A young Barbary Macaque monkey has been on the loose in west Jutland after fleeing its confines at Blåvand Zoo in January.
After being missing for a fortnight, the three-year-old male was spotted this weekend just 800 metres from the zoo, which he fled after being ostracised by the rest of the troop in the zoo.
“We haven’t seen it or heard from others over the past 14 days,” Hans Hestbech, the head of Blåvand Zoo, told DR Nyheder. “But then a family said they had seen it nearby, so we believe once again that we’ll find it.”
“We’ll try to lure it home with food. It wants bananas and strawberries – that’s its favourite. We would like to lure it all the way home to the big pine trees that surround the monkey enclosure in the zoo, and then we hope it will jump back by itself.”
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No more monkey business
The monkey enclosure in the zoo is open-air and the zoo wrote on Facebook that sometimes monkeys would rather scale the electric fence surrounding the enclosure than take a beating from the rest of the monkeys during times of strife.
Usually, however, they are so dependent on the rest of the troop they either jump back into the enclosure or sit outside the main gate waiting to be let back in. But in the future the zoo aims to lay a net over the enclosure.
The monkeys can live in an open-air enclosure throughout the year because they have a thick winter pelt. They are found in the Atlas Mountains of Algeria and Morocco, as well as Gibraltar.
