St. John’s Antigua – Farmers in the South-eastern village of Newfield, Antigua are losing crops due to a growing population of wild vervet monkeys also known as green monkeys that live in the bushes outside their farmlands.

The non-native animal is said to have been spotted several years ago but recently farmers in Newfield are reporting sittings of dozens more.

“I’ve seen several, not just one and I’ve seen them many times,” said Wayne Gardner, Manager of Lincoln Farm, adding that his first sighting was nearly seven years ago when he started to setup his farm and to date, he has seen at least 12 in one area.

“I had the land cleared all the way down to the gut stream and [as I was] going down to the gut stream one day, just driving in, I went all the way down to turn around, and there were several of them drinking water.”

“I was amazed because I never knew we had monkeys here like that. So, I stopped, and I looked and as soon as they saw me, they took off into the bushes,” he recalled.

The only monkeys that were known to be on Antigua before then, were a few at the Wadadli Nature Park. While some who spot the monkeys may see little to harm in hosting them, it is a financial cost to farmers whose livelihoods are disrupted when they still their crops.

“Farmers are really struggling with them especially my neighbours because they plant a lot of fruit crops – melons, tomatoes, stuff like that – and the monkeys would come, and they’d just take everything. I remember her last melon crops, she didn’t get even one because the monkeys wouldn’t just eat one, they’d bite everything,” he told Wadadli Unplugged.

They come all the time

“They come there all the time to eat tamarind. Whenever I see them, I run them. I don’t want them here because they come, they take my lettuce raft out of the water, drink water, sometimes I leave them there overnight and when I come the next day, they’re wilted and I can’t use them,” Mr. Gardner explained.

On the day of the interview, he said one of his employees spotted six monkeys in a nearby tree – one of them Mr. Gardner shot and killed.

“We’ve seen up to 12 at once and among them are a lot of babies – so of course, they’re multiplying. It seems that they’ve been spreading out.”

“I don’t know if they all started from the same group,” he said, theorizing that their presence on Antigua could be due to people smuggling them onto the island and then letting them loose.

“I think that the government has to, from that perspective, protect our borders from people smuggling these things in. It’s tough when you spend your money and you setup and you try to operate your business to make a living, but people bringing this problem on us, you know, it’s a real challenge on us.”

Now they come in larger numbers

Linda Foster who operates the farm next door corroborated that for the last few years, they too have been having problems with monkeys.

She said when they first started coming, they came in pairs or alone but the population today has grown. “Initially it might have been one or two, but I have seen as many as about 20 monkeys here at one time.”

Both farms are located near a small dam which has dried up due to drought. The Fosters are taking the opportunity to cut down the trees near the dam, to stop the monkey from coming onto their land.

“We are in the process of cutting all these trees back as the monkeys tend to climb in the trees and then creep down into the fields,” she said.

After Ms. Foster stopped growing tomatoes and watermelons for concern that the monkeys would bite into them, they then started digging up her cassavas.  But she said they have left it alone, probably because it was too difficult to do.

“We used to have a whole stack of bananas and they used to come and attack the bananas but they may only eat one or two bananas at a time so it was never a problem but when you get like 20 or so coming in, they can decimate the field you’re cropping in no time at all.”

But today with more problems in farming like praedial larceny and years of drought conditions, monkeys reducing crop turn out, is only increasing the difficulty for farmers to produce.

“It’s very soul destroying I’ll tell you. You know it’s not an easy task, it’s a seven day a week job and there’s umpteen problems with the drought right now that we have to deal with and then when you go to harvest, you find that there’s not very much to harvest at the end of the day.”

A shiny scarecrow in the field

Scarecrows are usually erected by farmers to ward of birds who want to feed on crops, so I suppose it is no surprise that they would work to scare off pesky monkeys. And that is exactly what Ms. Foster did when she noticed monkeys coming after her tomatoes.

“I put my bird scarers up which is basically just sticks in the ground with strings between and I hand CD disks off those and wind blows them and it’s like flashlights flying everywhere and that scares the birds. So, I put that up and put a scarecrow up and after that I didn’t have anymore trouble for a while with the monkeys – I just didn’t see them,” she shared.

But a month ago, when she moved the scarecrow to guard new crops, the monkeys reemerged the next day. “I don’t know if they’ve got used to it or it really is working.”

Ms. Foster described the monkeys as being similar to the ones found on the island of St Kitts – a notion shared by Ricaldo Pike, Veterinarian for the St Kitts Biomedical Research Foundation who once identified, by picture, an adult vervet monkey in Bethesda.

That monkey was photographed a year ago by a group of hikers who were making their way through the old Bridgetown ruins.

Monkeys have also been spotted in Christian Valley. Elderly farmer, Emmanuel Browne told us that he spotted “a big one “about four years ago at his farm.