If you haven’t seen a chimpanzee with a good suntan before, Lincoln Park Zoo intends to give you that opportunity next summer when it opens the doors to its new, $25.7 million Regenstein Center for African Apes.
Now under construction on the “footprint” of the zoo’s old great-ape house, torn down a year ago, the new building should be ready to receive the zoo’s chimpanzees and lowland gorillas in May. Once the animals are settled in, the zoo plans to open the new exhibits during the July 4 weekend.
That should give the chimps from the old building–Keo, June, Donna, Vicki and Kibali–enough time to get into the outdoor yards provided for them in the new building and soak up some rays.
That’s something they never experienced in the old building, which had one small outdoor yard, suitable only for gorillas. The more acrobatic chimps could easily have escaped from it, so they had to stay indoors.
“Chimp skin darkens in the sun just like ours,” said Stephen Ross, who researches animal behavior at the zoo. “But some of our chimps, like Keo, have not been outside in 30 years.”
Ross spent two years studying how the apes used the old building to help plan how the new building can make life easier, more interesting and more natural for the animals. At the same time, it can better tell the story of how the animals live in the wild to zoo visitors.
For both animals and visitors, the differences between the old building–an unusual, underground round structure–and the new one will be akin to the difference between night and day.
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All the indoor public and animal areas in the new building, named for the Regenstein Foundation (which gave a major contribution for its construction) will be airy, well-ventilated and bathed in lots of natural sunlight, as opposed to the darkened, musty circular corridor from which visitors viewed the apes in the old building.
The old habitats included stark cement floors and platforms to sit on, and lots of 30-foot-high jungle gym-like tubular steel trees to climb and lounge in. It looked barren, but the apes loved it, and the building, completed in 1976, was integral to the zoo becoming one of the most successful captive breeding programs for lowland gorillas in the world.
The new habitats will have the same vertical spaces the animals love to roam in, but instead of steel and concrete, the furniture will be disguised as natural-looking trees and rock outcroppings sculpted to resemble African forest areas.
All four habitats in the new building will have large outside yards, landscaped with real and artificial trees and equipped with heat sources that will allow the animals access to the outdoors on all but the coldest winter days.
Three of the yards, ranging in size from 6,900 square feet to 12,000 square feet, will be open to viewing by visitors from inside and outside the building. Two will be outfitted with escape-proof mesh enclosures so the chimps can spend as much time as they want outside.
“They’ll really get tanned out there,” Ross said.
Interactive environment
Several features are being built into the habitats that will give the apes greater control of their environment.
There are small heaters the animals can activate to control temperatures and nozzles in walls they can turn on when they want to play in water spray. There are plenty of doors leading outside so each animal can come and go as it pleases, rather than being penned indoors if a dominant animal hogs the doorway, as often occurred in the old building’s outdoor yard, connected by a single door.
“The whole object of the new building is to build features into it that will encourage our animals to live and behave as much as possible as they do in their natural environments,” said Lori Perkins, the zoo’s primate curator.
When the old building was torn down to make way for the new, all the resident animals were shipped to other zoos, with plans to bring most of them back.
One group not returning will be the gorilla family headed by Frank, 39, the last of four wild-caught males brought to Lincoln Park from Africa as youngsters in the late 1950s and 1960s to establish a captive breeding program with wild-caught female youngsters.
Those founders helped give the zoo its reputation as an international leader in gorilla breeding; they and their offspring produced 44 babies. Now Frank and the last surviving female of the founders, Helen, 45, are too old and frail to move again. They will live the rest of their lives in the Louisville Zoo, where they went early in 2001.
Set for homecoming
Still, most of the animals that will live in the new ape house are not strangers to Lincoln Park.
It will include two gorilla family groups. One is headed by Jojo, 23, a male born at Lincoln Park in 1980, and six females ranging from 5 to 16 years old, all of which also were born at the zoo, and a baby born early this month in Louisville. The second is headed by Kwan, 14, born in a North Carolina zoo. Kwan leads a group of three females ranging from 14 to 33 years old, all born at Lincoln Park.
