Monkey Relocation

I can only imagine taking a stroll in the forest preserve with Toby, and along the way come these two! Pretty neat that the zoo is able to do this.

BY KARA SPAK Staff Reporter/kspak@suntimes.com
For Diabo and Delilah, home is a split level Coleman cooler in the woods. The golden lion tamarins -- yellow and orange monkeys roughly the size of squirrels -- were recently moved from an off-exhibit space at Brookfield Zoo into an open wooded area adjacent to the zoo. Golden lion tamarins Diabo (left) and Delilah live in a wooded area adjacent to Brookfield Zoo. There, zookeepers hope the tamarins mate. They're about 3 years old and each weighs about a pound. "If they do well outside this year, we may do the same thing next year," said Vince Sodaro, lead keeper of primates. Golden lion tamarins are indigenous to the area surrounding Rio de Janeiro. Once critically endangered, the tamarin population in Brazil has risen in part because zoo-raised animals are being reintroduced into the wild, including a group sent from Brookfield to Brazil in 2000. While Delilah and Diabo (Portuguese for devil) are not Rio-bound, zookeepers hope sharp-eyed guests learn a bit about the zoo's reintroduction programs by watching them pop in and out of their cooler home. The cooler, based on a design from the National Zoo in Washington D.C., hangs vertically and includes two separate levels and two egresses, helping keep the Tamarins safe from predators such as raccoons and owls and protected from the elements. They wear radio collars so zookeepers can track them if they wander far from their cooler. Zookeepers don't expect them to wander too far from their home and zoo-supplied food.