Another month is here already and winter is on it's way, everything is looking much drier at the VMF and looks as though fire season is here early this year. The monkeys are in full swing of mating season too so lots going on between the troops and we expect to see quite a few babies this year.

This month we have seen many visitors including a visit from 65 nine year old school children from Rainbow school. We also saw the return of Brandi & Sean who brought another group of 12 students from Ball State University for 3 days during their field school to study vervet behaviour. The students were able to go in with the babies, juniors and some were even lucky enough to be able to go into the blind enclosure. They not only observed the monkeys but also spent time helping with volunteer tasks such as firebreaks, construction and monitoring so we thank them for all their hard work and hope some of them will volunteer with us for a longer stay in the future.

We have recently updated our website with a fundraising page with a list of achievements our fundraisers have succeeded in this year and thank you all who participated. We are currently updating some of the photos in the galleries so please have a look at the latest updates. With the help of all you pro-active volunteers out there, we have managed to purchase the microscope with built in camera and are now working on our next project being some more brushcutters to help us with our firebreaks.

We have also started to go green with recycling and have at last found somewhere local that we can take our sorted rubbish to. It's second nature to many of our overseas volunteers but unfortunately here it can be difficult to find places. In addition to recycling, I have been mixing up some environmentally friendly, safe, non-toxic cleaning products to use at tent village and in the cottage in place of chemicals - not only are they green, they're better for our health, cheaper and just as effective with some lovely aromas!

In this edition you will find our regular troop updates, news on the completed volunteer upgrade cabin and new microscope for sickbay!

Welcome to:
Julie Kirkley, Hayley Caufield, Suzanne Moelands, Sean Smart, Jamie Yarger, Jackie Lorge.

Things have been progressing very well in Skunkey over the last couple of months. The firebreaks have now been completed around the outside of the enclosure, big thank you to everyone that has been working on them for their hard work! They are looking fantastic. The firebreaks on the inside of the enclosure aren’t going quite as fast, but I’m working on them slowly, but surely!

Honey Bear has been moved into B2 with the other juniors that are being integrated at the moment, she has settled in very well with them, and is having a great time playing with Dino. She has been out into the enclosure a couple of times now, and has made a nice bond with Hawk already, which is very good to see, and hopefully will help her progress within the troop and build her confidence! She is already not wanting to come back home which is a very good sign.

The integration of the rest of the juniors has also been going very well. They are all beginning to make friends within the troop – Dino especially seems to be able to play and socialise with everyone, including Spike’s baby, Lee, who he often plays with. Jappie is loving going out into the enclosure still and I rarely see him when we are out, he is off playing with his friends in the troop and hardly ever comes back for reassurance.

It has been wonderful to see the change in all of them over the last couple of months, they are all becoming far more independent, even Devon and Jessie are venturing further away and socializing with the troop a lot more – including Red, which is very brave of both of them!

It hasn’t been such a good time for all of the monkeys in the troop recently though. Poor Big Boy seems to be having a bit of a hard time recently, Bevin and Red have begun to really mature and turn into the beautiful, adult males, that I always knew they would become. However, this has spelt trouble for Big Boy, who has found his position isn’t quite as secure now as it has been in the past. So, it looks like we have a new alpha male in Skunkey… Red! I think he will be a very good leader, as he has such a nice nature, but it is a bit sad to see Big Boy slipping in the ranking as he has been leader of the troop since the very beginning. But, he and Medusa seem quite happy spending their days together in some of the quieter parts of the enclosure…so maybe, this year Medusa will finally have her own baby, so she will no longer have to play auntie to the younger females babies!

All of the babies are doing extremely well; they are all developing quickly into monkeys now, no longer babies who are entirely dependant upon their mums. Lee and Reggae especially are really maturing; they have begun to join in with alarm calls, and spending more and more time away from their mums.

Jinx has changed a lot, he has now got his second coat of hair and seems to be growing by the day! Jasmine is continuing to be a fantastic mum, she is patient with him most of the time, but she has begun to discipline him as well, which he is not overly happy about, but its all part of growing up! He loves playing with his adopted older brothers, Mo and Sammy, they are very gentle with him when they are playing, Jinx does try and join in when they are playing by themselves, but they do get a little too rough for him sometimes, when he makes a hasty retreat back to the safety of mum.

Thank you to all the volunteers who have been working at Skunkey over the last couple of months, your hard work doing fire breaks, watering, eradication is very much appreciated by me, and all of the monkeys in Skunkey. 

