Monkey luvin'

Over the last few days our search for the lions has been unsuccessful and so we’ve been taking in all that Moremi has to offer. Elephants at sunrise, water birds playing, impala grazing and monkeys mating.

As we were sitting just south of Jesse’s pools, Graham was filiming some impala and monkeys feeding together. These two monkeys, seemingly too young to be so randy, began to mimic a behavior they have obviously witnessed at some point in their elders and attempted, rather awkwardly, to “mate”. I found this to be quite fitting giving all the wedding of David and Ari, the anniversary of Uncle Dan and Aunt Risa and the very soon wedding of Janey and Brian.

It provided a rather ammusing moment for us all as the young female buckled under the weight of the male and then chased him off in annoyance.

Once back in camp I decided to look up such behavior in our rusty well read Behavior Guide to African Mammals (Richard Despard Estes) of which I am also learning the latin names of all the mammals in Moremi as well, and learnt that certain social presenting behaviour in monkeys looks so similar to mating behaviour that telling one from the other may be difficult. Though I can assure you that the motions involved in this performance seemed more on the romantic side than on the just saying “hello how’s it going” side of things.