It is all anyone can talk about these past few days – is there a monkey roaming around Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island?
Conservation officers and police are investigating a monkey sighting after two children said they saw a small red monkey running across the street on Sunday afternoon.
Travis Wilson was one of the children who says he saw the monkey on Sunday, and saw it running into someone’s yard.
“I’d never seen a real monkey,” he said.
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Mark Stercks, manager at Meadowood General Store, laughed when asked about the sighting.
“What can I say about the monkey?” he said. “It’s big talk here in Meadowood. I thought it was kind of an April Fools joke on a Sunday, sleeping on my sofa pretty well and I get a knock at the door. And my son comes in and approaches me and says there’s a gentleman at my front door who would like to ask me a few questions. Ironically enough, the gentleman said he didn’t know how to word it, and didn’t know how to ask me, but he approached me by asking if I’d seen a monkey.”
Stercks said the man was a conservation officer from Nanaimo, and while he did not see the creature, he did hear there were tracks from an “unknown animal” in the area.
It appears no one has really seen the monkey since the original sighting.
In order to own a primate in B.C. you must have a primate permit and conservation officers say no one has one in the area.
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