Taipei Zoo - Hanging Monkey

My favorite animals to photograph in a zoo are the monkeys.  My gosh, they are so human-like!  Especially the bonobos, which in my experience are only on view in the Cincinnati Zoo (a darn good zoo).  It's easy to see why a person would fall in love with these critters and even take one in for a pet...a huge mistake, of course.

When my daughter Allison was in Girl Scouts we met a lady - a friend of Allison's awesome troop leader - who kept monkeys in her house to share with the public as part of her job as a professional clown.  The desire was strong to find a way to go to her house just to see how they are kept and to interact with them, if we should be allowed.  Upon reflection, however, we decided it wasn't a good idea, as even the small ones are smart, strong and very unpredictable.  Just couldn't expose our precious daughter to anything like that.

Didn't get a good picture of any of them, but this past December I was sprayed by a wild howler monkey in the jungles of Belize.  At least they were purported to be wild - my opinion is that they were fed and cared for by the people in a nearby village so they'd stick around for the tourist trade.  In any event, we were hiking on a trail and kept hearing this very loud, continuous howling, even when we were quite a distance away.

Turns out that it was coming from the male in a family that hung out close to the village, and he would go nuts every time a tour group would approach his girlfriend and baby, who stayed low in the branches to get snacks and attention from humans.  When we got there I decided to stay apart from our group, and was rewarded with extra attention from this guy...guess he felt I was vulnerable since I didn't stick with the pack.