Yellow-tailed Woolly Monkey Ready for Its Close-up

A young yellow-tailed woolly monkey plays in the rubbish behind a family’s house in Alto Mayo Valley, Peru / photos c. Shanee-NPC

Noga Shanee of the Neotropical Primate Conservation group and Univ. San Marco researcher Fanny Cornejo visited this blog a few days ago to share some facts about the yellow-tailed woolly monkey (Oreonax flavicauda), an extremely rare primate found only in the cloud forests of Peru.

As Noga and Fanny have so helpfully pointed out, I ran the wrong photo with my original post about this endangered monkey. Those images were of the common woolly tailed monkey, not the rarer yellow-tailed woolly.

Mea culpa.

A true yellow-tailed woolly has a white muzzle, as well as “very yellow pubic hair and a yellow patch of hair on the ventral side of its tail,” explains Cornejo. It’s important that people know these points because saving the animal from extinction begins with correctly identifying it in the wild, she adds.

To do my part as a conscientious blogger, I’m posting photos of a real yellow-tailed woolly monkey that appeared on an early Neotropical Primate Conservation blog (thanks in advance, Noga).

Noga and her team found this small male monkey (pictured above and below) tied up in a family’s backyard in the Alto Mayo Valley several years ago. Conditions were miserable for the monkey because he had no water to drink and was fed “only on green bananas and kitchen scraps, a very different diet from what he would eat in the wild,” Noga reported.

In need of rescue

Finding and rescuing monkeys like this one is just part of what the Neotropical Primate Conservation group does in Peru. NPC also runs programs to conserve the yellow-tailed woolly monkey’s habitat, to reforest the tropical Andes and to encourage responsible tourism.

Click here to view photo galleries of monkeys in Peru and NPC programs.

Click here for information about Woolly Jumpers: Made in Peru, a one-hour documentary by filmmaker Adrian Cale that aired on Animal Planet in September 2008.

Noga and Sam Shanee

Click here to read about the NPC staff and about the one-of-a-kind wedding of Noga and fellow animal rescuer Sam Shanee, who got married in 2004 while working on a gibbon rehabilitation project in Thailand. Theirs was “the first-ever gibbon style wedding, complete with the bride swinging down from the trees” (!).