Main content

Winter in the Atlas Mountains

By Mary Melville, Director for Macaque, Dynasties II

Barbary macaques, found in the mountain ranges of Morocco and Algeria, are one of the few primate species that have to deal with snow.
Barbary macaques have to make alliances to stay warm through the bitter cold – this was an interesting behaviour to follow, but it presented a unique set of challenges for us when filming.
The first snow storm took us by surprise – it had been a fairly warm week with highs of 20 degrees centigrade. It was only November, so earlier than the normal first snowfall – but suddenly a storm arrived, transforming the landscape – the monkeys spent a lot of the day huddling while we tried to keep all the camera equipment (and ourselves) dry! Camera operator, Jack Hynes, created a surprisingly effective cover from a large plastic sheet – not very high tech, but it worked!
The snow would hit us or the equipment and quickly melt – and sometimes the monkeys would shake trees, depositing a huge pile of snow down our backs or onto the kit!
It was the next snow fall however that really caused problems – until this point even when it had snowed, we’d been able to drive the 4x4 vehicles (from the local town where we were staying) up a track to near the monkeys’ territory – but the second storm brought over a foot of snow meaning all nearby roads were shut.
Our day now involved a 1.5 hour uphill trek in deep snow, just to get to where the monkeys were last seen – we were told it was unsafe to do this in the dark, so we set off at sunrise but by the time we got to the forest the monkeys had often moved, so we’d then have to spread out looking for them - luckily their prints in the snow helped us find them.
At the end of the day, freezing cold, we did this trek back down again! We were clocking around 25,000 steps… Luckily mules from the local town helped carry the equipment up and down the mountains, as I’m not sure we’d have made it otherwise!
Once we found the monkeys the next challenge was actually filming them – they were a lot better at travelling across the thick snow than us – we would fall into the thick piles, off balance holding filming equipment – whereas on four legs the macaques could skim across the surface.
On other days, when the fog was in or it was snowing, the challenge was seeing them. I going to grab some new batteries from a bag under a tarpaulin only a couple of hundred metres away and when I came back to the group I was walking in circles for 10 minutes before I realised the monkeys were just behind me!
On the really cold days I wish we’d been able to their huddles!

Stories from the field