Abstract
IT may interest your readers to know that monkeys are still to be found wild at a place within three days' journey of London, and easily accessible to the most unenterprising traveller. Yesterday, in company with my son, I drove up the gorge of the Chifa, on the excellent main road between this place and Medían. We halted at the spot where the appropriately named “Ruisseau des Singes” falls into the Chifa on its left bank, and ascended the narrow side-valley on foot. Its steep slopes are densely covered with brushwood, intermixed with a few oaks and stunted junipers. We had not proceeded more than ten minutes from the main road before we heard the chatter of a Barbary ape on the bank above us, and saw him scrambling along the rocks. Shortly afterwards, a fine large male of the same species was kind enough to mount a juniper-tree on the opposite side of the gorge to that on which we were seated, and exhibited himself to our gaze for at least fifteen minutes. His various attitudes were distinctly observable through a pair of opera-glasses, and we calculated his distance from us as not more than 400 yards in a straight line. A third ape was subsequently met with farther up the gorge, at a much nearer distance, but did not wait to be looked at.
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SCLATER, P. The Barbary Ape in Algeria. Nature 39, 30 (1888). https://doi.org/10.1038/039030b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/039030b0
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