On July 22, the Lincoln Park Zoo will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the birth of Kumba, its first baby gorilla. She`s now a happy member of Frank`s troop in the Great Ape House and her birth has been followed by 31 others, a remarkable world record that calls for retrospection and some modest chest-beating.
If gorillas really are ”thinking animals,” as zoo director Lester Fisher believes, it`s not hard to fathom their thoughts. Half a world away, they`re struggling against extinction in the African wilderness. But Chicago is fat city.
”There`s just something about gorillas,” Fisher explained about perhaps his favorite animal. ”They`re soft and gentle. They`re intelligent. They`re awesome. You just can`t help liking these big kids.”
The low-keyed veterinarian has been the principal steward at the zoo since 1962 and has blended science, intuition and love to create a unique haven for the great apes. Home to the largest of all collections-20 animals in residence living in three troops, and 13 on loan to other zoos-Lincoln Park justifiably can call itself the gorilla capital of the world.
So adept has the zoo become at lowland-gorilla husbandry that when another zoo wants to get into the breeding business, Lincoln Park sends them not one animal but a whole troop. Such a priceless gift, unprecedented in the history of zoos, occurred in 1985 when as part of a cooperative breeding program, Freddie, Jojo, Kivu and Matadi relocated to the St. Louis Zoo. Two babies have been produced so far in their $5 million facility.
Earlier, in 1973, the zoo became the first to send an adult male to Europe on a breeding loan. Kisoro, then 12 years old, went to London`s Howlett Zoo, thence to become the most prodigious sire in English zoo history: 14 offspring.
It comes as no surprise that Fisher`s colleagues regularly send him animals with orders: ”Teach him to act like a gorilla.” And it helps explain why Fisher was selected to direct the Lowland Gorilla Species Survival Plan Committee, which officially monitors all 302 captive gorillas in North America.
Fisher keeps the book on gorillas. He is responsible for their continued survival and his efforts have gained worldwide respect.
Gorillas come basically in two types, lowland and mountain. Lowland gorillas are dispersed through six African nations and population estimates range from 20,000 to 70,000. Mountain gorillas are imperiled in the high rain forests of Rwanda. No more than 300 are left-none in zoos-and the survivors are threatened by poachers and encroaching civilization.
For zoos, the supreme compliment from the kept to their keepers is the willingness to reproduce.
”We`ve been blessed in this area because gorillas are like other animals, and statistically we should have ended up with half boys and half girls,” Fisher said.
”But from 1970 to 1976, six of our first seven births were females. So we didn`t have the problem of what to do with the young bucks as they grew up. In a gorilla troop, we can handle a dominant male, and possibly one subordinate male, and all the rest are females.
”That`s what we recommend now. A zoo should have two males and three females if they want a long-term breeding program.”
Although the city`s love affair with gorillas harkens back to the 1930s, Fisher`s Lincoln Park career spans 42 years, starting in 1948 when he signed on as one of the first zoo vets in the business. Since then, Fisher has been closely associated with more zoo animals than he can remember-”I`ve delivered them, treated them and buried them,” he noted.
But in all that time, only one animal has stirred in Fisher enough awe, affection and stark terror to spill over into his dreams.
That was Bushman.
From 1930 until he succumbed to pneumonia in 1951 at age 22, the massive gorilla reigned in Chicago as king of the animals. Children all over the city wept the New Year`s Day that news of Bushman`s death was announced. Thousands of mourners filed past his empty cage. So powerful was the magnetism of this charismatic animal that more than 750,000 people a year still come to view his mounted remains in the great hall of the Field Museum of Natural History.
”The media made Bushman a star,” Fisher said. ”He was a great fan of the media, and they of him. Reporters would go behind his cage to see him and he`d throw dung at them.”
An orphaned 2-year-old from the Cameroons who weighed only 38 pounds, Bushman arrived in Chicago a year before Al Capone went to prison for tax evasion. Enormous crowds visited the little gorilla, but it was his appearance at the 1933 World`s Fair that established him as an international celebrity.
Fisher`s friend and predecessor as director, the late Marlin Perkins, a onetime keeper from St. Louis who became a master promoter, put Bushman on TV. The wonderment never ceased as he grew to more than six feet, tipped the scales at 550 pounds, and was selected by the nation`s zoo directors as ”the greatest of his kind, the most outstanding single animal of any zoo in the world, and the most valuable.”
”I was privileged to know Bushman during his final years, and even took care of him,” Fisher said.
Trying to practice zoo medicine before the era of tranquilizing drugs and capture guns, Fisher never was able to lay a hand on the mighty gorilla. Bushman`s fans remember him as many things-affectionate, comical, glowering-but to Fisher he was, mainly, ”unpredictable.”
”I never touched him. I did eyeball diagnosis and tried to sneak medicine in his food. Had I been able to do more-and if we`d known more-perhaps he wouldn`t have died so young. Average longevity`s well into the 30s today.”
Many times as a young consulting vet, Fisher would make his rounds at 2 in the morning. Ever so gingerly, he would unlock the doors of the old monkey house in which Bushman resided. The ape was so strong he could take an NFL football, jam it under his arm and pop it as if it were a balloon. Fisher always figured Bushman could break out of his cage if he really wanted to.
”I would open the doors of the building. I`d peer into the dark and listen,” Fisher said. ”I`d dream about the old guy . . . in there . . . waiting for me.”
But the tragedy of Bushman`s life was that it reflected the ignorance of the times. This spectacular animal lived in solitary confinement for 20 years. His world consisted only of a small cage that was empty except for his one toy, a tire hanging from a chain.
