I seen this on the michigan outdoors forum and thought i would pass it along.
April 1, 2003
BY ERIC SHARP
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
GARDEN CORNERS -- As if wolves and cougars weren't controversial enough, scientists in the Upper Peninsula said Monday that they are getting an increasing number of sightings of the UP brush monkey. The animal is Michigan's version of the Yeti of the Himalayas and the Sasquatch of the Pacific Northwest.
The best-known example of a brush monkey is a mounted head at Foxy's Den in Garden Corners.
The brush monkey has been an elusive part of the Upper Peninsula's fauna for decades, said Dr. Per Varicater, who compiles data about Yetis (also called abominable snowmen), Sasquatches, the Florida skunk ape and similar creatures for the Bremen Universitat Naturalisticher Konklave (BUNK) in Germany.
"The brush money is a puzzling and contradictory creature," he said. "While it is very rare and shy, most of the reports come from places where people congregate, especially around taverns."
I.M. Lyon, an English big-game hunter who has led several expeditions to Tibet in unsuccessful efforts to catch a Yeti, was hired last fall by the Upper Peninsula Tourism and Recreation Association to capture a brush monkey.
"We thought we had some prime specimens for sure in November," Lyon said. "A woman from Bloomfield Hills was passing through the western UP and reported to the police that she had seen a bunch of hairy, smelly, apelike creatures lurking in the woods near Ralph. We went in there at night and set up our net cannons near what appeared to be the creatures' den.
"When they came out about an hour before dawn, we fired the nets and got all of them. But it turned out it was just a bunch of guys from Negaunee who had spent a couple of weeks in deer camp."
The best-known example of a brush monkey is a mounted head at Foxy's Den, a store that John Fox runs in Garden Corners at the intersection of M-183 and U.S.-2.
The mount, made by local taxidermist Richard Spalding, "has really surprised many a poor, unsuspecting troll from down around Detroit," Fox said. "Some of them are afraid to go camping after they see it and we explain what it is."
Dr. Phool Yu, a Shanghai University crypto-biologist and a visiting professor at Northern Michigan University in Marquette, said the UP provides excellent habitat for brush monkeys "because of all the deer blinds in the woods. The monkeys have a pretty thick coat of hair and can live in the open in the warmer months. And just as it really starts to get cold and they need shelter, the deer season ends and they have all these nice little dens to spend the winter in."
Dr. Wada Loada Boohl, a statistician with the Carpathian Research Archival Panel in Baluchistan, said descriptions of UP brush monkeys resembled similar sightings of Yetis in mountainous regions of Asia.
"We think that the brush monkeys must breed in the spring, because that's when we get the majority of the sightings," she said. "In fact, nearly all of them come right around April 1."
Doan B. Leavitt lives about three miles from Fox's store in an area where he said brush monkeys are common.
"I don't think they're really monkeys but a kind of cave man, because they seem to be pretty intelligent," he said. "I once saw a bunch of them looking at a discarded newspaper that had a story about politicians who were promising to cut taxes and spend less, and they seemed to be laughing."
Professor U.R. Gullibel, head of the Department of Unusual and Paranormal Experimentation (DUPE) at Michigan Technological University in Houghton, said the state Department of Natural Resources had hired him to catch a brush monkey this summer.
"It shouldn't be very hard," he said. "We did a brush monkey population estimate by using the same mathematical model that the DNR uses to count deer. According to that model, there are about 2 million of them."
