The last week’s have seen a major change in our wild slow loris social groups. This has resulted in some dangerous dispersals by two of our young lorises. Our famous loris Tereh and her husband Alomah experienced an invasion from Fernando. This resulted in the death of our dear Alomah and the breaking up of Tereh’s stable and adorable family. Furthermore, oldest daughter Tombol literally made for the hills. However her younger brother Tzatziki was forced from his home just a little too soon. He is coping okay, and is still not sure whether to try for home again with mama or make his own way. This week our team has been observing this once in a lifetime event, and following Tzatziki as he moves between farm, forest and village, doing our best to make sure he makes it to wherever he decides to go safely.
Slow lorises eat gum and insects and love to lick flowers. Fruit is not typically on the menu – our confused Tzatziki even tried to eat a lemon! And dropped that sour fruit with a confused look. We would like to tell the story of Tzatziki to children in our village, and perhaps even produce a new t-shirt to help support our studies of this important behaviour. So we are launching this small competition to produce a cute drawing of Tzatziki and his lemon! The winner will receive a bundle of LFP goodies, and the winning drawing will be used feature on a t-shirt for our Nature Club programme in the village where we study this Critically Endangered primate. We would love to use the other drawings to produce a story book about Tzatziki and his family.
Why this work is important
We also want to use this example to help reintroduction projects. It is more and more common to release slow loris species that have never been studied in the wild. Without knowing what these different slow loris species eat or how they behave, how can we even know where to put them? So we can use this drawing as a symbol of just how hard dispersal is for our wild animals – emphasising the importance of knowing wild behaviour ourselves before we choose where to put slow lorises (and other species) back.
Please send your drawings to info@littlefireface.org
Here are some more photos of Tzatziki! Please submit your artwork no later than 15 June 2018!
