I’d like you all to meet Novia – a Spider Monkey living happily in the jungles of the Peruvian Amazon. She spends her days swinging through the canopy, gorging herself on the abundant fruit, and socialising with the other members of her troop.

However, her life wasn’t always this way.

Novia means ‘girlfriend’ in Spanish, and this particular monkey got her name from her previous life as a circus performer. Novia was held captive for ten years in a Peruvian circus, where she was regularly forced to perform a routine that involved her being ‘married’ to a person in the crowd. It was a cruel and unforgiving life that no animal deserves.

Fortunately, in December 2017, she was rescued during a police operation and placed in the care of Taricaya Eco Reserve, a wildlife rehabilitation centre in southeast Peru. After a lengthy recovery process, she was finally released into the wild earlier this year at the nearby Kawsay Biological Station, where she now lives wild and free – as all Spider Monkeys should.

I recently had the privilege of volunteering for a week at Kawsay, and in this post, I’ll be sharing some stories and information about the work that they do, as well as some facts about these utterly captivating monkeys.

Sadly, Spider Monkeys were driven to local extinction in the region around Kawsay as a result of habitat destruction and hunting, but since 2011 a healthy population has been successfully reintroduced. Taricaya Eco Reserve and Kawsay Biological Station are located a short boat ride from each other along the Rio Madre de Dios, and the two organisations work in tandem on the Spider Monkey project, as well as a range of other conservation programs. Taricaya focuses on the initial rehabilitation of the monkeys, while Kawsay conducts monitoring and research upon their release into the wild.

A typical day as a Spider Monkey volunteer at Kawsay begins by getting up before the sunrise, having a quick breakfast, packing your lunch, and then heading out into rainforest. The aim is to reach the monkeys before they wake up, so as to minimise the time spent searching for them in the dense jungle. Once located, the rest of the day is spent tracking the monkeys and taking regular notes on their activities. When they move, you move. When they eat, you eat. When they rest, you rest.

However, as I would come to learn, it’s not always sunshine and rainbows in the world of monkey monitoring…

For the next part of this post, I wanted to share with you the story of one of the days I spent tracking and monitoring Spider Monkeys at Kawsay Biological Station. But fair warning, it does not have a happy ending…

Content Warning: Graphic descriptions of dead animals (jump ahead to the picture of the monkey hanging upside down by its tail if you want to skip the story)

Monkey Misadventures

We headed out into the rainforest as a group of six, just as the sun was peeking above the horizon and starting to burn off the morning mist that lingers over Kawsay’s jungles. We quickly stumbled across the famous Novia swinging about the tree-tops, exactly where we expected her to be. However, none of the other ten monkeys in her troop were anywhere to be found.

We decided to split up. Two of the volunteers remained with Novia, while the other four of us, including myself, headed off in search of the other monkeys.

Now unfortunately, monkeys don’t stick to the trails, so searching for them involves hacking your way through the rainforest with a machete, and then occasionally stopping to scream at the top of your lungs. You see, this is how Spider Monkeys communicate with each other over long distances, and they’ll scream back if they’re within earshot.

After an hour or two of fruitless screaming and aimless wandering through dense jungle, our adventures suddenly took a rather gruesome turn.

As we were passing through a relatively sparse patch of forest, I looked down at my feet and noticed something strange in the leaf litter. At first glance it looked like several patches of some kind of wispy, black fungus; and it took me several moments to work out what I was actually staring at… It was fur. 

There must have been a dozen tufts scattered around a small area, no more than a metre wide. As I knelt down, there in the middle of them all, was an unmistakable splatter of blood.

I was looking at a murder scene…

The blood was still bright red, fresh, probably not more than a few hours old. We deduced that the culprit was most likely a puma that had been spotted in the area two weeks earlier, or perhaps even an elusive jaguar.

The reality of the situation began to set in. The casualty was a Spider Monkey, meaning it was a creature that the rest of the group had spent months, perhaps years, working closely with – feeding it, looking after it, taking care of it. For now, however, the monkey’s identity remained unknown.

At this point I noticed a low, constant buzzing to my left. It wasn’t uncommon to stumble across a wasp nest or bee hive while traipsing through the rainforest, and I felt my calves tense, preparing to make a hasty exit. But they weren’t bees or wasps, they were flies. And a swarm of flies in the jungle usually only indicates one thing – dead flesh.

We tentatively approached the buzzing, and spotted a cluster of leaves and branches that were organised slightly less haphazardly than the surrounding foliage. They’d been placed there deliberately. We took a couple of photos, and then one of the other volunteers leaned in and carefully removed the top layer with his machete. Underneath, there lay a set of organs – heart, stomach, intestines, and several smaller parts. They’d been almost surgically removed, strategically organised, and then perfectly hidden (or almost perfectly, except for the unavoidable flies).

