| Early one morning last
September, a MINAE vehicle crawled up the long steep drive to biologist Gloria
Dempsey's Lake Arenal mountainside home. Two Ministereo de Energia and Ambiente
employees approached the wide veranda, one carrying what seemed to be two small
animals. He handed them both to Gloria. One animal was a baby Howler Monkey hardly
bigger than her hand. The other was a stuffed teddy bear the men had given to
comfort the baby, whose mother had been killed in the night by dogs. The tiny
"mono," cold, its eyes closed tightly, clutched its surrogate mother."What
had happened to little Sami, as Gloria named the infant, represents, she says,
one of the three main hazards facing Costa Rica's monkeys today. Besides death
at the hands of domestic animals, the monkeys are often struck by cars or electrocuted
when traveling on power lines. "In
a recent widely sent email, Gloria wrote that, "It has been "the tragic
circumstance of Sami and |
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| Gloria Dempsey
and Chico | |
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many others like him that has prompted me to look for solutions to the problem
of destruction of natural corridors to monkey feeding trees." The "destruction
of the corridors forces the monkeys to descend to the ground to move from one
group of trees to another on their feeding circuits.
Meanwhile, Sami
has survived. In September, Gloria estimated Sami's age at about five weeks. Baby
howler monkeys are born silver and slowly turn a gold color, and by the time they
are three months old, they are black like their parents. Sami was partly silver
and gold." At that time, she says, he
weighed 350 grams,about one-half pound. "I
first put him in a plastic animal carrier with a heating pad and began to give
him warm milk with an eye dropper," recounts Gloria. "In a few hours
he opened his eyes and had warmed up, and then I began regular feedings every
2-3 hours around the clock. Yep middle of the night, too. I began feeding him
warm cow milk because I had nothing else and knew he needed to be rehydrated quickly.
Shortly after, I went to the store and purchased infant Nursoy, a soy-based baby
milk replacement." Attached
to the recent email was a list Gloria has compiled based on research done by Ronald
Sanchez at the University of Costa Rica in 1991. It is a list of the indigenous
trees that best provide the leaves, flowers, fruit, and seed pods on which the
monkeys feed. The list, which may be obtained by emailing the address given below,
is topped by species of ficus, guava, and circropia trees. Gloria
and husband Jim Nadolski moved to Costa Rica in September, 2000, and built a spacious
veranda-skirted house on a mountain-side property overlooking the lake and the
hilltop town of Nuevo Arenal. "Being a zoologist by profession and having
a deep love and appreciation for all animals, I came here for the thrill of living
with and studying theses wonderful wild animals," she says. "In the
six years I have lived in Arenal, I have seen many changes on the face of the
land. Many more families have moved here and more of the natural habitat is now
disturbed. Much of the natural forest habitat was long ago destroyed by local
people to raise cattle. This we foreigners can't take the blame for. In fact,
we foreigners in many instances have had a positive influence on the environment
because we came here to protect the natural habitat and have reforested with hundreds
of trees. So, for those of us who have purchased some acreage that was previously
pasture and reforested to try to restore the natural habitat, we have been a positive
influence." However, Gloria
finds a new threat to the habitat she is tryng to save. "Now what I am seeing
is some people coming in purchasing huge tracts of land to 'develop' it into small
'parcellas' with huge amounts of construction, doing major destruction to some
critical feeding areas of many wild animals, including Howler Monkeys." "Howler
Monkeys are by nature predominately leaf eaters," she explained. "They
have a very |