monkey

Up close and personal with Africa’s wildlife

Some of my favourite moments as a wildlife photographer have been when I’ve been able to get as close to my subjects as possible (without getting eaten of course!) and capture their facial expressions.  There’s nothing like spending several hours just quietly observing animal behaviour on your own whether it’s a haughty leopard staring at you from a tree stump as seen in the above photograph, or a curious baby baboon hanging precariously from its mum’s fur. As long as it’s safe and I’m not too close, I’ll switch off the motor, sit quietly, camera ready and wait to see[…]

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How I become ‘mother’ to an orphaned baby baboon

I’ve had some great adventures in my life from climbing icy mountains to fishing for piranha in the Amazon, but nothing quite compares to the experience of babysitting a smelly, mischievous orphaned baby baboon in Namibia. During a recent trip to Africa I volunteered at the Naankuse Wildlife Sanctuary near Windhoek where part of my ‘work’, alongside food prep, carnivore feeding, game counts and cheetah walks, was to spend the night with a baby baboon, bottle-feeding him and changing his nappy. As my friend Anneli said, ‘good baby practice!” There are currently several orphaned baby baboons at Naankuse  – all bought to the[…]

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The cruel reality of nature

This looks like a sleeping baby monkey but the harsh reality is that nature can be as cruel as it can be cute and fluffy. This is in fact a dead baby vervet. It had just been killed seconds before we arrived. It’s grief stricken mother sat with it briefly and then walked away. Two other monkeys nearby – a mother and baby – had terrible bite marks on their backs so we can only assume that a male vervet attacked both mothers and babies. New dominant males in monkey families will kill all the babies that aren’t sired by[…]

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The cheeky chocolate-cake-stealing monkeys of Jinchini

In the gardens of Jinchini on the coast of Msambweni, Kenya live a band of Sykes monkeys who tear through the neighbouring properties like marauding pirates – sucking the pollen from flowers, licking leaves like their lives depended on it, stealing chocolate cakes, fighting over food and inhaling bananas left behind by the Humans. These comical monkeys, which consist of nervous mothers, gangly spider babies, boisterous and naughty juveniles and the larger ‘dude’ males with their moving caterpillar eyebrows,  series of squawk, barks and squeaks and unsubtle crashing from tree to tree, provide hours of entertainment every time I visit Kenya. They are such[…]

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