{"id":210163,"date":"2025-12-25T11:47:12","date_gmt":"2025-12-25T11:47:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/210163\/"},"modified":"2025-12-25T11:47:12","modified_gmt":"2025-12-25T11:47:12","slug":"sun-sand-and-a-deadly-paradise-for-kenyas-rarest-monkeys-inside-the-battle-to-save-them-before-its-too-late","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/210163\/","title":{"rendered":"Sun, sand and a deadly paradise for Kenya\u2019s rarest monkeys: Inside the battle to save them before it’s too late"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ambling along Diani Beach road, 30km south of Mombasa in Kenya, I am parallel with the Indian Ocean and minutes from the powdery, cream sand of Africa\u2019s best-known beach, writes \u00a0Beth Richardson. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s February, the heart of the dry season and peak tourist time. The sun is high, it\u2019s hairdryer hot and the air is sweet with ripe fruit on roadside stalls. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Drapes of rainbow kikoys flap like bunting on the breeze, shading the street sellers and enticing a steady stream of tourists to view their wares, while puttering tuk-tuks weave between speed humps, offering lifts with a loud meeh, meeh.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I round a corner towards my beachside B&B and bump into a huge yellow baboon. He darts me a sideways glance as he picks through leaves and rubbish. I hesitate slightly. Avoiding eye contact, I continue past him with feigned indifference. He joins me, and we walk side by side for a few seconds.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Yellow baboon (Papio cynocephalus) walking along top of wall covered in broken glass used as a deterrent. Ukunda, Diani Beach, Mombasa, Kenya.<\/p>\n

The yellow baboon is the largest of Kenya\u2019s coastal primates<\/a>. This individual reaches my hip on all fours and swaggers under broad, bristly shoulders. Leaping up on to a wall embedded with broken glass, he sits, manspreading, and yawns to reveal his impressive canines. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Inside the shaded B&B garden, a group of vervet monkeys combs the grass for food. Tiny infants are wrapped around their mothers, their fingers splayed spiderlike around their backs, while juveniles playfight and graze.<\/p>\n

\"\"Vervet monkey. Getty<\/p>\n

A monochrome blur catches my eye. Three Angolan black and white colobus monkeys \u2013 two adults and a youngster \u2013 bounce along the boundary wall to a flowering flamboyant tree. <\/p>\n

They have a cape-like mantle of flowing white fur fringing their glossy black shoulders. With matching coiffed sideburns and long, tufted tails hanging straight beneath them like light pulls, they are strikingly beautiful. They perch silently, watching the enthusiastic holidaymakers gathering beneath them, cameras poised. These are the rarest of the coastal primates, the last population in Kenya \u2212 fewer than 400 remain.<\/p>\n

As though in shifts, high-pitched staccato chirps signal the arrival of Sykes\u2019 monkeys. The first one plops on to the lawn, quickly followed by the rest of his troop, all flecked iron-grey with snowy bibs. The bartender hands a long stick to a couple sunbathing by the pool. The next day, when I am occupying the same sun lounger, I understand why: it\u2019s clearly the ambush zone.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In a blink, a male makes a dash towards me and snatches a packet of peanuts. Squawks of excitement echo around the group, but the thief is not about to share his spoils and the others resign themselves to a more conventional meal of grass. Youngsters play hide-and-seek around the base of trees, while one individual sips drips of condensation from the outlet pipe of an air-conditioning unit.<\/p>\n

\"\"Bushbaby or galago. Getty<\/p>\n

Seeing four of the area\u2019s five resident primate species in less than an hour \u2212 the fifth, the galago, or bushbaby, is nocturnal \u2212 it would be easy to assume they are thriving on Kenya\u2019s popular south coast. But a darker truth explains the apparent abundance of these monkeys. And the bartender\u2019s stick hints at a growing problem. The reality is that these primates have no choice but to live here.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Diani lies within the remnants of East Africa\u2019s coastal forest, a unique ecosystem rich in endemic species and the primates\u2019 natural habitat. It\u2019s a globally recognised biodiversity hotspot that once stretched uninterrupted from southern Somalia to Mozambique yet, following decades of deforestation, only 20 per cent remains in fragmented patches. <\/p>\n

The primates have become squeezed into ever smaller spaces, giving the false impression that numbers are healthily high. Nicole Englefield lives in one of the oldest houses in Diani, where she runs a small business of luxury beachfront suites from her 1.2 hectare property. Her house was built before the rise of tourism, and her garden remains a haven of native plants and ancient trees that attract all five primates.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom the beginning, it\u2019s been important to us to avoid overdevelopment,\u201d she says. \u201cWe\u2019ve been careful to leave much of the land untouched, preserving the space for wildlife.\u201d<\/p>\n

The transformation south of Mombasa began in earnest when the Diani Beach Road was built in 1971. The beautiful broad, white sands of Kenya\u2019s south coast opened to tourism, attracting a growing number of both domestic and international visitors, and the once dense forest became prime real estate. <\/p>\n

As rows of new hotels, resorts and houses sprung up along the beach, Diani became a tourist trap for people and a death trap for primates. The loss of forest threatened their food sources and severed their canopy-level commuter routes, forcing them to make risky road crossings at ground level or along overhead cables to find food, water and places to sleep. Unable to navigate the new infrastructure, monkeys were hit by cars and electrocuted on powerlines.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"ngolan black and white colobus monkey<\/p>\n