Well Sickbay has been on top form this past month with many things happening and many volunteers giving us their time and skills to help us achieve our goals.  One of them being the successful integration of all the Juniors into SAAV enclosure.  They had their first night out as a group one week ago and now there is no stopping them! They are making great use of their new introduction cage (SAAV B) for eating their breakfast and dinner in, with the help of whitey and then are rattling at the door to go back out again.  It’s brilliant to see them all bouncing around during the daytime and then settling to sleep in the trees as the sunsets in the evenings. Vibrance has found a favourite tree (made just for a princess!) and Scooter has been full of himself even chasing Tripod out of the enclosure! We have had another successful release into the blind enclosure with a young monkey that arrived in about 1 month ago named Divet.  Divet arrived with possible head injuries but has now made a full recovery.  For the time being we have let him in the blind enclosure to make some monkey friends to help him settle in.

Sickbay itself is running smoothly with the great addition of a Microscope which is helping Arthur greatly.  We are busy collecting fecal samples at present which Arthur is busy studying and working on.  Indy is finally back! Wahoo! So a big smiling face joins me and Hilde every morning for our day of work and she says (in an Indy voice) “its mint to be back”. Our 12 bouncing babies this year are doing great and love all the volunteers, jumping around, swimming in their bath and rolling in all the dust! Fraggle is very partial to red grapes and Madam just never stops smiling! They are now sleeping in sickbay at night and spend the day in SAAV C. Hazel still gets out into sickbay most nights and enjoys her midnight feast of bananas and everyone else’s dinner!

A special thank you to Cameron for all his hard work and commitment during his past 4 months with us, he has been a great volunteer and has built some great relationships with the monkeys helping us with integration.  And also to Trisha for her amazing generosity and kindness to all the monkeys at Sickbay.  They have enjoyed their new cosy hot water bottles on these colder winter nights and all of the extra food she has been donating.

Some other well known monkeys you may want an update on (as I have had a few emails from some of you) are ‘George’, who is still doing great and enjoying his daily grooms from volunteers especially from Hayley who took a great liking to him!  ‘Chico’ who is enjoying life with Bobby in her new bigger introduction cage, and ‘Gedafie’ who has had endless cuddles from everyone recently and who has grown in confidence so much. 

So from The team in Sickbay we thank everyone for their hard work recently and just want to give Arthur’s new head ties a mention, they do look good and go well with the keyboard playing!

Thank you to Sylvana & Anne Mieke for raising the funds for the new intro cages at SAAV - much appreciated!

I'm really pleased to announce that a new microscope with built in camera has successfully been purchased for sickbay and Arthur has already been able to identify types of parasites and therefore treat some cases much quicker. We now have enough funds to purchase the phase contrast kit to advance the technology even further. We can take photos of the slides and send them to various endemics to help us analyse and build up a database for vervet monkeys.

We have discovered that there are no blood values for vervets so we also need to take a large number of blood samples to develop a blood value for them, any vet students coming out this year???

Thank you to all those who contributed, the fundraising is going extremely well and really does show what can be achieved with your help. Don't forget to view our new fundraising page on our website with this years achievements and our next projects.

(Click here for link to fundraising page).

25th April 08 - Claude-Alain Fournier (previous volunteer) donated 250 Euros towards microscope

Robyn Stoward raised 80 AU dollars from schools for the microscope

Alex Robertson has raised a total of 800 pounds - one major contributor was from Vince Cowling & John Leonard (Vanguard Oil & gas) who donated 250 pounds. The rest of the names who donated will be thanked and listed under our fundraising page on our website shortly.

Alex has written an article below on how she came to raise the funds needed for the microscope.

Alex is due to come out as a volunteer on the 1st June and will stay in our new 'Libelela Thaba' cabin. Here's her article on how she managed to raise funds towards the microscope and vervet forest.

I have been crazy about animals all my life. My passion for Vervet Monkeys started last year when I was travelling around Botswana and Zambia.  The little cheeky monkeys used to steal the bread from the camp and stared with very judgmental eyes (or horror eyes, I’m not sure) at me when taking a shower from a bucket above my head in a mini-tent under “their” tree. They were so cute and so beautiful, I had to love them; plus they never peed or pooed on me!

When I came back home from Africa I decided I wanted to do something more meaningful than travelling in a truck taking pictures of amazing animals that some psychopaths shoot.  Thanks to lots of research and a volunteer’s travelblog I got to know about VMF.  I contacted Josie and some of the volunteers through Facebook (Facebook is not such a waste of time as my boss thinks!) and decided I wanted to volunteer. 

It did not take me long to realise how amazing the project was and how much help was needed, therefore I was determined to organise a fundraising within my friends, family and colleagues.  I had never done it before so I really did not know where to start. I did not have time to go and visit them one by one asking for money and also I knew people wouldn’t have the time to come to any kind of event I could organise.  At last I decided to prepare a power point presentation (the wonders of technology), full of cute pictures (not ones with judgemental eyes), some funny bits and plenty of facts. I sent it to everybody I could think of.

