During October, the monitoring teams patrolled the forests of Edu Suazo, Takinta, Atwebanso and Anwiafutu. The patrols are conducted if there is a tip-off of any illegal activity such as illegal lumbering, hunting or charcoal production. During the patrols, members are brought together from alternative communities, which becomes necessary because it is sometimes not appropriate to involve monitoring team members from the focal community for their own safety. During the month of October, only one chainsaw machine was confiscated at Edu. A total number of 200 lumbers were confiscated and handed over to the respective communities. A lot of work has been done in the community tree plantations. The monitoring team and some community members were organized to weed around the trees, weed the lines and replace dead trees with new seedlings. These activities were carried out in Takinta and Nawule. It was agreed that the weeding should be done on a monthly routine. Some communities have made more lands available for more trees to be planted so the tree nurseries are being expanded. Trans-border monitoring has occurred three times on the Tano River. The monitoring was conducted by the Ghanaian team who to the various points where lumber is bought from Ivory Coast. These points included Ellenda Warf, Kabblasuazo Warf and Edu Warf and Atsimanu. During the patrols, 100 boards were confiscated, however no chain saws were confiscated. The boards were ultimately donated to the community.

We are so happy to announce that two of our White-naped mangabeys, Sonja and Efia Marie, are pregnant! By the end of the year and beginning of 2017 we will hopefully have two new-born mangabeys. This year has been filled with great moments at the centre thanks to several visits/volunteers from all over the world. We enjoyed a training workshop, veterinary nursing advice, and a lot of helping hands to improve the welfare of our lovely primates. In one of those visits we learned how to do rope splicing with the help of two volunteers from ZSL and we were able to give a lot of new rope enrichment to our primates as well as feeding platforms. Nuba’s family will soon have a new semi-free enclosure in Kumasi Zoo! Thus, they are getting trained to be able to travel. The alfa male, Nuba, is responding very well to hand injection training and the others are already familiar with the box in which they will travel to Kumasi. We have also been training the patas families to take medication from a syringe. They have been a bit sick lately but we are doing our best to investigate the cause with our veterinary team, and hopefully they will improve soon. It is a bit of a worry for us, but does not stop them from enjoying enrichment using Bel Aqua bottles filled with treats. Due to lack of proper storage facilities and rats, some of our food at Accra Zoo goes to waste. Therefore, we undertook an investigation of our primates’ diet. The food given and taken out of the primate enclosures was weighed and we discovered the amounts consumed during a week. This gave us a precise idea on the amount of each food type that they got. The results obtained will help us reduce waste and adjust the quantity of food given to them daily to improve their diet. Thanks to all the small efforts brought together to make the EPBC great and better! We will continue to do our best to keep it up! The EPBC team!

WAPCA is distributing money boxes made by students of the Holmer Secondary School (UK) throughout organisations in Ghana, UK and Germany. Landau Zoo and Heidelberg Zoo have already provided homes for two of the boxes and now we are searching throughout Accra for businesses that could display them at their counters. Sadly it has been more of a mission than expected to distribute these lovely money boxes and only three have been dispersed. Thank you to the businesses that have opened their doors to help WAPCA fundraise! The current locations are: Wild Gecko Handicrafts, Suntrade Beads and a yoga studio in Dzorwulu. Hopefully more locations will be added to the list soon!

From the 10th-17th October Hannah and Miranda from the Zoological Society London (ZSL) visited the Accra Zoo and worked with zoo keepers to explore the new world of rope splicing. Using hundreds of meters of rope they showed their expertise in creating complex creations like monkey fists and ladders, which have been erected in enclosures for the monkeys to explore. Not only rope splicing was on the agenda. Hannah and Miranda were also involved in training and enrichment activities, lending a helping hand, adding suggestions to make training more effective and donating many useful materials like clickers, targets and animal training pouches...hard things to come by in Ghana. It was a pleasure to have the ZSL keepers in Ghana and their help is much appreciated by primates and staff alike!

October 4th was International Zoo Keeper Day throughout the world. WAPCA made sure to honour the keepers working hard at the Accra Zoo on this special day by having a small party with Ghanaian Red-Red stew. It is important to remind the zoo keepers of the importance of their work, especially in a country like Ghana where the keepers are not as celebrated as in other European countries. By commemorating International Zoo Keeper Day we have reminded our keepers of their imperative role in the lives of the zoo animals. As we sat under the Achimota Forest tree canopy, wild spot-nosed monkeys roamed around above our heads, leaping from branch to branch making the evening extraordinary and overall a day to remember. Hopefully keepers around the world felt celebrated and inspired to continue making a difference in the lives of so many zoo animals around the globe. International Zoo Keeper Day was also the ideal opportunity for WAPCA to gather WAPCA and zoo staff together and establish a united Accra Zoo team to ensure further work at the zoo would be effective. Making the various staff members feel heard has already led to more open communication and the vocalisation of ideas to make the zoo a better place for animals and staff!

WAPCA's Country Coordinator Andrea Dempsey has been placed on the African Primatology Society (APS) steering committee and already meetings have taken place to develop the new society. The APS was formed in April 2016 at the IUCN/SSC Primate Specialist Group African Red List Assessment Workshop in Rome, Italy. It hopes to represent a continent wide platform to coordinate African primatology research and conservation efforts. Over 70% of the 282 nonhuman primate taxa (including subspecies) on the African continent are threatened in the wild and 15 taxa are critically endangered. This conservation status assessment has reiterated the dire situation facing African primates stemming from hunting pressures, habitat loss and fragmentation. Clearly the current efforts have not been sufficient to significantly influence the declining trends of primate populations and more commitment and unity is required among governments, international organisations, donor agencies, research institutions and local communities. The lack of coordination between conservationists and primatologists has also been criticised as a contributor to the lacking effectiveness of primate conservation to date. The idea to establish a platform for information sharing, coordination of research, conservation efforts and networking among African primatologists to promote research and improve conservation efforts has been discussed prior to 2013. The African Primatologists Working Group (APWG) was formed as a result of these discussions in 2013, which was furthermore developed in 2016 to form the APS. The steering committee of the APS is now working towards organising an inaugural congress of the APS in 2017 where the structure and operational framework of the society will be clarified. A constitution will be adopted and officers elected to coordinate the affairs of the society. In the near future we can expect the circulation of a membership form and the creation of an APS website, where a database of members and relevant contact details will be circulated. We look forward to APS news and hope that this platform will help to safeguard the future of African primates!