Born Free

Thanks to the coming of the rains it is newborn baby season at Lilongwe Wildlife Centre.  Not only have the orphan rescues been coming in thick and fast but many of our female primate residents (rescued and wild) have a baby clinging on their backs or belly.

As we always plan to release our rescued primates back into the wild where they belong, we limit interference with their natural behaviours, allowing them to strengthen their social bonds through breeding. We also limit human contact to a minimum and integrate any new orphans as soon as possible with a suitable primate surrogate mother.  This goal must of course be balanced with welfare and quarantine protocols, and as a result most of our baby arrivals will initially go through a month of human surrogate care.  This tends to involve volunteers such as Sarah shown in the picture below not only providing the regular bottle feeds but also the affection and contact that is necessary for early survival.  Bear in mind that this is round the clock care with the weakest requiring hourly feeds, so hats off to our dedicated volunteers who have worked through the night recently and still greet us in the morning with a big smile!

So, we thought we would share one lovely success story with you, in the form of Boo.  Rescued from Nhkata Bay on the lakeshore, Boo has been the light of our lives recently, an adorable and feisty young vervet monkey whom everyone has fallen in love with.  We were however all rather worried about the introduction, since there remained only one female vervet, Britten, who had not given birth to her own this season.    If she didn’t accept little Boo we had as yet no plan B.  But follow the photo story below and you can see just how quickly Boo was taken under Britten’s wing.  Within the hour, we were pretty confident that this was going to be our fastest introduction ever!  A week on and they are still as happy as when their eyes first met…

You can help with the rehabilitation and release of monkeys at Lilongwe this Christmas by buying one of our release a monkey gift cards.

If you would like to adopt Boo for a special Christmas present, or come out to volunteer yourself at Lilongwe Wildlife Centre then please contact Kate at marketing@llwc.org.