Here’s another black-crested macaques. They’re found only on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia in Tangkoko National Park and they are critically endangered. I went to the island specifically to photograph these monkeys and was able to spent several hours surrounded by them in the forest. This guy seemed a little confused.
The adolescent orangutans were my favorites because of their curiosity. I was face down on the ground photographing the little bearded pigs when this guy came along. He was swinging on a vine, at first swatting at the pigs. When I got up to take a few photos, he started swinging toward me, getting closer with each swing. All of a sudden he reached out to tap me gently on the head. He did this a few times, and tapped me a few times on the chest too. Then he would sit back in the tree and sniff his finger. He seemed fascinated with my bald, sweaty head.
Black-crested macaques are quite possibly my favorite type of monkey — even though this guy swatted me in the head a split second after I took this photo. They are listed on the IUCN Red List (International Union For Conservation of Nature) as critically endangered, which is the final category before extinction. They live only on the northern tip of the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia and are the reason I set aside a couple of days and made the effort to visit Sulawesi and Tangkoko National Park. The island isn’t visited by very many tourists and those who do go are usually there for the scuba diving. Despite conservation efforts, their numbers have been in steady decline due to hunting for bush meat and habitat destruction. I saw this first hand as we followed a group of the macaques for several hours and ended up in a section of the forest recently burned illegall, by local farmers to clear the way for planting. Much more on these guys to come.
A couple of generations of orangutans watching over the forest in Indonesian Borneo. It’s not hard to see that these two are clearly related.
The female proboscis monkeys don’t have the large potato-like noses of the males, but they’re still a bit odd looking. This one, however, seemed to think she was the shit with her black lipstick and all. She must have been eating some kind of dark fruit just before I took the photo.
At first these bearded piglets ran away from me but then slowly they came out of the forest to investigate, and eventually came so close that I was able to switch to my widest angle lens to get shots of them inches away sniffing the front of the glass. There were eight piglets in all as well as their blind mother who had lost both of her eyes somewhere along the way. An orangutan was in a tree just above them and was playfully swatting at the babies. Apparently, they live in harmony with each other and I had a few other sightings of adult pigs foraging for fruit closely behind the orangutans, picking up their scraps. The adults are truly ugly creatures (in a good way) and get their name from a thick beard around their snout.
This infant orangutan was only a few days old when I took this shot. The mother was extremely gentle and attentive with the way she carried it around in a very human way. The baby seems almost defenseless and sick in this photo, but a few minutes later it was crawling around in the mother’s lap and breastfeeding.