What happened to this baby…?!

On Sunday 4th March, we had our 29th baby of the season turn up… I say ‘baby’ with a little disbelief.

This baby, which has been named Kobe by Emily one of our baby mum staff, is a little on the big size. He is roughly twice the size of what he should be for a 4 month old ‘baby’. Kobe is the size of our juveniles which were last years babies! I have no idea what genes he has, but he’s definitely going to be a biiiig monkey.

Kobe was handed from person to person and finally ended up with us, when people tried selling him while he was being held in a sock… of all things! The story was he was left alone all day with a bowl of food and milk in a room. That explains why he didn’t like spending the night in a large crate for the first couple of nights and would scream the place down. But over time, he trusted us and knew a crate was for sleeping and not for punishment, so the next couple of nights went quite smooth.

Kobe has stolen the hearts of quite a few volunteers and staff since being at the foundation, as he’s such a sweet heart. He would lay in your arms like a baby when he wanted some milk, he wasn’t the greatest at drinking milk from a bottle when he first arrived, but over time, he mastered it and got quite cheeky with it. When his bottle would run out, he used to pick it up and throw it in your direction as if to say ‘come on… I’m running dry’! When ever I would walk past Neverland with him in there, all I would hear would be laughter and chatter between Kobe and the person sat in with him.

On Wednesday however, he was moved straight to an intro cage. He mastered the feeding cage on his final day in quarantine, meaning he could completely by pass Disney Land and go and meet his new flat mates and mum! Kobe was moved to D&D enclosure with Conjo, Timothy, Merlin and mum Phyllis.

Kobe was quite nervous to begin with, but that same day, all was well and he was playing with the other babies for quite a while. Although Torie was worried if Kobe sat on Timothy, he would squash him because Kobe is 3 times as big as little Timothy. It was all fun and games, and still is so it’s a lovely outcome for the poor baby that was handed from person to person early on in his life.

It has already been decided that D&D babies will be going out into the troop on 26th March, unfortunately I won’t be here but I’m hoping to be kept updated on how they get on, so therefore I can still update you guys.

 

 

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Another exciting thing happened this week at the foundation! Christal and Jeffery were meeting their mums on Monday! It didn’t go as well as when Joli and Peggy went into Koko and met mums, but the troop have still shown interest. We have had issues with getting mums to stay in the intro cage over night, so we have been swapping females every night to make sure the others are getting breaks.

Even though Christal and Jeffery have been having a different female with them every night, they have adjusted very well and still go to bed on the perch with the female without a problem.

Peggy and Joli have also been let in and they are definitely loving having younger siblings to play with! As nice as it is to play with young monkeys, having even younger monkeys to play with is a lot more exciting!

There hasn’t been a date decided yet for when Christal and Jeffery will be going out into their troop yet, but fingers crossed it’ll be when they reach 12 weeks old and not longer.

The babies don’t look like they’re in a very comfortable sleeping position there, but they slept like that for a good half an hour!

Lets hope the babies get permanent mums soon, rather than a lot of baby sitters.