A diapered baby bonobo (pygmy chimpanzee) lies sucking her thumb in a crib crowded with fuzzy toy chimps. In the next room, two tiny Persian leopard cubs wake from a nap at the belly of a huge stuffed lion and begin clumsily to stalk and battle each other.
The glass-fronted nursery is one of the most popular attractions at the San Diego Zoo-and that’s saying something, because the zoo is visited by 3.5 million people a year and houses 4,000 animals representing 820 species.
Nonetheless, the staff would like to put the nursery out of business because that would mean mothers were taking care of their own babies.
This progressive and sophisticated facility goes into action only when an infant is in trouble-if it or its mother is sick or injured or, more commonly, when its mother rejects or abuses it.
In the old days, the nursery was always filled. Mother animals in captivity often don’t have a clue about parenting.
Now, the goal at zoos is to get more natural behavior from its animals.
Nevertheless, baby gorillas, tigers, bears and gazelles have been hand-raised here by a staff that has learned to mimick the sounds and behaviors of wild animal mothers.
Becky Kier has worked as a surrogate mammal parent for more than five years, and she knows all the tricks. She can bleat like a wildebeest mother. She holds towels over the heads of gazelle babies while bottle feeding to simulate the shade of a maternal belly. Carnivore cubs have warm water trickled down their bellies and get their hindquarters tickled. This gives the sensation of a mother’s grooming tongue and works to stimulate defecation.
Now Kier grooms Kiri, the 4-month-old bonobo, as a mother chimp would. The keeper must force herself to be a little rougher with the infant than she’d like because as soon as possible Kiri will be reintroduced to her group, and they won’t pamper her.
As with any kind of foster parenting, saying goodbye is tough. With primates, it often means pulling away tiny, desperate hands that are clutching at you and handing babies, terrified and screaming, back over to their family. Kier remembers the day a sweet 10-month-old orangutan named Karen was placed back with her group. Almost immediately, a 6-year-old dragged the screaming infant to the top of a high climbing apparatus. While Kier held her breath, an older, maternal female scrambled up and rescued the baby.
Kier just revisted a tiger cub she had raised and not seen in more than two years. Now Monique is a massive adult, but when she saw Kier, she began to make “chuffing” noises (the tiger equivalent of “yippee!”) and rub her head and body against the fence. Kier went over and carefully had a reunion.
A bear cub with severe digestive problems almost died several times on the operating table, and was named Pepino, as in “cold as a cucumber.” But he graduated from the nursery and is now a healthy 4-year-old.
But Kier’s most remarkable story is that of a little white-faced saki monkey who was discovered at midnight, just after her birth. She was rejected by her mother in favor of a more robust twin and was left at the bottom of a cage, with her “head split wide open.” She was cleaned and stitched, but no one thought she had a chance. That baby is a now a happy, healthy member of the saki community, with just a funny cowlick to remind people of where her scalp was sewn back together. She was named Milagro, Spanish for “miracle.”
The miracle, of course, will come when the cribs are empty.