As expected some people ignored the email but the ones who responded have been incredible.  Some people started forwarding my email to their friends and thanks to that I have met other people who have donated money and items. They also have been trying to contact pharmacies and other suppliers they know and they think could help.  I met a lady at work who is also crazy about monkeys and has sent my email to half of Scotland; I even think I’m famous now ( I’m not joking, the other day somebody stopped me in a bike shop and told me she had seen my presentation, she didn’t gave me a penny though!). So far I have collected almost £800, some blankets, baby bottles, bandages and some stationary plus I’m famous so it worked!

I would like to thank again all those who took the time to see my presentation and most important those whose hearts were moved by the Vervet Monkeys and have contributed one way or another to this cause. I also want to say thanks to Josie and the VMF for giving me the opportunity to do something as amazing as this.  Finally I want to say thanks to my beloved husband who has supported me on this crusade, without his support this would not have been possible plus he has made sure my English does not totally stink. He will be compensated by a month of bachelor’s life when I am away.

I’m so looking forward to volunteering in June; I can’t wait to go and work with VMF helping all those little monkeys which finally will pee and poo on me.

See you soon!

Thank you Alex and all who helped, we look forward to seeing you soon!

In our last newsletter, we mentioned how Neil Wilson had kindly donated a cabin and came up with the idea to use it for volunteers as a private upgrade cabin. The idea is to use the additional funds to go towards our vervet forest project and encourage other volunteers who are not so comfortable about staying in a tent.

It didnt take long for Arthur, Ryan, the workers and the volunteers to have the concrete base ready and the cabin was soon delivered and erected free of charge by 'Cumfy Cabins'.

Picture drawn by Hellen Bersacola.

Deb and myself went on a shopping spree for all the trimmings inside and Alyssa was busy making the curtains outside of hours after establishing that the sewing machine wasn't working (which has since been fixed by Tricia!)

The cabin is fully equipped with a double bed, bedside cabinet, rechargeable camping light, mosquito net, fire area outside with wood, wash bin, waste bin, mirror, rug, outdoor solar light and 2 camping chairs.

The name of the cabin is 'Libelela Thaba' meaning 'Mountain View' (translated from Sotho with Maggie's help) and will have a wooden plaque shortly with 'Neil's hideaway' underneath. It's situated halfway up tent village path on the left hand side (if facing downhill). There is no electricity in the cabin and volunteers still use the showers and toilets at tent village so as not to lose the social feel of the place.

Anyone wishing to come back and have a little luxury, please enquire. We have already booked it out for June, some of November and Dec so reserve your spot soon!

Mary was the first person to stay in Libelela Thaba cabin for a week so she could spend time with her daughter - Jamie who is volunteering with us for 10 weeks.

Donations this month:

16th April 08 - Kathleen & Lee Healy (Aoife's parents) donated 250 Euros
25th April 08 – Lucy Radford (previous volunteer) 10 pounds
26th April 08 – Henry Shields (previous volunteer) 50 pounds
7th May 08 – Cyd Rossen Herrmann (previous volunteer) donated $50
7th May 08 – Mary Ellen sent R40
18th May 08 - Felicity Green donated $25 for her brothers birthday
Rachel Anne Henry (previous volunteer) has set up a standing order of 10 pounds every month

Gifts from our volunteers:

Tricia - bought many gifts for the foundation, some of which include new automatic water feeders, fruit for the monkeys, and she's even covering our chairs in the cottage with some nice ethnic print (a woman of many talents!)

Alyssa - bought blankets for sick bay and dried fruit for the monkeys

Hilde - bought a measuring cup and bottle brushes for sickbay

Vanessa & Daniele - donated R100 towards new spades to help with firebreaks

Susie - donated some rakes and shovels

Abbie - donated some baby bottles and blankets

The following previous volunteers have successfully recommended a friend to volunteer with us this year:

Hellen Bersacola
Anna Bachman
Alex Mumbauer

Whilst it may seem to you it’s been a long time since pen has been put to paper to report news up at Goliath, to us it seems like only yesterday. On reflection however having done our arithmatics it has in fact been over 4 months and for this we sincerely apologise.

We are now pleased and ready to announce the new additions of Tigger and Speedling in to our paradise called Goliath enclosure. If only all integrations were this easy Goliath would now be overflowing. The boys are on exceptional form – even though Tigger is already after only a short time of being out beginning to think he is the only important male in the troop! The hunt is now on to find our delicate Adoonsie some new found friends though he has been hanging out with our very own Skunkey monkey which would you believe actually works quite well. Poor kitten on the other hand isn’t so happy as she’s now grown too fat to fit through the holes in to Skunkey’s cage. Never fear though cat lovers she gets her own bowl of food at main feed and following Skunkey’s personal dietary loves, is also a firm favourite of bread!

Now that the boys are out work has begun to get Delah and Tiny successfully out. This however is proving to be slightly more challenging as Tiny is seeing fit to be a prima donna and squeal at every monkey/leaf/tree she sees. As I’m sure you can imagine this isn’t exactly making our life or hers any easier! Hopefully with perseverance and minimal fights we will soon be able to call them members of the troop in the very near future.

Once again that time of year has come around when we have to put hands to shovels, bend our backs and dig like we’ve never dug before. I think we can all say it’s not the most pleasurable (though apparently good for ones biceps…..) of jobs however we have already achieved extra wide firebreaks round the whole of the outside and are already nearly ½ way through the inside of the enclosure. Thank goodness. We would like to thank everybody who has helped us achieve this so quickly and Goliath monkeys will be eternally grateful if a fire comes as close as unfortunately it did last year.

Finally it is with great sadness we have to report the departure of our dearly beloved Scoutey. For those that knew her you will remember her for her perfect grooms, her empathy towards other monkeys, her eternal warmth and love she gave each and every one of us she met whilst being an amazing leader/mother to Goliath troop. She is now resting peacefully down past the fig tree in Goliath enclosure next to our dearest Engeltjie.
So here’s to beer o’clock and if everybody can raise their drinks and say “to Scoutey".

On the morning of April 30th, the rumbling of a large bus and excited shrieks of kids could be heard as the bus made its way up the dirt road about 15 minutes before the actual arrival of seventy school children from Rainbow Combined School in Tzaneen.  Seven international volunteers anxiously awaited their arrival, ready to educate the students about vervet monkeys and have a fun time with them. 

The rumbles came to a halt as the bus ran into a set of electric wires and dragged down a pole.  A bit of a rocky start to what turned out to be a fabulous day which both VMF and the Rainbow children seemed to thoroughly enjoy. 

The grade 3 and grade 4 classes were split up – the grade 3 class went to watch the Safari School video and have a chat with Arthur.   Vanessa helped out with the management of the kids and played the video for them, and Arthur the famous person who was on TV wowed them with the role that Vervets play in the ecosystem. 

The fourth graders were divided into two groups, the monkeys and the bananas.  The monkeys were off to have a small chat with Lisa, Jackie, and Julie.  They were told interesting facts about vervet monkeys, such as what to do when they find a monkey, what vervets eat, that they’re not good pets, and rules for dealing with monkeys on the Foundation.  Then the monkey group headed off to pet a baby monkey.  Thanks Hilde for your help! 

Meanwhile, the banana group of students was put through an intense, monkey-like warm-up where they ran, jumped, and screeched like monkeys.  Steph, Abbie & Deb got them excited and raring to go!  They then played a series of games such as duck, duck, goose – aptly named ‘Monkey, Monkey, Banana,’ and Stuck in the Mud – renamed ‘Go Bananas!’   Once the kids were a little tired, they moved to a quiet, shady spot on the patio for some drinks and to do some colouring of educational vervet drawings created by Hellen Bersacola (previous volunteer and artist).

Do not keep vervets as pets! - By Hellen Bersacola

The grade fours then switched groups, and when the grade threes were finished their chat with Arthur, all the students went to Tent Village for a toilet break, and to enjoy some English songs while Lisa played the guitar.  They sang the Wheels on the Bus, Five Little Monkeys, and If You’re Happy and You Know It.  Two Rainbow girls got really involved and started ‘Head & Shoulders’ as well…. 

The visit of Rainbow School students ended with a large game of Monkey, Monkey, Banana, and a quick photo shoot.  The school gave a R350 donation to the Foundation, and loaded back onto the bus, leaving even more excited screams and farewells as when they arrived.  Noise was definitely the order of the day, but the foundation felt a little too quiet upon their departure.  Hopefully other schools or classes will come visit, as it was an exhausting but completely joyful day!

Special thanks to all the volunteers who helped organise the children!

• There are currently no normal blood parameters for vervet monkeys?
  
  
• VMF was mentioned on BBC Radio Wales this month thanks to Alasdair & Laurence talking about the Great Primate Handshake?
  
  
• Our very own Jacqueline Pearce has been busy overseas in London with interviews about her stardom and has managed to raise extra funds for vervet forest. (More to come in the next edition)

Goodbye & thank you to:

Yonat Eschar, Stephanie O’Donnell, Tricia Rose, Margaret & Ian Brown, Vanessa Pape, Daniele Carpitella, Jackie Van Haeran, Kerrie Ruddock, Nick Chafe, Cameron Groombridge, Mary Yarger, Katherine Paynter, Abbie Morris.