baby marmoset at Knowsley
A BABY monkey has been taken home by a safari park photographer after being abandoned by its mother.
Elliott is the smallest of three babies born to one of Knowsley Safari Park’s tiny marmoset monkeys recently.
However, marmoset mothers only have two teats and enough milk for a pair of infants and, on the few occasions triplets are born, one baby is effectively abandoned.
In the wild the infant would die, but fortunately Safari Park staff were able to step in to rescue Elliott.
The tiny Brazilian baby has been looked after for the past five weeks by park photographer Penny Boyd.
It is been no easy job as, for the first four weeks, Elliott had to be fed milk via a syringe every two hours, day and night. Now he has moved on to a mix of milk and baby rice, but he still has to eat every three hours, round the clock.
Penny said: “Looking after Elliott has been a big job for such a little guy, because simple tasks like shopping have had to be organised around his feeding times.
“We’ve also had to very careful about who he has had contact with because marmosets are very susceptible to human germs. If he’d picked up a cold in his first few weeks, it could have been fatal.”
When he gets older, the plan is to introduce him to a new group of marmosets at the park.
