Plettenberg - monkeys, birds and big cats

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What a great day! The sun was shining and Sara felt better after a day of lying in bed ill.

We started the day at Monkeyland, which sounds tacky but is in fact a huge reserve housing monkeys rescued from zoos and private owners worldwide. A ranger took us on a guided walk, with the moneys often running up to us. The most numerous were the ring tailed lemurs, so cute with their long ringed tails and big yellow eyes. Several were nursing tiny, very new babies. There was a female gibbon, separated from two newer gibbons that were in a cage for new arrivals, so they can get to know the other residents of the reserve before mixing. They were calling to each other making an astonishing racket. The guide told us the howler monkeys in the next door tree make three times the noise, which seemed hard to credit, but only do so in the morning to mark territory. There were tiny yellow squirrel monkeys and three langurs who were brothers. Another cage housed a family of 7 capucin monkeys, a male and female with 5 baby sons. They had been privately owned but the owner could no longer cope once there were seven of them. The guide told us they could not be released into the main sanctuary as the other species would turn on them. We overcame our fear of heights to walk along a 126 metre long canopy bridge 30 metres above the ground, which lets you see some of the species that rarely venture to the ground, particularly the black and white lemurs. There used to be baboons roaming wild in the area now covered by the sanctuary, but they all left when the fencing was put up as they did not want to be confined. Instead they roam around outside causing a nuisance to the farmers and people generally!

Right next door was Birds of Eden, a bird sanctuary covering 21,000 square metres of indigenous forest all within a massive net. We made our way along a series of board walks that kept us above the ground to improve our chances of seeing birds. There was an amazing profusion of species of all shapes, sizes and colours, prompting us to take far too many photos – over 700 between us, requiring very heavy editing! The Knysna louries were green and blue with plumed heads, but when they fly they reveal red feathers. After an hour we thought we’d reached the end of the walk, only to turn a corner and encounter the most amazing bright red bird with a long curved beak. The book we bought from the gift shop at the end revealed this to be a scarlet ibis, originally from the Americas. A hundred metres further on, there was a pond with a dozen of them, and an enormously tall imperious flamingo walking in stately fashion down the path towards us. Another hundred metres on there must have been four dozen or more ibises, together with flamingos and spoonbills.

By now we were exhausted, after 2 ½ hours on our feet. We stopped for lunch, then it was on the third sanctuary in the group, Jukani. This is home to rescued big cats, which have mostly come from zoos and – especially after Europe banned the use of wild animals in them – circuses. It’s not great for taking photos, as for obvious reasons there are high wire fences with a lower outer fence, but there are a few lookout points you can climb up to. We saw huge Siberian tigers and the smaller Bengal tigers, lions, a leopard, a caracal, a puma and a honey badger, all with sad back stories. The guide told us that in South Africa a lot of farmers rear big cats especially for trophy hunters. This is now illegal, but is worth so much money that the business continues with the help of big bribes. A hunter will pay £45,000 to kill a lion and take home its head, and the rest of the animal is then sold to the Chinese for the bones, raising another £20,000 or so. At the end we saw 2 zebra and 3 springboks in a field, but the guide assured us these were not for feeding to the lions! They get mostly donkeys, horse and animals from local farms that have become ill and need to be put down. The cats don’t get to kill the prey though, as that would retain their aggressive urges and make them liable to try to break out when they saw people and children in particular in order to eat them.

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