Dealing with monkeys

Agricultural Techniques Pest Control
#1

HIYA :slight_smile: I’m looking for advice for dealing with monkeys eating the tops of papaya plants, and tearing up banana plants! The papayas especially, never get more than about 50 cms tall when the monkeys rip the top off and eat it. So we’ve stopped planting them. And bananas … they shred the plant in order to get the young core of the stalk. Most of the plants recover, but we want a sensible way to prevent monkeys from damaging the plants. We’d be happy to share with them ;), but as things stand, they’re not sharing with us!

We’ve thought about using an electric fence around a small area to see if this works. It’d be solar powered. Also, we’d have to cut the tall trees around the perimeter of the fence so monkeys wouldn’t be able to swing in. Even if they did get inside, they probably wouldn’t be able to jump out. I’d hate to have this happen. I can only imagine the small nightmares that might ensue!

We’re in the jungle of southern Thailand.

Thanks much, Troy

#2

I have no idea if it would work, but I would try spreading human urine around the plants. It’s a great fertilizer and does repel some animals.

#3

Ah those monkeys! We have a big problem with vervets in East Africa and I should be glad to see any clever ideas in response to your query.

Our dear monkeys take much of our mango and orange production and we have tried many different ideas. The only one that seems to work is to have a youngster running around with a catapult firing off missiles and shouting. But since that costs us a daily fee, it plays havoc with the economics. We run turkeys, ducks and geese among the trees so the fruit guardians serve a dual role but it still knocks a hole in our balance sheet. My neighbour lets off fire-crackers but that is anti-social and not cheap.

#4

Thanks guys … I appreciate your responses.

Robert, we already regularly spread urine around the bananas, but not very much because we don’t know how much the plants can handle. I suppose, in order to have that repellent effect from the smell, we’d have to spread LOTS, and so we’d have to spread it far from the plants. I wonder if the smell’d repel us too :slight_smile:

Everard, we may very well someday have chickens and ducks running around. I’ve heard there are huge snakes in the area, so we’d have to have some way to keep the birds safe.

Putting up our fence is not a high priority, so I really don’t know when we might get around to it. Still fishing for ideas right now, but this is so far our plan.

Thanks much :slight_smile:

#5

We get snakes a lot – the pythons are threat at night so we put our poultry in small houses made of pallets around the inside of which we nail chicken netting making complete coverage against most snakes. Mambas are slightly more versatile and the younger snakes can penetrate chicken netting [we lost a half-mature gosling at one point] – the answer seems to be goats which mambas seem to avoid. We housed our milk goats next to the poultry houses and have not had any issues since. Mambas can be quite bold – recently I have had a couple pass beneath me as I sit out in the evening.
In addition to your idea of chickens and ducks, I suggest geese and guineas - they are good at warning of snake attacks. Guineas do not mix democratically with chickens, however, and so much depends on your breed of chicken.

As to monkeys I guess it may depend on which type you have. Vervets can be very bold and habituate to humans, hence the need for catapaults to remove the habituation. In the maize-growing season, all in our neighbourhood play the game of ‘Pass the monkeys’ since when we drive them off, they become someone else’s problem. The early plantings of maize this year having mostly failed, we find it easy enough to drive the monkeys off onto neighbouring plots. This year, there are few monkey-feeding tourists around at the coastal lodges and so the monkeys are hungrier – the problem is that their natural habitat has been lost over the years and so they need new food sources. If we had forests instead of endless sisal plantations the monkeys would be less of a problem.

[Habituation to humans can be a real problem - one of my elderly neighbours fought a battle with pots and pans against a blue-balled male vervet in his kitchen the other day. The neighbour has had a triple by-pass surgery and so the battle was not advisable although the old man finally prevailed with a frying pan and subsequently – for him, not the monkey - a large glass of whiskey.]

#6

Thanks Everard, for sharing your experiences and suggestions. I’ve shared your comments with my friend, and we’ll keep these things in mind :slight_smile:

#7

This is a long shot, but I heard monkeys are very afraid of snakes… is there such a thing as a snake decoy the way an owl is used for pigeons? Just a thought.

#8

A lady next to our place has started using a solar powered mp3 player to play sounds of a tiger, alternated with what sounds like machine gun sounds. The sounds go off at regular intervals, every few minutes. She doesn’t have any way of knowing though, if it’ll work, but it seems like it’s not working because she’s seen damage that I think can only have been done by a monkey. I’m thinking it might be effective if the sounds were triggered by a motion detector. I like the idea of using cha-om as a barrier because it’s perennial, thorny, grows fast, and many people like eating the shoots. Progress on our place is SLOW, so we still haven’t done anything about monkeys! Thanks for the snake suggestion :slight_smile:

#9

This is certainly a real struggle for us as well here in Senegal. Other than group chases to move monkeys to neighboring areas (which gives usually a few days reprieve) or shooting monkeys (which we want to avoid), the continual presence of humans or trained dogs seem to be the only effective solution we’ve found so far. Dogs obviously require some training to stay and guard a field, but the monkeys that come for vegetable and fruit raids eventually leave frustrated.

#10

Hiya Noah :slight_smile: Thanks so much for this.

The monkeys have been leaving us alone for the most part. Wish I had some idea why. In the past, we couldn’t get papaya plants taller than even a half meter. But now we’ve got several about a meter and a half high :slight_smile: I forwarded your message onto my friend, the guy who I work the land with.

There are dogs living in the forest, at least it seems like they live there! I wonder if they could be trained fairly easily! There’s no way for us to have a continual human presence any time soon.

I’m glad you’re not so quick to shoot the monkeys. Heck, they just wanna live too, right? How can we live together? I sometimes wonder, if we planted more, would they have enough, and leave enough for us, or would that just encourage more to come, and somehow lead them to have more baby monkeys, and still leave nothing for us!

Thanks again, and I wish you (and even the monkeys :slight_smile: all the best :slight_smile:

ในวันที่ พ. 21 ก.ค. 2021 เวลา 21:53 Noah Elhardt via ECHOcommunity Conversations conversations@echocommunity.org เขียนว่า: