Dr. Birute Mary Galdikas' Blog

Black Monkey:Long-tailed macaque dyed black

While going to one of our field sites in Kalimantan Tengah a few days ago, we were driving along a terrible dirt road. Suddenly I spotted, out of the corner of my eye, a monkey tied to a pole. There was something unusual about the monkey. It was relatively small, black, and had a long tail. “Silver leaf monkey!” I thought to myself and brought the pick-up truck to a screeching halt.

In 40 years in Borneo, the only silver leaf monkeys I had ever seen were in the wild. I had observed a few along the Sekonyer River, along rivers in the interior of Borneo and once or twice at Camp Leakey. But, in fact, I have not observed  silver leaf monkeys for some years. I had never observed one in captivity.

I jumped out of the pick-up and approached the monkey. Next to her, there were two women and a man sitting in front of a wooden hut in a transmigration project with fields in the back.

Fortunately, there was a forestry official in his fire-fighting uniform with us. I’ve known him for at least 15 years, maybe longer. He knows the routine. We’ve done this a few times before. He immediately started speaking to the woman closest to the black monkey, telling her it was illegal to keep the monkey. In reality, long-tailed macaques are not endangered and, thus, not protected in the strict legal sense that orangutans and gibbons are under Indonesian law.

In the meantime, I looked intently at the monkey, quickly realizing that it wasn’t a leaf-eating monkey at all. Silver leaf monkeys are colobines; they are also known as silver langurs. The individuals I had seen in the wild looked black from a distance but, in reality, their black hair was touched with silvery tips. Infants are bright orange, startlingly different in color from their parents.

Colobines have complex stomachs which enable them to digest mature leaves and, probably, unripe fruits. They spend part of the day just sitting, digesting. Their long intestines give them a pear-shaped body, making them look perpetually pregnant.

As I gazed at this monkey, I confirmed to my own satisfaction that she was clearly not a langur. As I observed her for a few more seconds, I realized that she was a member of a much more ubiquitous species, the long-tailed or crab-eating macaque, one of the smallest of all macaques and certainly one of the most common monkeys in Indonesia. Macaques are very versatile monkeys with some species seemingly equally at home on the ground and in the trees. A touch of disappointment manifested itself for a brief second in my mind as I would have been delighted to rescue a rare langur, but then I was relieved that the little black monkey was a macaque, not a langur.

Langurs virtually never survive in captivity, at least under local conditions. One of my former SFU (Simon Fraser University) students tried to save a red leaf monkey infant a few years ago at our Care Center but the little monkey soon died. Macaques, on the other hand, are extremely hardy and can survive under the difficult conditions of local captivity.

I was still puzzled as to why the hair of the little macaque was jet black. Normally, long-tailed macaques are grey. The macaque’s owner, a Javanese woman in her twenties, explained. She had dyed the little monkey’s hair black to match the black polish on her own fingernails which she displayed.

The woman quickly gave up her little monkey. She didn’t even seem sad or ask for any re-imbursement (as some owners do). She seemed resigned to the fact that somebody would just show up in a uniform and take her little pet away. Within a few seconds the little black monkey was in a cardboard box in the back of our pickup.

We brought her to the Orangutan Care Center and Quarantine. The little black monkey was very sweet, shy, and didn’t bite at all. We put her into a plastic dog carrier (that I had used many years ago to rescue a dog in Japan) with the door to the carrier open. Every once in a while she would leave the carrier and race around in circles through the room and root through anything she could find, ripping open the pages of books, noodle packages, and the like. She liked an old white tee-shirt we gave her under which she would hide and peek out at us.

But she never tried to bite anyone, unlike some other macaques we have known! One of our volunteers wrapped her up in a burlap sack and held her tightly, a technique the volunteer had learned in Africa for calming down vervet monkeys. It worked with the little macaque as well. She calmed down eventually but it took a little time. By the time night rolled around, the little monkey curled up in the white tee-shirt inside the dog carrier and fell asleep.

We’ve never had a sweet macaque like her before! A little wild and rambunctious, but still sweet. There is something a little dainty about her, something unusual for a macaque. Or maybe I simply don’t know too many juvenile long-tailed macaques!

We know our first mission is to rescue and protect orangutans. But how could we leave this little monkey behind?

Black Monkey eating boiled egg with dog carrier behind her, tipped over on side

Black Monkey sitting in dog carrier