Colobus Trust

Category: Fundraising, Primate Rescue/Rehabilitation | Date: Jan 15 2009 | By: colobus

At The Colobus Trust, the phone often rings with news of dead or suffering animals that have been involved in road accidents or electrocuted on power lines.  So on Thursday 8 January it was a more pleasant surprise to receive a call about an animal that wasn’t injured but still needed our help.

The call was from a local resident about a bush baby she had been rearing as a pet for about a year.  Its wild instincts had started to kick in and it had bitten her earlier in the day so she decided it was time for the Colobus Trust to get involved.

Peter, Tim and I went round to pick it up and found it in a laundry basket – not the sort of place a bush baby is likely to feel most at home.  We brought it back to the vet clinic to give it a once over and it seemed particularly annoyed so it went straight into a carrier cage.

Over the next couple of days we worked to make one of the rehabilitation cages suitable in the quarantine area.  These cages are designed with larger primates in mind and Peter had once put a bush baby in and it was able to escape.  We had to reduce the hole size by winding wire around each individual opening to make the cage more secure.

To help save resources, and as a poetic form of recycling, we were able to use snare wires which have been collected from local forests over the past months to complete the job.  It was a long job but finally the cage was complete.

On Tuesday we were able to furnish the cage with a selection of foliage and branches from trees in the garden to enable the bush baby to have adequate cover during the day and to provide leaves to make a nest for sleeping.

Then came the transfer; true to form he was not happy at being woken in the middle of the day just to move into another cage.  Finally in he snarled and hissed at us in such a way that you wouldn’t think we had saved him from a life of captivity. Although they look cute and cuddly they can be very aggressive.

He seems to have settled in much more now and is certainly happier than he was.  The plan is to begin opening the cage in the evenings so he can go out exploring.  However it is uncertain whether he can be released in to the gardens here permanently.

Bush babies usually form small groups of mother and offspring or occasionally small bachelor groups.  The males use urine to mark boundaries of their territories and can be aggressive to intruders.  At the cottage there are already a group of bush babies which come to feed in the evenings so only time will tell if he will be accepted.

Because of this there are added pressures on the Trusts resources to continue feeding him until he is ready to be released; this is in addition to the seven vervet monkeys which continue to be housed at the Trust until they have built up the skills to survive back in the wild. The vervets are also rescued pets, some of whom have been with us over a year.

Any donations would be welcome to help with the upkeep of the bush baby or the vervet monkeys; while we try to feed them on wild foods when possible, in the dry season the possibility reduces so more supplemented food is required, all of which needs money to buy.  You can help us by using the “donate” button on the right hand side of this blog. All money donated goes directly towards helping support the Colobus Trust and helping us do such work.

Like other non-human primates, bush babies are considered likely sources of diseases that can cross species barriers and so they are not a good idea when considering a pet.  They are wild animals and while they may seem very cute, they have sharp teeth and can inflict a painful bite. Better to choose a cat or dog which have been domesticated specifically for this purpose.

Tracey Stenson, Colobologist

(Photos by Tim Jukes)

Tags: bush baby, Monkey, pets, vervet

No responses yet