This past month has been hectic for the Monkey Helpline and Animal Rescues Unlimited, the two KZN-based, Animal Rights Africa rescue projects coordinated by Steve Smit and Carol Booth. There have been monkey rescues every single day, interspersed with almost daily calls to rescue dogs, cats, hadedas, Egyptian geese, dassies, genets, mongooses… and even storks! Read more for a full report by Steve and Carol on their busy month.

Not too many rescue calls have a humorous slant but we couldn't help laughing when we got a call from a very concerned Kloof resident to say that a "large black bird with a long red beak had landed in her garden and that, in spite of close attention from her cat and efforts on her and her son's part to shoo the bird away, it wouldn't fly off".  She said they were quite sure it was a baby something or other and couldn't fly.

From her description, which I had to prize out of her, I was pretty sure it was a Wooly-neck Stork, beautiful birds being seen ever more frequently around residential areas along the coast.  I told her to keep an eye on the bird until we could get there to 'rescue' it. She begged me to get there as quickly as possible because she was busy preparing for an influx of visitors to attend her pregnant daughter's stork party that afternoon. Indeed, how many people have a real stork visit them for their 'stork party'?

Needless to say, when we arrived at the house the perfectly healthy adult Wooly-neck stork took one look at us approaching with our capture nets and gracefully walked a few steps before taking flight and disappearing into the distance.

On the heartache side we dealt with over 150 dead monkeys between 1 June and 31 August.  International Primates Day was, ironically, a day of monkey carnage, with five monkeys killed by cars and dogs. On a happier note, on the same day we also released a monkey we had rescued four weeks earlier on the north coast golf estate, Prince's Grant. She had somehow got caught up in fishing tackle and had a treble hook in her mouth attached by nylon to another treble hook on a wire trace with a float in her right thigh. 

Monkey Helpline will intensify its campaign for far more stringent controls on the ownership and use of pellet guns. This includes lobbying government, and educating the authorities and the public about the horrifyingly cruel consequences of shooting animals with lead pellets.

Anyone wishing to know more about these two Animal Rights Africa projects, and how you can support their work for animals, should visit the blog http://monkeyhelpline.blogspot.com

Steve Smit and Carol Booth are both Animal Rights Africa trustees.