A troop of 24 squirrel monkeys managed to escape from their enclosure at Odense Zoo on Saturday.
While, some of the four-legged fugitives broke out from the zoo facility already at about 19:30 on Saturday, by Sunday morning the entire enclosure was empty.
A total of 19 adult squirrel monkeys and 5 young ones went missing.
But they did not go far.
Zookepers found them sitting in the treetops near the enclosure, just on the other side of the river Odense, which flows through the zoo.
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All of them have already been lured back with larvae and pieces of fruit.
It is not yet clear how the colourful primates managed to escape from the enclosure, which is surrounded by an electric fence.
“We have to check if there is a hole in the fence that we haven’t discovered or if there are some tree branches hanging there in a way that make it an escape route for the [monkeys],” stated zoologist Nina Collatz Christensen.
Squirrel monkeys are natively found in the tropical forests of Central and South America.
They have short yellow-orange fur on their legs and back and black-and-white face.
