Sept. 29--The monkey business is over in Osceola County.
A monkey that was on the loose for the past couple of weeks was caught this evening in St. Cloud after a sheriff's helicopter spotted it monkeying around in the treetops, officials said.
The large brown beast eluded county animal-control workers, who had a hunch -- based on reported sightings near the city's lakefront -- that he might be in woods near Cypress and Wisconsin avenues, said Lee Radebaugh, county animal-control director.
The monkey was, indeed, swinging through a patch of cypress and bay trees on a swampy piece of land a block from the lakefront, Radebaugh said. Afraid it might go bananas if they tried to trap it, animal-control workers tranquilized it with a dart gun a little before 5:30 p.m.
"It's in custody," joked St. Cloud police Sgt. John Kerr.
The monkey, a male, was taken to animal-control headquarters. A veterinarian is examining and monitoring it because it "took a pretty good fall" out of a tree when the dart hit it, officials said.
The vet hasn't determined what kind of monkey it is, although it resembles a Rhesus macaque, which is native to South and Central Asia but certainly not to Osceola County.
The only monkey wrench in the rescue was that no one has reported a missing or stolen monkey, so officials aren't sure what to do with their mystery guest, which is about 4 feet tall and weighs 25 to 30 pounds.
An investigator from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission plans to go to Osceola County on Thursday to examine the animal.
"He has no tattoos or markings of any kind, so we have no way to trace him," Radebaugh said.
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