Mike in the Wild

A Christmas holiday away from home guarantees an opportunity to explore new landscapes, especially when it's a winter escape to the Caribbean Sea.  While the area's islands are famous for their Afro-European cultures and beautiful beaches, they're not as well known for their native mammals.   Besides bats and seals, few actually even live there today.  However, colonial settlement and exploitation brought several new species that remain today, with the best example being perhaps the vervet monkeys on the island of Saint Kitts. Native to Africa, the vervet or African green monkey, have existed in feral populations on both Saint Kitts and Barbados for at least 300 years.  They either escaped or were released in significant enough numbers over the years to create the viable groups that inhabit these two unique and distant Caribbean islands.   It's possible they were pets of early European settlers or tradesmen, maybe sailing aboard the same ships that b...