Punch, the orphaned monkey at the Ichikawa City Zoological and Botanical Garden in Japan, is marking his first birthday on Sunday with a flood of fan mail and a place in the zoo's monkey enclosure. The zoo said it has received about 2,500 birthday cards and messages for the animal that was abandoned by his mother after birth a year ago Sunday.
The response helps explain why Punch has become a draw far beyond the zoo itself. His image, still linked to the plush toy keepers gave him to help develop his gripping ability, turned him into an online sensation in February and brought tens of thousands of visitors to the zoo, with half of them coming from overseas. Fans inside Japan and abroad answered again for the birthday, and the zoo opened a Punch birthday exhibit filled with cards, messages and video about his earliest days.
For Punch, the story is not only about attention. Zookeepers cared for him through six months of special care before he was placed into the monkey enclosure in mid-January, where he now lives with about 50 other monkeys. That move changed his daily life, and it also changed the picture that made him famous: he is no longer holding the toy and now mingles and plays with the others, even as visitors continue to treat him like a star.
Kumi Ishizawa, one of the people who came after recovering from illness, said Punch gave her a reason to get well and visit him in person. She had followed his story from afar and came to the zoo after she could travel again, part of the wider reaction that has turned one young monkey's survival into a public event. Takashi Yasunaga, a zoo official, said the keepers and staff watched over Punch closely as he struggled to live each day, and he recalled that the heat when the monkey was born made the memory especially vivid as the season returned.
His first birthday now closes the gap between the animal people first met online and the one living with the other monkeys today. Punch may no longer have the plush toy that carried his image around the world, but the birthday cards show that the bond did not end when the photos did.