The much-expanded chimp group will include the animals that had lived in the old building: a male, Keo, 45, and four females, June, 37, Donna, 38, Vicki, 39, and Kibali, 23. They will be merged with a group coming from Lion Country in Florida: a male, Hank, 12; Nana, 9, and her son, Optimus, 4; Cashe, 19, and her son, Kipper, 3; and Kathy, 13, and her son, Chuckie, 4.
“Optimus, the 4-year-old male, is going to be the star of the chimps,” Perkins said. “He is a pistol, with lots of charisma and full of himself.”
The enlarged chimp group will more closely approximate groups that live in the wild, said Perkins, with multiple adult males, as opposed to gorilla families, which are headed by a single, dominant male.
“More science went into the planning of this building than any other building built in this zoo,” Ross said.
Long before architects began plans for the new ape house, he spent hundreds of hours interviewing everybody who will use the building–visitors, keepers, veterinarians, janitors, research scientists and even apes–to determine an ideal design.
“It’s kind of neat that we’re designing this building according to what the apes told us, not according to what the architects told us,” Ross said. “It is easier to build a pretty building, but it’s better to build one to keep the animals comfortable.”
Of course, Ross didn’t actually interview the animals.
“We did a two-year behavioral study of them,” he said. “We collected data on how they used the space in the exhibits, getting information on the elements in the old exhibits that they liked and didn’t like.
“We watched how they behaved, slept, groomed, ate and played, noted how much time they spent by themselves, how much they interacted, whether they spent most time on the ground or in trees.”
Ross interviewed hundreds of humans about the facilities and also shadowed visitors to see how they actually used the facilities.
Research facility planned
Part of the new building has office, lab and observational spaces dedicated to the zoo’s planned great ape research institute, which should continue Lincoln Park’s prominence in the field, said Kevin Bell, Lincoln Park Zoo’s chief executive officer.
“In the old building, when scientists wanted to do observational studies of the apes, they had to do it from public spaces, with regular visitors milling around them,” Bell said. “Now we have an entire mezzanine section one floor up from the public viewing areas overlooking the animals where scientists can do this work unimpeded.”
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Part of the dedicated research space includes a fourth ape habitat that will not be viewable by zoo visitors.
Each of the resident ape groups will spend time in that habitat, including a proposed group of three to five unattached male gorillas the zoo is planning on forming.
“Because gorilla family units are multiple females headed by one dominant male, naturally there is a surplus of young adult male gorillas in the North American zoo population,” Ross said.
“There are about 50 males living in bachelor groups around the country already,” he said. “There is always a need for space for them, and we have this space, so it’s only natural that we use it for a bachelor group.”
The basement below the public areas will be outfitted with a medical station so the animals don’t have to leave the premises for medical procedures, and will have out-of-view animal holding areas connected to the exhibits by caged runways. The animals will be shuttled to the holding areas for about an hour a day while keepers clean the exhibits.
Cleaning will be somewhat simplified, Bell said, by a new style of indoor flooring that has become popular in European zoos’ primate exhibits. It consists of layers of treated wood chips about 2 1/2 feet deep.
“It only has to be removed and replaced about twice a year,” Bell said. “The poop gets removed daily by keepers, but the urine is biologically filtered as it passes through the mulch and drains from the floor beneath.
“The great part about it is that it is a soft, indoor surface for the animals to walk on. In the past, some of our animals as they got older suffered from arthritis in their knees, we think from spending so much time standing and walking on hard concrete.”
Because the old building was under a landscaped mound of dirt, it was almost invisible. Though the new building is at the same location on the zoo’s east side, it is easily visible from Lake Shore Drive, where drivers can see a big concrete box rising where a gentle slope of trees once stood.
“A box is a very efficient shape for a building,” said Neal David, the zoo’s vice president of planning. “But when this building is finished, it won’t be perceived as a box. It will somewhat disappear behind the outdoor exhibits and landscaping we will plant along its perimeter.”
The new building tops out a few feet lower than its closest neighbor, the graceful small-primate house just a few steps to its north, built in 1927 when zoo buildings were intended to be architectural showcases.
“We’re using brick colors and limestone that you see used on other buildings in the zoo to give it some continuity,” David said.
But the building’s function is more important than its appearance. “Ultimately, you don’t want people to say, `Oh, what a beautiful building,’ but to say, `Oh what a beautiful ape,'” David said.