Monkeying Around
Pamela and I visited the Limbe Wildlife Center when we stayed on the coast north of Limbe near Mount Cameroon. We never got to see the mountain because of the hazy, overcast skies which have dominated almost every day in Cameroon. Like the Mfou primate center near Yaounde, this old zoo is being used to rescue primates from the bushmeat trade and those taken from the forest for pets. Usually, the older animals are killed for their meat and the babies are left over for pets. The wildlife center integrates the baby primates into their existing groups. They have grandiose plans to put these animals back into nature, but I seriously doubt that they can do that successfully and they did not provide any specifics backing up this wish. Their intentions are very good, but I think the claims of possible reintroduction into nature are more for charitable contributions than real. I think they serve a good enough purpose (that being to educate people about these amazing, threatened animals) as they are without having to do what is probably impossible.
This facility has western lowland gorillas, chimpanzees, a number of monkey species, drills and mandrills. It also has some baboons – ho hum. The highlight for me was seeing drills and mandrills since these are not easily seen in nature due to being in remote locations and because they are very threatened. The drills are an interesting primate because they are kind of a cross between a monkey and a baboon and they are found near the Cameroon and Nigeria border as well as on slandEquatorial Guinea’s Bioko Island offshore of Mount Cameroon that. They had a lot of drills at this facility with most of them in a nice open area, but some were in a very cramped cage. I am not sure why there were drills in the cages, but they were obviously not very happy with their accommodation whereas the ones outside seemed to be having a good time. Maybe they were being isolated for a reason, but I was not able to find the Dutch volunteer that we had spoken to before seeing the drills to ask her why. The mandrills are very similar to the drills, but they have amazingly colorful faces of blue and red. They are found in Cameroon near the Equatorial Guinea border as well as in Equatorial Guinea and Gabon. The facility does not have a lot of these animals and they were kind of hiding from view, but one was near us and we could use binoculars to see the others.
Although the drills and mandrills were of particular interest to me, the gorillas and chimps are certainly the facilities’ main attraction. And they were special for our visit, too, because Pamela had never seen gorillas and seeing the chimps up close certainly makes our chimp experience in Uganda more complete. As always, the gorillas were quite entertaining running around their large enclosure, climbing up the trees and swinging from the manmade contraptions placed in the enclosure. Pamela got the idea about why they are so much more amazing than the chimps seeing their size and seeing the silverback pound his chest. Of course, they are not quite as entertaining and funny as the chimps…
The chimps at this facility are very bad indeed. The signs warned us that they liked to throw rocks at the visitors. I was sure they liked to throw their feces, too. And I am sure they laugh when they do both. We were close to the first enclosure with a male sitting right in front. Others were right behind him wrestling, eating and just sitting and one had a metal rod (part of the fencing?) twisted around her head as if it was some kind of jewelry. The male got very excited and I told Pamela it was because of her. I don’t think she believed me at first, but she did shortly thereafter. I knew he could smell her and he liked what he smelled. Soon he was masturbating away… dirty little monkey with a big grin on his face. Pamela had already seen how they tricked us, scared us and laughed at us in the forest so she knew that we were dealing with a smart little monster. Of course, we could not help, but laugh too. Then another male chimp started to help him with his “problem”. A female in estrus came over and soon we had a real x-rated show going on. I’m always looking for animals mating in nature (number one wish is to see elephants followed closely by giraffes) so I was interested to see my first primate show, but I did not get any photos. If you are wondering… you’ll have to ask me J. We left without having rocks thrown at us and I attribute that to the chimps liking Pamela. The drill enclosure was next and it must have been in the air, water or food because we soon had a couple of very excited drills going at it. This was in a totally different manner, but, again, you’ll need to ask for the details or stay tuned for the poor photo that I took J. The humorous part was that an employee laughing with us threw some food into the enclosure and the male drill immediately abandoned his mate for the food. Not too different than humans and I am sure introducing the drills to television would result in a complete breakdown in their reproduction capability.
Everyone else was well-behaved until we got to the second chimpanzee enclosure. They were really wrestling and screaming a lot. We were much further away and possibly down wind of them so they ignored us. But after we passed by a group of secondary school boys passed us going the opposite direction and we soon heard commotion. We turned to see the chimps throwing rocks at the boys. I’m not sure how it started, but I did see the boys returning the rocks and I was suspicious that the supposedly smarter primates had been the instigators. I watched kind of hoping one of the boys would get a rock off the head for a good lesson. Actually, I was hoping the chimps would resort to their nastier arsenal which I am sure would not have been returned! The boys left and the chimps calmed down. I took some pictures of a chimpanzee up on a pole from a good distance and I really could not see what she was doing. Now when I look at the photos I see that she was urinating. That’s fine except the photo sequence captures her catching the urine in her hand and then drinking it. And some people think chimpanzees make nice pets!
Other than the monkeys which were in small cages as compared to Mfou and so I ignored them for the most part, the other highlight was seeing hundreds of African Grey Parrots. They were off to the side and we had to cross a drainage ditch over a shaky “bridge”. They were in two cages, but there were also dozens of others that were wild and visiting their caged friends. I was taking photos when we were asked to leave with the employee explaining that this area was not open to the public and thus explaining the scary crossing. I am sure the caged animals were also recovered from the pet trade, but I am not sure why they could not be released back into the forest or why it was any better to have so many in these large, but not large enough cages. To me, it seemed like a great place to breed an illness and then allow it to get out to the natural birds that were able to visit their imprisoned brethren.
Tags: Africa, cameroon
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