Tracking Monkeys : Biologist Has Difficult Test on Field Trip

SAN FRANCISCO —  A biologist who spent three years studying primates in the wilds of Kenya has been brought in to track a 12-pound patas monkey that escaped from the San Francisco Zoo with her baby three weeks ago.

So far, the great monkey hunt has turned up only two dogs, a cat, a hawk and a gopher, the biologist, Janice Chism, said.

“It’s going to be like looking for a needle in a haystack,” said Chism, a biology professor at Oakland’s Merritt College. “There’s a lot more vegetation in the city than you think.”

The monkey and her baby, worth $250 each, disappeared from the zoo’s new $7-million Primate Discovery Center on July 11. Since then, the monkeys have led humans on a chase.

Zoo officials believe that the mother jumped the fence from a tree after a quarrel with other monkeys.

The zoo has received dozens of calls from residents who have spotted the animals as they moved from backyard to backyard, from park to park.

After chasing the monkeys through the streets and over the backyard fences of San Francisco, zoo officials called in Chism just as the monkeys seemed to have comfortably settled in the wooded Sutro Forest.