Gorillas back in their midst

Lincoln Park Zoo welcomes home four great apes, which had spent three years in Columbia, S.C., while their new home was being built

May 05, 2004|By William Mullen, Tribune staff reporter.

As Kwan--a sleek, muscular, 401-pound gorilla--regally stepped from a crate into an airy suite of holding cages, he became the first official resident of the Regenstein Center for African Apes.

It only took moments for Kwan's overpowering, acrid, musky gorilla scent to suffuse the shiny, fresh holding area.

"You don't know how much I've missed that smell," said Robyn Barbiers, Lincoln Park Zoo's general curator, noting that it has been more than two years since any great apes had lived at the zoo.

With workers still putting finishing touches on the grounds and upstairs rooms of their $25.7 million showcase home, four members of Lincoln Park Zoo's famed gorilla collection returned to Chicago Tuesday to set up housekeeping in basement quarters.

Kwan and his harem of three adult females, spent 16 hours Monday night and Tuesday traveling from South Carolina in the back of an air-conditioned produce truck.

Andy Henderson, the zoo's primate supervisor, anxiously supervised a forklift truck that gingerly pulled the four big crates from the truck to run them into the basement of the new ape home.

He and his crew of keepers were all dressed in crisp new coveralls for the occasion.

"You have to look good for a special occasion like this," said Henderson.

To watch the historic arrival, construction workers lined the roof of the new building, and Chicago cops who escorted the truck into the city gathered in the driveway.

All of the zoo's gorillas and chimpanzees were removed to other zoos while their old building was torn down to make way for their new facility, scheduled to open to the public July 1.

Kwan and the three females had lived for the last three years at Riverbanks Zoo in Columbia, S.C.

"I remember when you were a little pipsqueak," Barbiers cooed to the calm but curious Kwan as he shifted through the various cages of the suite assigned to the four gorillas.

In that interim, the fur on Kwan's huge, broad back, changed from inky black to the familiar gray of a mature silverback male gorilla leader.

Zoo officials hope that Kwan's family and another family of lowland gorillas, led by the silverback leader Jojo, will maintain Lincoln Park's reputation as a major captive gorilla breeding facility by giving birth to lots of babies in the new facility.

Kwan and the others are being kept in a holding area until their permanent exhibit space is completed, probably within a few days.

The ease with which Kwan led his females into their suite of interconnected cages in the holding area was a relief to zoo officials, who hoped the new building's design would overcome difficulties the old building presented in shifting animals around.

Kwan himself seemed at ease with the design as he settled in and watched keepers free his three companions, Kumba, Kowali and Bulera, from their travel crates.

"We really saw him grow up," Renee Gainer, one of his keepers in Riverbanks Zoo, said Sunday morning shortly before putting the animals into their crates for their return to Chicago.

When he came to Chicago in 1998, Kwan was a cocky, gangly, insecure youth who was quickly cowed by the big, experienced females with whom he was assigned to live.

"He's a real silverback now," said Gainer. "He does everything a silverback leader should do. If any of his girls get into a tussle, he steps between them and stops it. If we needed to shift the animals through different parts of the facility, we showed him where we wanted them to go, and he'd get them moving."

When Kwan and his group arrived at the Riverbanks Zoo in 2001, they moved into a brand new gorilla house that was the centerpiece of a $20 million zoo expansion project and immediately became a statewide sensation.

"In their first year here," said Riverbanks director Satch Krantz, "we had more than a million visitors. In our whole metro area we have 650,000 people, so that is saying something."

Zoo officials are eager to see how much the apes will use their spacious new yards. Almost an afterthought in the old building, few of the animals bothered to use it much.

"Kumba and Bulera never used our yard much," said Riverbanks keeper Renee Gainer, "but Kwan got to spending quite a bit of time outside.

"There's a hill in his yard that overlooks the elephant habitat, and he'd never seen an elephant before in his life. When he first saw them, he used to spend several hours a day sitting on that hill, just staring at the elephants."