About 10 years ago I was sitting in Lincoln Park Zoo’s old Great Ape House watching Debbie, the zoo’s incomparable gorilla foster mother, patiently doing nothing while a very ill-behaved 2-year-old female orphan was throwing tantrums.
Debbie, by then in her late middle age, was herself a lowland gorilla who had been born in the wild in Cameroon and sold as an infant to the zoo in 1966. Unable to have babies, she nevertheless became perhaps the most valuable female gorilla in the world because of her ability to adopt human-reared, human-imprinted gorilla toddlers and teach them how to be proper gorillas.
I was sitting next to a viewing window in the small, darkened public area of the ape house “nursery.” I was alone with the two animals, a privileged observer during Debbie’s introduction to the youngster. The zoo kept visitors from the nursery viewing area by hanging a heavy curtain across the access door.
Though my back was to the door, I knew when somebody had parted the curtain to peek in because of the shaft of light. At one point I sensed a “peeker.” My left shoulder was resting against the viewing window; Debbie’s right shoulder was leaning against it from the opposite side as she scrunched down, intrigued by my moving pen.
“Honey, look,” came a woman’s awed but hushed voice from behind me, “that man is in there interviewing that gorilla!”
Away from her home
Early last year Debbie and her family group were moved to the Louisville Zoo in preparation for tearing down Lincoln Park’s ape house. Debbie will never see the new grand facility. On Aug. 30, she died in Louisville of renal failure at age 37, quite old for a gorilla.
She left an indelible legacy.
Not very big, quiet and undemonstrative, Debbie often was overlooked by the millions of zoo visitors who trooped past her living space over the years. Most were more transfixed by the immensity and regal bearing of the male silverback leaders and the non-stop antics of infants tumbling and chasing each other.
In the old ape house, however, there was a coterie of visitors who were stalwart gorillaphiles, people who would come several times a week, if not daily, to check in with their gorilla friends. Extremely smart animals, the gorillas came to recognize them, and Debbie, especially, made a point of greeting them by shuffling to the window and sitting next to where they stood.
She did the same for dozens of the zoo’s docent guides she came to recognize and endeared herself to the zoo staff with her unfailing manners and attention.
Debbie also chose to shower attention on a few random visitors. She might spot an adult carrying an umbrella or some other object that piqued her interest. Putting her hand to her side of the viewing window, she’d invite the passerby to do the same, then spend some time peering at the person and the object.
She was very interested in human children. She played a sort of patty-cake game she devised, alternately clapping her hands and placing her palms against the window, enticing children on the other side to do the same.
“She has always been fascinated by kids,” said Cathy Maurer, the lead gorilla keeper at Lincoln Park four years ago, when I did a magazine story about Debbie. “When children come dressed up for `Spooky Zoo’ during the Halloween season, she glues herself to the window and looks over the costumes the kids are wearing.”
Certainly she caught the interest of animal behavioralists because of her stepparenting skills, a behavior that does not exist among wild gorillas. In the wild, a motherless infant soon dies from lack of adult protection.
Soon after zoos began having successful captive gorilla births 40 years ago, they realized infants were best raised within natural families composed of a dominant silverback male and his harem of adult females and their offspring. Roughly 30 percent of all zoo babies, however, have to be pulled because of illness, injury or abandonment by their mothers.
Identifying with humans
Those orphans are raised by humans, a less-than-ideal solution, as the babies come to identify with their human “parents.” When it is time for them to be returned to the gorilla world, they are terrified and ignorant of gorilla social hierarchy, which can be dangerous if their behavior offends an ill-tempered adult.
Most zoos, when introducing such orphans back into gorilla groups, hand them over to an available female and hope for the best. Sometimes the orphans–if they survive–end up ill-adjusted and neurotic.
Lincoln Park, however, had Debbie. She loved all infants and was infinitely patient with spoiled human-raised toddlers.
Initially, the orphans spent days crying for their human parents and would show their scorn for Debbie by attacking and biting her. Rather than biting back, as most gorillas would, she simply bided her time.
It might take weeks, but eventually, the infants would turn to her, crawling into her lap. She would display the same unconditional love as a birth mother, and once an infant was confident of her protection, keepers would let Debbie introduce the toddler to other members of her family.
Lincoln Park has had 44 gorilla births, making it one of the world’s most successful gorilla programs. Of those, Debbie nurtured and raised 10 to be healthy, sane and well-integrated.
“I don’t know of any other gorilla in the world that has this kind of record,” Terry Maples, Zoo Atlanta’s director and one of the world’s premier primate behavioral experts once said. “In a world where so many children are neglected and abandoned, she sets an example for all primate species, even our own.”
I knew her for 20 years and gradually became a bit addicted to her attention. Whenever I went to Lincoln Park to do a story, I always tried to steal 15 minutes to go to the ape house.
If she was preoccupied with one of her toddlers or was entertaining other visitors, I would find a place at the viewing windows and wait.
In due time, she would spot me, and I would see a glimmer of recognition cross her dark, placid face. By and by she would saunter over, sit down next to me and usually pat the thick window, bidding me to put my hand up on my side of the glass.
We’d keep that pose for a few moments, then either she or I would have to leave, but I always found the encounters thrilling, an acknowledgment and a shared affection between two individuals from different species.
I get kidded fairly frequently at my office about my supposed friendships with gorillas. When I returned to work after the Labor Day weekend, I found some messages about Debbie’s death in my e-mail, and a few colleagues stopped by my desk to say they were sorry.
Whether or not their expressions of sympathy were sincere or joking, I accepted them, because I really did lose a friend, and I genuinely needed the condolences.
