (or ten) for our tigers. Make your tax-deductible donation at www.houstonzoo.org/gift-of-grub. or, click our our CONTRIBUTE tab on Facebook!

You can email development@houstonzoo.org for more information.

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Aug
17

Borneo Travel Log, Part 2

Posted by in Conservation,Featured,Primates

This article is part of a series of journal entries by Natural Encounters Supervisor, Amanda Daly, on her recent trip to visit the Kinabatangan Orangutan Conservation Project in Borneo.


21 May 2009: Our First Wild Orangutans

 Crack!

 “Did you hear that?” It was the heat of the afternoon, the worst time of the day to see wildlife, and Martina and I had retired for a post-lunch nap to our room at the guest house of Danau Girang Field Centre.   

Crack-thwack!

 I did hear it.  “Maybe Ian’s home.”  A bird researcher named Ian Vaughan, the only other occupant of the four bedroom cabin, was rarely there and, in our previous dealings with him, had not seemed prone to making loud cracking noises.

 We decided to go check it out.

 Thwack!  At first the sounds seemed to be coming from a bedroom on the other side of the cabin but, as we headed that way, we heard a loud Crack-crack! Smack! from the small sitting room behind us.  We looked at each other, eyebrows raised.  The sitting room was empty.

Macaque through window screen. Photo by Martina Stevens.

Macaque through window screen. Photo by Martina Stevens.

Crack! We looked up in unison.  The sounds were coming from the roof.  Outside the screened windows lining the back of the cabin, the trees were full of long-tailed macaques.  Now, unlike silver leaf monkeys and proboscis monkeys, long-tailed macaques are widespread in Southeast Asia and relatively common around the Kinabatangan River.  Most of the residents and researchers get about as excited about a long-tailed macaque as a Houstonian gets about a squirrel.  But I don’t think I could ever get tired of watching these scrappy monkeys.  Their slender gray shapes weaving in and out of the trees, they crashed from branch to branch as they made their way toward a fruiting tree that stretched high over our cabin.  Crack!  The rowdy monkeys were dropping fruit and pits on the roof.  Mystery solved.

Martina and I were more than happy to give up nap-time to snap photos to watch the macaques negotiating with each other for the best foraging spots.  Periodically, one of them would notice us moving behind the window screens and would pause, surprised, trying to see inside.

After about an hour, Benoit showed up with his head of facilities, a Malaysian man named Zainal, to plan some work at the cabin.  We surrendered the living room to get ready for our evening boat trip to look for wildlife on a nearby ox-bow lake. 

 A few minutes later, Benoit called us back.  “Listen.”

Phoebe and Pisang. Photo by Min Poh.

Phoebe and Pisang. Photo by Min Poh.

And I heard a sound I knew well from my days as a primate keeper but that was, for me, completely out of context in a forest: the high squeals of an irate baby orangutan.  These were followed closely by the low gutteral utterings of a placating adult.  We couldn’t see them so we hurried outside to the back of the cabin and peered through the foliage at our first wild orangutans, just a few yards away, a dark red female with her baby, about a year and a half old, a bright ball of fluff.  The ball of fluff was having a little bit of a meltdown.

 We were soon joined by practically everyone in camp, maybe ten people including Marc Ancrenaz, the Scientific Director of Hutan and the visionary behind the Kinabatangan Orang-utan Conservation Project.  Based on years of experience observing wild orangutans, Marc interpreted the scene.  The mother orangutan was trying to make her way through the trees and underbrush to the fruiting tree over the cabin but the baby was justifiably alarmed by the twenty-odd macaques scattered across the intervening space. 

Phoebe and Pisang. Photo by Min Poh.

Phoebe and Pisang. Photo by Min Poh.

Rachel Henson, one of two Danau Girang research assistants, put some names to what we were seeing.  The two orangutans tended to visit the field center about once a month.  They had named the mother “Phoebe” and the baby, a little female, “Pisang,” Malay for “banana.”  The tree attracting all the wildlife was locally known as sengkuang (Dracontomelon costatum).  We picked up one of the unripe fruits the primates had allowed to fall to the ground, a marble-sized pit, covered by a thin layer of fruit and a tough brown skin.  It tasted like lemon.

 As we watched, Phoebe moved a short distance from one sapling to the next, about twelve feet up from the ground.  Pisang whined shrilly in protest.  Phoebe turned back, croaked comfortingly, and held her hand out encouragingly.

 “She’ll cross there,” Marc predicted, pointing to a thick branch arching over the undergrowth separating the orangutans from the sengkuang tree.  He was right.  We watched as they made their way, Pisang gradually calming, the scary macaques having backed off somewhat in the face of the crowd of human spectators.

 Soon the spectators faded away in their turn, returning to their own pursuits and eventually even Martina and I decided to return to the cabin and let Phoebe eat in peace.

 But the forest held one more surprise.  We heard a crunching sound, as if someone was outside crushing cans.  We went back to the windows in the sitting room to find that the clean-up crew had arrived. A handful of bearded pigs, so named because of a row of white bristles running down each side of the snout, were milling around under the sengkuang tree, wagging their tails, happily munching the unripe fruits, pits and all, dropped by the primates.  The macaques had returned in force and were moving around over the pigs with their characteristic lack of subtlety.  Phoebe and Pisang stayed out of sight high above the cabin in the sengkuang tree. 

