HOME | DD

Description
As a bird of prey swoops in to make an attack, a troop of Coquerel's sifakas (Propithecus coquereli) notice only at the last moment and make growls as an alarm call perhaps a bit late. One of the lemurs leaps out of the treetops in attempt to evade the raptor's talons, a response these primates use to escape their natural aerial predators. Except this raptor is not a natural predator of lemurs: it is a red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis), a bird not found anywhere even remotely near the lemur's endemic home island of Madagascar. It's not the hawk that is out of place, but the lemurs, as they are living in Durham, North Carolina.

Drawing made for another Animal of the Month event from the Wildlife--Awareness group (slightly rushed and last minute though, because I am a huge procrastinator who only started working a monthly event on the last day of the month). The 'from below' perspective was fun to play around with in this one.

Alright so some of you might be going "why the fuck is this lemur troop in North Carolina", and that's understandable considering this family of primates is endemic to the African island of Madagascar. However, captive animals are a thing that exists. In Durham, North Carolina, is one of the largest lemur sanctuaries in the world: the Duke Lemur Center. This facility houses numerous species of lemur, some of which have access to the several outdoor areas called 'natural habitat enclosures'. One of the lemur species kept at the center is the critically endangered Coquerel's sifaka, and two troops of them are housed in these outdoor forest enclosures where they will eat the local wild plants along with whatever the keepers are feeding them.

Well, I recently read this study on sifaka alarm calls , analyzing warning calls from both wild and captive populations of Coquerel's sifaka as well as the related Verreaux's sifaka, and one of the analyzed lemur populations was the semifree-ranging Coquerel's sifaka troop in the Duke Lemur Center. Something that grabbed my attention was when they considered sympatric predators to predict the lemurs' responses to warning calls: it was mentioned that "only attacks by red-tailed hawks have ever been observed". Yeah, apparently the long-as-fuck list of red-tailed hawk prey species includes a large species of lemur whose native range is nowhere near overlapping with the hawk's, all because the raptor will attack the captive primate at this Center. An adult sifaka can weigh more than 4 kg and is around 50 centimeters long excluding the tail, which surely would rank it among the hawk's largest known prey species. Of course, the paper didn't mention whether the attacks were successful or if they were targeted at adults, and these attacks are probably rare, but it still stuck out to and surprised me enough to make me draw this. Interactions between native and non-native animals are quite interesting.

And here's more stuff. Remember that show Zoboomafoo on PBS Kids (I watched the hell out of it when i was younger) where the titular character is a Coquerel's sifaka? Well, the real lemur who played Zoboo, named Jovian, lived at the Duke Lemur Center from 1994 to 2014. Given that the aforementioned paper was published in 2010 and the hawk attacks mentioned within would have occurred some time before that, it is possible that Jovian saw at least one of them. Yeah, wild stuff to imagine, but of course we probably can't ever know for sure. It's not like we can ask Jovian since he doesn't speak English and also has been dead for 9 years.

Description
As a bird of prey swoops in to make an attack, a troop of Coquerel's sifakas (Propithecus coquereli) notice only at the last moment and make growls as an alarm call perhaps a bit late. One of the lemurs leaps out of the treetops in attempt to evade the raptor's talons, a response these primates use to escape their natural aerial predators. Except this raptor is not a natural predator of lemurs: it is a red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis), a bird not found anywhere even remotely near the lemur's endemic home island of Madagascar. It's not the hawk that is out of place, but the lemurs, as they are living in Durham, North Carolina.

Drawing made for another Animal of the Month event from the Wildlife--Awareness group (slightly rushed and last minute though, because I am a huge procrastinator who only started working a monthly event on the last day of the month). The 'from below' perspective was fun to play around with in this one.

Alright so some of you might be going "why the fuck is this lemur troop in North Carolina", and that's understandable considering this family of primates is endemic to the African island of Madagascar. However, captive animals are a thing that exists. In Durham, North Carolina, is one of the largest lemur sanctuaries in the world: the Duke Lemur Center. This facility houses numerous species of lemur, some of which have access to the several outdoor areas called 'natural habitat enclosures'. One of the lemur species kept at the center is the critically endangered Coquerel's sifaka, and two troops of them are housed in these outdoor forest enclosures where they will eat the local wild plants along with whatever the keepers are feeding them.

Well, I recently read this study on sifaka alarm calls , analyzing warning calls from both wild and captive populations of Coquerel's sifaka as well as the related Verreaux's sifaka, and one of the analyzed lemur populations was the semifree-ranging Coquerel's sifaka troop in the Duke Lemur Center. Something that grabbed my attention was when they considered sympatric predators to predict the lemurs' responses to warning calls: it was mentioned that "only attacks by red-tailed hawks have ever been observed". Yeah, apparently the long-as-fuck list of red-tailed hawk prey species includes a large species of lemur whose native range is nowhere near overlapping with the hawk's, all because the raptor will attack the captive primate at this Center. An adult sifaka can weigh more than 4 kg and is around 50 centimeters long excluding the tail, which surely would rank it among the hawk's largest known prey species. Of course, the paper didn't mention whether the attacks were successful or if they were targeted at adults, and these attacks are probably rare, but it still stuck out to and surprised me enough to make me draw this. Interactions between native and non-native animals are quite interesting.

And here's more stuff. Remember that show Zoboomafoo on PBS Kids (I watched the hell out of it when i was younger) where the titular character is a Coquerel's sifaka? Well, the real lemur who played Zoboo, named Jovian, lived at the Duke Lemur Center from 1994 to 2014. Given that the aforementioned paper was published in 2010 and the hawk attacks mentioned within would have occurred some time before that, it is possible that Jovian saw at least one of them. Yeah, wild stuff to imagine, but of course we probably can't ever know for sure. It's not like we can ask Jovian since he doesn't speak English and also has been dead for 9 years.