Angolan colobus monkeys, being mainly arboreal, were particularly vulnerable. These animals rarely come to the ground and have no traffic sense compared to their terrestrial baboon cousins, who are far more streetwise, even known to look left and right before crossing the road.<\/p>\n

Casualties hit an all-time high in 1996, prompting a community outcry. In response, Colobus Conservation was established to rescue and rehabilitate sick and injured animals, raise awareness and develop strategies to protect local primates.\u00a0<\/p>\n

According to the charity, 20 per cent of callouts are to monkeys involved in electrocutions, while traffic collisions injure 55 monkeys on average every year. The dry season is particularly dangerous, as dying foliage reduces food availability and canopy cover, pushing the monkeys to take greater risks in search of sustenance.<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t have to wander far to see the improvements Colobus Conservation <\/a>has made to keep monkeys out of harm\u2019s way.\u00a0 Brightly painted speed humps and \u2018Colobus Crossing\u2019 road signs have slowed drivers down, while specially designed \u2018colobridges\u2019 \u2013 simple yet ingenious chain ladders covered with tubing \u2013 hang above Diani Beach Road in accident hotspots. These simple structures provide safe passage through the canopy, helping to prevent accidents and ensuring sub-populations stay connected to maintain healthy gene flow.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A short tuk-tuk ride to Colobus Conservation HQ at the quieter, southern end of the town reveals the extent of the charity\u2019s education programmes for community groups and schools (1,000 children attend workshops a year). For a small fee, tourists can visit the rehabilitation enclosures, information centre and tree-planting scheme, and may even catch a glimpse of the resident colobus family. One of Colobus Conservation\u2019s most significant victories came in 2017, when the charity successfully lobbied the Kenya Power and Lighting Company to insulate about 12km of powerlines and relocate transformers from primate electrocution hotspots. The organisation is also planting a corridor of native trees linking primate habitats along a 15km stretch of coast from the Kongo River, north of Diani.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Annual censuses keep track of primate populations, and recent data is promising. However, these figures do not necessarily tell the whole story, as many primates have been displaced by ongoing development in neighbouring areas. One major project \u2212 the Dongo Kundu Bypass \u2212 connects Mombasa to the south coast via a 17.5km highway and a series of bridges. Seen by authorities as a milestone in national infrastructure, the first phase opened in August 2024 and is already boosting tourism in Diani. It\u2019s welcome news for the local economy but the cost to wildlife is yet to be seen.<\/p>\n

More roads, more cables and more human encroachment all threaten to tip the balance of conservation efforts, while climate change is exacerbating the problem. Failed rains and rising temperatures are putting both people and primates under pressure. When drought kills their crops, farmers look to the remaining forest for food. In desperation, some risk prosecution and set illegal snares to trap wildlife, including monkeys, for bushmeat.<\/p>\n

\u201cDiani\u2019s remaining natural habitat is disappearing at an alarming rate, and unless urgent action is taken, the next three years could mark a critical tipping point for the region\u2019s primates \u2212 particularly the vulnerable Angolan black and white colobus,\u201d says Nancy Mungania, the general manager at Colobus Conservation. \u201cRapid development continues to degrade the forest, threatening the biodiversity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nancy and her colleagues are particularly concerned about the threat to primates from large new infrastructure projects. They are working with the Kenya Power and Lighting Company to find long-term solutions for the higher voltage powerlines that can\u2019t be insulated in the same way as those in Diani. New monkeys arriving in Diani are likely to join the ranks of those already successfully eking out an existence alongside humans. <\/p>\n

As Nancy says, \u201cThose that adapt, succeed.\u201d The more audacious species with broader diets have been quick to exploit the benefits of coexisting with people, often found foraging from bins, raiding restaurant tables and sneaking through open hotel windows to ransack bedrooms.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Unsuspecting tourists make for particularly easy pickings \u2212 as I myself experienced when I lost those peanuts. Signs advise against feeding wildlife, yet guests often ignore them, entertained by the monkeys\u2019 antics. With the primates becoming bolder and more enterprising, hotel and restaurant staff now go about their daily duties armed with catapults \u2212 the sight of which is usually enough to deter even the most persistent opportunists.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Not all the primates are mischief-makers, though. The gentler colobus monkeys have no interest in human food, sticking to their treetop diet of leaves, seeds and flowers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For now, under the watchful eye of the local community, Kenya\u2019s south coast primates continue to survive on the edge of human life. But their future hangs in the balance. The region\u2019s last pockets of forest are shrinking, and the next few years will be critical, especially for the Angolan black and white colobus monkey. Whether Diani becomes a model for coexistence or a cautionary tale of unchecked development depends on the choices made today.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As I admire a colobus family watching silently from among the flowers in a tree above the beachgoers and cameras below, it\u2019s clear: they\u2019re still here. But for how much longer?\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ambling along Diani Beach road, 30km south of Mombasa in Kenya, I am parallel with the Indian Ocean…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":210164,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[61,60,82,263],"class_list":{"0":"post-210163","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=210163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210163\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/210164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=210163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=210163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=210163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}