- Amanda Daly, Natural Encounters Supervisor

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Aug
12

Borneo Travel Log, Part 1

Posted by in Conservation,Featured,Primates

This article is the first in a series of journal entries by Natural Encounters Supervisor, Amanda Daly, on her recent trip to visit the Kinabatangan Orangutan Conservation Project in Borneo.

20 May 2009: The Kinabatangan

 After a few minutes on the river, all the time crunched up on airplanes was already worth it. 

Dusk on the Kinabatangan

Dusk on the Kinabatangan

We were sitting in a boat under a big tree of wild long-tailed macaques, at least twenty of them – lithe grey shapes moving along the branches of a tall tree overhanging the water.  We could see mothers with clinging infants.  Goofy juveniles scattered along the branches and banks, watched us unconcernedly, curiously.  They were our first wild monkeys in Malaysia, my idea of heaven.  

When you think about it, a day is an amazingly short span of time to travel from one point on the globe to the point almost directly opposite.  It still feels like a long time when you’re doing it.  Martina and I had flown from Houston to Chicago, from Chicago over the Bering Strait and down to Soeul, and from Soeul to Kota Kinabalu, a large city (“Kota” means city.) by the standards of the Malaysian state of Sabah. 

Produce stand on the way to Danau Girang Field Centre

Produce stand on the way to Danau Girang Field Centre

Since then, we’d had a night’s sleep and a day-long car ride that took us from the foot of Mount Kinabalu to a small eco-tourism village on the banks of the Kinabatangan River.  There we met a young Malaysian man named Salen and he and our host, Benoit Goossens piled us and our luggage into a small blue motor boat for the last leg of the journey to Danau Girang Field Centre.  Owned by the Sabah Wildlife Department and supported by Cardiff University, the new field center provides resources and a home base for research that will contribute to the conservation of the Kinabatangan region of Borneo.  Benoit had come up with the idea after hearing about an education center that had been built in the forest near the river and then fallen into disuse.  Now, Benoit directs the research facility out of those buildings.  Our visit fell just as the first year of active research was coming to a close.
 

Palm fruit truck

Palm fruit truck

The river was wide, the water approximately the color of chocolate milk.  The fresh, cool air felt great.  Trees lined both banks, mostly natural forest but on the hills to our right, the green patchwork gave way to a uniform canopy of palms.  To the naïve eye, the palms are pretty but we’d already spent hours that day driving past them, oil palms planted in row after row after row, the monotony broken only by the occasional sign, in English and Chinese, declaring the name of the plantation.  A guard shack.  A cluster of scenic wooden houses on stilts, a smattering of fruit trees, a little mosque with a metal dome on top – a village for the workers.  It’s a pretty crop, dark green fronds shading light green ferns that grow across the ground and up the trunks.  But it creates a monoculture where few animals can survive for long.  Smaller scale, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing.  It doesn’t deplete the soil terribly.  Many animals can move through it for short distances.  But they sell the palm oil all over the world.  In the United States, we eat it in our snack foods.  It’s in our lotions, our cosmetics.  So there’s a strong incentive to plant palm and now it covers about 16% of Sabah state.  Elephants are killed to keep them from eating the new palm chutes.  Orangutans venture in and get lost.  And starve.  So I was concerned to see the palms even here in the wildlife sanctuary so close to the river that forms the backbone of the ecosystem.

Proboscis monkeys over the Kinabatangan River

Proboscis monkeys over the Kinabatangan River

But soon we had passed the palms and five minutes later, we were at a tree full of silver leaf monkeys, harder to find and more on their guard than the macaques.  As our boat approached, they ran nimbly to the safest spots at the very ends of their branches where they perched regarding us with a certain amount of suspicion.

Sunrise and sunset are the best times to see wildlife on the river.  Monkeys and other animals like to sleep over the water where they have a clear vantage point to spot potential predators.  The river also provides a built in escape route.  However, dropping into the water and swimming to safety is a strategy of last resort.  The river is full of crocodiles.

We saw so many animals – several more troops of macaques, a rare storm stork, it’s dark, graceful form silhouetted overhead, and a rhinoceros hornbill, the first of four types of hornbill we’d see during our stay. 
Martina and Benoit at Mt. Kinabalou

Martina and Benoit at Mt. Kinabalou

There were big white egrets that looked, to my untrained eye, like the ones on Armand Bayou back home.  Finally, we saw proboscis monkeys, distinctive even from a distance because of their large size and tawny color.  Benoit had spotted them with obvious relief, having put pressure on himself to find some for us to see.  The first ones we saw crashed away from us, arms and legs spread as they soared from one branch to another.  As the sun sank further, the proboscis settled down in their trees.  The next troop let us come closer and we got a good look at arguably the strangest looking monkey in the world.  They have long fleshy noses and big round bellies full of leaves.  The young ones have a round-eyed, perpetually startled look.  Benoit pointed out the breeding male, distinguished not only by his size but also by having the squishiest nose and the roundest belly of all.

By the time Benoit and Salen helped me and Martina carry our bags up the ramp from the boat, the sky had darkened to a deep cornflower blue.  As we walked up the path toward the lights of the field center, I still couldn’t believe it – Borneo!   

- Amanda Daly, Natural Encounters Supervisor

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