A man picks up a car at a Florida airport and finds a monkey sitting on the roof

A man went to pick up his car at the airport and found an unexpected visitor: a monkey perched on top of his vehicle.

Reddit user u/disgruntledmarmoset, who goes by the pseudonym Geoffrey, 26, shared his surprise encounter in a post on the “animalid” subreddit, racking up 5,800 upvotes.

On October 14, Geoffrey had just arrived at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport (FLL) on a Spirit Airlines flight from LaGuardia Airport, New York, and headed to the parking lot expecting nothing more than a routine trip home. Instead, he came face to face with a primate.

“My car is kind of high up and I wasn’t expecting a surprise so I didn’t see it at first. I heard like a scraping noise and I looked up and saw it. I was like W**!” Geoffrey said Newsweek.

In his Reddit post, he detailed his attempt to handle the situation, sharing, “That’s when I took the photo. I hit the lock button to see if the sound made him run, but it didn’t.”

The monkey, standing on the driver’s side passenger door, seemed unfazed. But Geoffrey wasn’t about to let his new friend hang around for long. “I opened and closed (the door) to see if it had run, and it worked. It went down over my windshield and my hood and ran away, and that was it,” he said.

Monkeys in Florida

Geoffrey’s experience, while surprising to many, sheds light on a little-known fact: Florida is home to several colonies of non-native monkeys, and the primate population has exploded in recent years.

Some, like the Green Vervet monkey, which Redditors have identified as the mystery monkey, have thrived in certain areas for decades.

A colony of Vervet monkeys has lived near Fort Lauderdale for more than 80 years.

These monkeys escaped from the Dania chimpanzee farm in the 1940s, the farm formerly known as the Anthropoid Ape Research Foundation (ARFF). Monkeys were used for both entertainment and research.

Now, the project serves as a sanctuary for free-ranging apes in the area.

Reddit Reacts: “Only in Florida”

Unsurprisingly, Geoffrey’s post sparked a lively conversation on Reddit, with many users talking about their unexpected encounters with wild animals.

“I thought seeing a coyote every now and then was scary,” wrote one user, marveling at Geoffrey’s experience.

Another user, pbounds2, identified the animal and commented: “Green Vervet monkey, invasive. Found this – been there for 80 years.”

That revelation surprised more than a few people, including one commenter who joked, “What the hell, Florida. Every week I learn about a new invasive species you have that’s been there for decades.”

One Floridian even offered a fun fact: “There’s a large colony of them hanging out at the Fort Lauderdale Airport Park N Fly. They’re fun to watch. Not sure what type, though.”

One user summed it up perfectly: “This is amazing! I love that there are people working to protect them. I had no idea there were monkeys in Florida. I’m amazed!”

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