Over the next twenty minutes or so, we gradually discovered the other parts of the carcass, all equally well-disguised. One arm, then the other, followed by the skull and then finally the lower half of the body – severed at the base of the spine. It was a gruesome and confronting crime scene, but equally, it was incredible to see the way the puma had so meticulously organised her kill, and stashed it away for later.

The puma’s victim was identified as Tara, a two-year-old female Spider Monkey still finding her feet in the jungle. One of the other volunteers would later show me photos of her as a freshly-rescued baby, with big, bright eyes as she was being fed in the early days of her rehabilitation. (The monkeys are gradually weaned off human contact in the weeks leading up to their release.)

We collected her remains in order to give her a burial back at the station, and then continued our search for the other Spider Monkeys. It was bittersweet as we came across two other individuals, joyfully swinging through the canopy – presumably unaware of the fate that had just befallen another of their kind earlier that day.

Despite being due back for lunch at 1pm, we decided to spend more time searching for the other monkeys, and it was after 2pm by the time we started to head home. About ten minutes later, the heavens opened and we got utterly drenched in the most typical of tropical downpours. We made a futile attempt to shelter at the base of a tree for a quarter-hour or so, but we eventually gave up and made a dash back to the station.

We stumbled in looking like drowned rats around 3pm, by which point I was just about ready to start eating leaves to satiate my hunger. And all the while, somewhere in the nearby jungle, a puma lurked, with a stomach much fuller than mine.

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Note: I decided against including the photos that accompany this story, as they’re just a little too graphic. At the same time, however, they also highlight the intelligence, precision and power of the puma, and the ruthless nature of the jungle. So if you’d like to see them, they can be found at this link, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Alright, enough stories. Let’s get into some cold, hard Spider Monkey facts!

Probably the best thing about Spider Monkeys is the way they use their tail as a fifth limb when darting through the canopy. That’s actually where they get the name Spider Monkey, as the bonus limb and black fur often makes them look a bit like a giant arachnid bounding through the trees (albeit much cuter). Only some monkeys have tails which are prehensile, meaning that they’re able to be used for grasping and holding onto things. The strength of Spider Monkey tails is utterly incredible – as evidenced by Novia here, who is literally taking a nap while hanging upside-down from her tail.

Interestingly, despite evolving an impressive tail, Spider Monkeys have almost entirely lost one of their digits! They have what is referred to as a vestigial thumb – essentially just a small nub where their thumb used to be. Funnily enough, that where they get their genus name from. ‘Ateles’ derives from the Ancient Greek for ‘incomplete’ or ‘imperfect’.

Personally, I reckon that’s a little harsh given that from an evolutionary perspective, these monkeys used to have thumbs, but then decided that they didn’t need them! If anything, we’re the imperfect ones, since Spider Monkeys are one of the fastest-moving primates on the planet, with agility comparable only to the gibbons of Southeast Asia.

Spider Monkeys primarily eat fruit, but they aren’t too picky, and have been observed consuming frogs, birds, eggs and insects as well. They also produce a wide-range of vocalisations – from the long-range screams we mentioned earlier in this post, to a horse-like whinny for communicating at short distances, and even a kind of bark which they use when threatened.

While organisations like Taricaya Eco Reserve and Kawsay Biological Station are doing incredible work in the conservation of Spider Monkeys, these enchanting primates are still facing a wide range of threats. Of the seven species of Spider Monkey in South America, one is vulnerable – the Guiana Spider Monkey; five are endangered – including the Peruvian Spider Monkeys featured in this series; and one is critically endangered – the Brown Spider Monkey of Colombia and Venezuela.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) reports that for the Peruvian Spider Monkey, populations have declined by at least 50% in the last 50 years, and that these monkeys today occupy only 28% of their original range. Only 32% of their habitat is currently protected, and it is expected that by 2050, a further 40% of their habitat could be lost due to agriculture, logging and mining. As if all this wasn’t bad enough, these gorgeous monkeys are also hunted due to their value in the bushmeat trade.

Spider Monkeys are one of the most captivating creatures on the planet. With their seemingly effortless movements through the treetops, their constant curiosity and inquisitiveness, and their high levels of sociability, it’s no wonder that they’re one of our closest evolutionary relatives. Yet without our urgent support, it seems that these beautiful primates could end up confined only to tiny protected areas, rather than roaming the length and breadth of the Amazon Basin where they belong.

The best way to support the work of Taricaya and Kawsay is to visit them and participate in their programs, but you can also donate directly at taricayaecoreserve.org/donate

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Peruvian Spider Monkeys (Ateles chamek), Kawsay Biological Station, Peru