Doing my usual loop of the Tropics trail last week, I crossed paths with fellow volunteer Michele at the South American end, by the tamarin exhibits. She was on the cotton-top side (across from the golden lion tamarins), gazing up into the treetops where these white-crested mini-monkeys usually perch. Instead of the usual pair, there was just the female “widow,” whose mate died of cancer quite recently. The female cotton-top might be lonely, but at this moment, Michele seemed to be filling the gap. She was making a series of cooing and whistling noises, and the tamarin was squeaking back at her (zoo lit says cotton-tops have more than 30 different vocalizations), hopping back and forth on its branch, occasionally leaning over to rub a furry shoulder against the bark — obviously intrigued and possibly even enamored.
This imperfect photo is probably the clearest shot I could ever hope to get of this tamarin and her complicated little face, bathed in the red glow of heat lamps. Our cotton-tops stay high in the trees, as they would in their native rainforest canopy in northwestern Colombia. In the wild, they lick rain off leaves and suck sap from trees after biting the bark off. They avoid descending into range of earthbound predators such as cats. These 1-pound monkeys were declared an endangered species in 1973, and fewer than 3,000 remain in the wild. Besides squeaking at volunteers, they’re said to express emotion by flicking their tongues and, when alarmed, raising the shock of white hair on their heads. A former fellow volunteer, also snowy-haired, once told me laughingly that a child said to her, pointing at a cotton-top tamarin: “It looks just like you!”
Whether it was Michele’s long blond hair or the way she was softly cooing and even meowing, this tamarin’s fascination with my current fellow volunteer was so intense that I dubbed her “the tamarin whisperer” on the spot. After Michele proceeded along the trail, I lingered a few moments to observe the reaction and to try a little cooing of my own. I got a very minimal response. Here’s the tamarin gazing after the no-longer-visible Michele — disconsolately, I suspect.
We’re told that the Species Survival Program for tamarins is on the lookout for a new male, which ideally can be shipped here before it gets too cold for such a tiny tropical creature to travel this far north. Wild tamarins live in groups of three to 15 members; they are not solitary by nature, and clearly, this one is ready for some companionship.