Sad stories about macaques

Well, at the last post I said that the next one would be about funny stories of the macaques. However, last days events have made me change my mind. We all hear about why a species is endangered, the menaces it faces, such as illegal traffic, but when you see it and realize how such small things can cause such huge effects…

I have 3 sad stories, and I hope no to experience more in the future (though it’s quite unlikely…).

The first and the second one occurred on the tourist group we work with. It’s a group of macaques that is habituated to tourist and, in fact, a considerable amount of their daily feeding comes from them. In comparison with the other group, with a much more natural living, these are huge; females have extremely large swelling in comparison with the other females and even a 3 years old female has a big one.

This group is probably the one everybody sees when goes to see the famous (and dead) Gouraud’s Cedar tree; since part of their home range lies on the area near the shops for tourist and a zone prepared for barbeques and picnics. Partially because of this, the road that goes through their territory is relatively busy. This is dangerous for animals (and people) everywhere in the world, but here is even worse.

One of the main features of the traffic in Morocco is that it’s completely crazy. There is always people and animals crossing everywhere without any care and the cars, to don’t be less, also goes pretty fast, sometimes in the middle of a road of two directions. Actually, it is a miracle that no more accidents occur. In the part that I talk about in particular, there is a curve where you cannot see what is at the end from the beginning until is too late. Instead of going slow in this stretch, people usually go pretty fast and the most careful ones maybe touch the car horn.

Then, it’s no surprising that accidents take place, and one poor macaque had to suffer one.

It happened one of the days during my (everlasting) training. I was practicing an hourly scan and I was going to cross the road when I saw an orangish ball of fur in the middle of the road; it was a macaque infant. I called the Czech, pretty scared, and with some difficulties I could make her understand what I had seen (my spoken English is kind of Tarzan level most of the times…sigh). She told to the Californian by radio and we remove the corpse from the road and put it under a tree. The Californian went to check what female was without her infant and the Czech and me stayed with the body without knowing what to do. Then, one of the one year old females came close to the corpse and started to groom it. It was really sad for us but, fortunately for them, they don’t seem to realize of what happened to their partner. Of course, this wasn’t the first time that something like that happened and won’t be the last one…So, please, if any of you drive through this area , go slowly and be careful.

The second story has more to do with the fact that it’s a very accesible group. We were collecting data in the afternoon when most of the monkeys started to scream and run towards the picnic area. The Californian followed them running to see what happened and write it down but few seconds latter he told us through the radio that someone was stealing a monkey (well, in fact he had to say it twice cause we didn’t get it at first…damned Babilonia tower). Me and the PhD student went then there running but we didn’t know where to go and the Californian no longer replied on the radio so we stopped to ask (too much in my opinion), till someone guided us. Then we came into the forest again and found all the stuff of the Californian on the ground; coat, pocket pc, radio…I got scared then, thinking that maybe the baby macaque wasn’t the only primate missing. We tried to look for then and I separated from the PhD student. When I was pretty far she told me on the radio to come back to the tourist area and that the Californian was fine. We picked him up relatively far from the tourist area; he managed to run behind the guys long enough to make them drop the macaque. Then, we went back to Azrou and the PhD student warned the forest commission about the incident.
From this we should take two conclusions. One, which will be reinforced by the last story, is that no one should ever have a primate as pet (actually, any exotic animal). That was the reason because, presumably, the macaque was close to be kidnapped, they are appreciated as pets. The second one is that never, ever, in your damned f%&$ing life cut the communications with the only people that can help you, it’s a matter of survival.

Finally, the third story has nothing to do with our groups of macaques, at least as far as we know. We were coming back from the field when, pretty near Azrou, we saw a male Barbary macaque close to the road. We stopped and went to see him. We could approach him and he didn’t even try to escape, he only teeth chattered to us. We tried to feed him without any success and we were for a long time trying to keep him out of the road. He looked like if he wanted to kill himself. He was pretty weird and seemed to have a problem on his legs. Furthermore, he had the mark of having had a rope or something similar around his neck. We assumed that he was probably an abandoned pet. We couldn’t make anything for him. We saw him the next day and it looked that he wasn’t eating anything, since he was in an area full of acorns and there wasn’t any leftover that indicated that he was feeding on them. We didn’t see him again, probably he died, unable to live in the wild after a life of captivity...