We’re Watching You!

These shots are made in the unique Primate Park ‘Apenheul’ in Apeldoorn / Holland*. 
There is no other zoo in the world where you will find so many primates roaming freely among the visitors: more than 200 of them! 

The monkeys are very friendly, cute and harmless to you and your children. They are curious by nature and will even come up close. But.... they are relentlessly looking for food and frequently turn out to be swift little pickpockets.

It’s amazing how the adorable Squirrel Monkeys climb on your shoulder and unzip your bag or searched your pockets before you even notice it!

The ladies that accompanied me are living proof when they were robbed of a piece of bread!  (there's a picture in the extra's made just seconds prior to the theft!)

The girls are still doubting if they’ll press charges at the local Police-station :-) :-) :-)

So don’t say I didn’t warn you when you let them come closer by looking at these shots in the LARGE mode :-)

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*some history:
In the sixties, Wim Mager, a photographer from Rotterdam, had two tamarins. At the time it was legal to buy monkeys at a pet shop. What started as a hobby, ended in a primate park. Mager decided to give up his job as a photographer and developed the ‘apen-heul’ concept (‘apen’ means ‘apes’ or ‘monkeys’ and ‘heul’ is old-Dutch for ‘refuge’ or ‘safezone’).

The concept was simple: people enjoy primates most when the primates are enjoying themselves and behaving naturally. So the monkeys no longer lived in cages with bars, but in large, natural enclosures in the forest.

Apenheul opened in 1971 as a small but revolutionary zoo but expanded enormously over the years. It is the first and only zoo in the world(!) where monkeys live free in the forest but can also walk around the visitors.