”If Bushman were alive today, he`d probably be the leader of his own troop in the Great Ape House,” Fisher said. ”He`d be there with his wives and children. His life would be infinitely more interesting, and he`d live a darn sight longer because he would be happy.”
Knowledge was slow in coming, so far as gorillas were concerned. In 1965, for instance, Fisher proudly sent the mighty Rajah on loan to a German zoo to impregnate all their females.
”I got a telegram back asking why we`d sent a female. I stoutly denied it,” Fisher said, laughing. ”But they said they had pictures. It was very embarrassing. The fact is, with gorillas it`s hard to tell, unless you look very carefully.”
Zoo professionals knew that the animals belie their ferocious image and basically are shy, almost faint-hearted creatures. But details of their lives remained unknown until the 1950s and 1960s when pioneering field studies by George Schaller and Dian Fossey contributed scientific research to counter a century of myths.
”George and Dian discovered that gorillas live in large, highly interactive groups dominated by a patriarchal male known as the silverback,” Fisher said. ”The silverback leads the troop, breeds the females and settles arguments.
”As young males become the equivalent of rebellious teenagers, they may challenge him, or get booted out to form their own groups. Group living in a hierarchy makes gorillas feel secure. It lets the youngsters learn the social skills so crucial for survival.”
As soon as they realized this, Fisher and other zookeepers were determined to make amends. They started to form gorilla troops and conceived enclosures that, while not perfect, were designed to allow the animals to behave as naturally as possible. In this way, the integrity of the troop could be preserved.
”Gradually we also learned the medical requirements of the animals, and their nutritional needs. I suspect, for example, that vitamin and mineral deficiencies contributed much to Bushman`s death,” Fisher noted.
Fisher readily admits his gorilla campaign met little resistance. Because of Bushman, the people of Chicago have followed with avid interest the lives of his successor silverbacks: Sinbad, Otto, and now the beautiful Koundu, 15, who Fisher believes may outshine them all someday as what he calls ”a cornerstone animal.”
But as Fisher quickly found out, merely housing gorillas together was not necessarily the way to go. There were fights, some serious. Gorillas, it turns out, pick their friends, not to mention their lovers, carefully. Sinbad, for example, a magnificent animal who died in 1985 at age 38, had to be isolated from the other gorillas in 1958 after he matured from a lovable baby into a wife-beater and irascible tyrant.
On the other hand, Otto, who assumed senior status upon Sinbad`s death, was basically a benign leader, a huge animal weighing more than 400 pounds, short and squat with a mohawk hairstyle. ”Otto was a great social animal,”
Fisher said. ”Frankly, his attitude toward everything was that you either ate it or bred with it.”
But even Otto could be difficult sometimes. One arranged marriage to a big female named Terra was doomed by Otto`s aggressive behavior. The zoo put her together with Frank, described as ”a flowers and candy kind of guy,” and they had a baby.
Nonetheless, Otto was a fine troop leader and became the outstanding U.S. sire of his kind. When he died prematurely of a heart attack at 25 in 1988, Otto`s obituary listed these survivors: five mates, Lenore, Helen, Mumbi, Terra and Benga; six daughters, Obala, Douala, Kisuma, Bassa, Kivu and Mtadi; and two sons, Babec and BeBac.
Otto and other imports who arrived between 1961 and 1968 had special significance: After them, the zoo accepted no more gorillas from the wild. It didn`t have to.
”Our nutrition got better; our husbandry did, too,” Fisher said.
”Then our first baby, Kumba, was born in 1970. It obviously was a deeply emotional experience for all of us here. But she really was an accident. Sometimes, you put two animals together and they breed. That happened with Mumbi and Kisoro. We can`t take credit for it.”
However, several of Fisher`s current staff-including assistant director Dennis Meritt, curator of mammals Mark Rosenthal, and senior great ape keeper Patricia Sass-were witnesses to Kumba`s birth and have provided continuity to further the evolution of their program.
This is the team that Fisher credits with the subsequent gorilla success story. They were aided considerably by Lincoln Park`s Great Ape House, constructed in 1976 at a cost of $3.2 million to house the gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees. A marvel for the time, it still is highly functional with six spacious ”habitats,” which were not intended to be naturalistic, but instead to provide the physical and behavioral stimulation that the animals needed for contentment.
The gorillas may interact with their keepers all day and are kept busy foraging for snacks and playing with contraptions that staff members and architecture students design for them. Teams of human and animal doctors provide continuous care. The gorillas may sack out in privacy when they wish, and are free to go eyeball-to-eyeball with visitors separated only by a sheet of tempered glass.
”Gino, who`s 9 and a troop leader, illustrates what we`re trying to do here,” Fisher said. ”Captive-born in the Rotterdam Zoo, he was rejected by his mother at birth and hand-raised. He imprinted on his human surrogate mother, which meant he was destined to suffer big problems later.”
Such animals have tended to live in a netherworld as adults. They don`t know anything about being gorillas, yet aren`t people, either.
”When we`re forced to hand-rear an infant, we try and integrate it back into a troop between the ages of a year and 18 months,” Fisher said. ”That way it still has time to learn the ropes.”
Gino was introduced to 16-year-old Debbie, the zoo`s favorite foster mother. She accepted him, and eventually the youngster was able to join Frank`s troop.
”When Otto died in 1988, ” Fisher said, ”we moved Gino in to see if he could take over. He had to bat a few heads, but eventually the pecking order fell into place.
He mated with Kowali, one of the females, and in 1989 their baby, Mosi,
”It takes infinite patience and understanding for this to occur,”
Fisher said.
”But I`m continually amazed by our people. They really care. I`m sure other zoo people care, too. But, I mean, our people really care.”
