Screeches, yowls and the hum of cicadas echo alongside yelps, squawks, splashes and drips. It’s first light in the Peruvian Amazon and my ears are enlivened with the joyous din of nocturnal symphonies jostling with the waking dawn chorus. Then, I hear it: a long growl, like an approaching storm. I peer into the towering […]
Tag: spider monkeys
It’s ‘whack-a-mole’: Alarming rise in pet trade fuels wildlife trafficking into California
In October, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer at California’s Otay Mesa border crossing noticed an odd bulge inside a man’s pants. Jesse Agus Martinez, a U.S. citizen who lives in Tijuana, repeatedly claimed the bump was “pirrin,” a Spanish word for penis. His history of smuggling birds into the U.S. prompted further examination, […]
‘They’re a lot like us’: saving the tiny punk monkeys facing extinction
Luis Enrique Centena spent decades silencing the forest. Now, he listens. Making a whistle, the former logger points up to a flash of white and reddish fur in the canopy. Inquisitive eyes peer back – a cotton-top tamarin, one of the world’s rarest primates. “I used to cut trees and never took the titís into […]
Poachers are killing families of spider monkeys, kidnapping their babies and selling them to Americans on social media
Bound, sedated and stuffed into bags: Poachers are ripping baby spider monkeys from their mothers in the forests of southern Mexico and selling them as pets on social media platforms in the United States. Jim Stinebaugh, a special agent with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, says nearly 90 baby spider monkeys have been confiscated […]