Never before had he seen one of the striking creatures emerge from the forest.
Deforestation was eating away at its limited domain, and the monkey was trying to find an escape route for its family.
“This little creature is endangered. We need to do something to preserve it,“ said Schlindwein, a 62-year-old small-scale farmer in Sinop municipality, located within Brazil’s central Mato Grosso state.
Within five to seven years, they hope the new growth will have tripled the available space for this particular monkey family, made up of four adults and an infant.
'Nowhere to go'
It was listed as one of the world’s 25 most endangered primates in the 2022/3 “Primates in Peril” report of the IUCN and other environmental groups.
“When offspring are born and need to migrate to continue the reproductive cycle, they have nowhere to go,“ Gustavo Rodrigues Canale, a primatologist at the Federal University of Mato Grosso, told AFP.
Schlindwein's family of monkeys is curtailed to a patch of land the size of a polo field, in a region with the ignominious title “Arc of deforestation” for having the highest rate of Amazon forest destruction.
The “Primates in Peril” report suggested forest loss could be mitigated by the creation of reserves “and the replacement of large areas of chemical-dependent monocultures of commodity crops by more sustainable models of land use, such as agroforests and agroecological food production.”
Deforestation is not the only threat to Schlindwein's monkey family.
“Here, there used to be a stream with trees, but the Sinop Hydroelectric Plant (UHE)... created a large lagoon that the monkeys cannot cross,“ says Anthony Luiz, spokesman for MAR, next to a body of water about 300 meters (984 feet) across.
In the dry season, the rotting wood is exposed, feeding forest fires that hurt and displace monkeys and other animals.
It added that it “maintains permanent monitoring of water quality, aquatic and terrestrial fauna, and vegetation regeneration in the area” and had also launched a monitoring program for threatened primates, as required by law.
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