LITTLE ROCK — The young mother peered intently into her newborn’s eyes as she cradled his wobbly body. Sekani the gorilla was so apparently awe-stricken by her newborn that humans who came to ogle her at the Little Rock Zoo pressed hands to their hearts, recognizing that emotion.
Gorillas are not people, but still, the sight of a great ape tenderly embracing her offspring evokes a fellow feeling.
And so it seems natural that the zoo has invited humans to celebrate the Aug. 19 birth of Sekani’s (still unnamed) babe with a baby shower at 11 a.m. Saturday at the zoo.
What to give the ape that appears to need nothing? Keepers set up a gift registry at Target.
Among 119 approved items are blankets and receiving blankets, tub toys and cuddle toys, teething toys ... a Baby Einstein Lights and Melodies Mirror, a Baby Einstein Press & Play Pal lion ... hmm, should prey-size animals cuddle toy lions when actual lions reside nearby? Well, keepers know what they’re doing.
Applesauce, sugar-free diced pears, honey, dried mango, Yogi All Natural Mountain blueberry flax granola crisps, Apple Cinnamon Cheerios, Quaker Life cereal, wasabi peas, Berry Berry Kix ... Kellogg’s Cracklin’ Oat Bran ... Silver Spring jalapeno mustard ... dried pineapple ... Stubb’s barbecue sauce ... Jif peanut butter ....
Wait - what?
Mustard, wasabi peas, barbecue sauce?
Keepers have also requested we buy this little bitty baby 18 ounces of Kraft Original barbecue sauce, five 14-ounce squeeze bottles of Market Pantry brand yellow mustard, 12.25 ounces of Market Pantry Hawaiian marinade, 12.25 ounces of Market Pantry mesquite marinade, 10 32-ounce bottles of Market Pantry Upside Down tomato ketchup, four 14-ounce bottles of French’s classic yellow mustard, four 40-ounce bottles of Heinz tomato ketchup, four 10-ounce jars of Ingelhoffer original stone ground squeezable mustard.
Gorillas nurse their babies. So what’s with all this spicy stuff?
Enrichment, Catherine Hopkins explains. She manages the great apes at the zoo, making certain they have something to do all day besides go stir crazy.
“We do a lot of training with the apes,” she says. “And it’s a lot of positive reinforcement.” Apes have to be taught to allow medics to inspect their bodies. One way to get an animal to open its mouth is by putting food in there; dried fruit and nuts make ideal rewards.
Enrichment is “just different things that get the animals moving, thinking,” she says. “With the different condiments, we’ll do what’s called fishing tubes.”
The keeper puts something yummy inside a PVC tube and places it so the gorillas have to figure out how to use sticks as tools to get at the stuff.
Although the new baby won’t be able to dig mustard from a tube anytime soon, he’ll see the adults in action.
“Right now the baby is pretty helpless. Mom’s carrying the baby around all the time. It will be a few months before the baby even starts wandering off exploring things,” Hopkins says. “But something like the fishing tube takes years of watching the mom and the dad and seeing how they do it.”
Similar activities keep chimpanzees occupied.
“We have a youngster chimpanzee that is learning. Kendi is now 3. He watches his mom do it, and a lot of times his mom will pull out the stick and he’ll lick all the good stuff off. He’s actually now at the point where he can do it himself,” Hopkins says. “But it kind of was ‘What are you doing?’ and watching and trying to learn how to do those different things.”
Hopkins also plans to hide the different condiments around the exhibit and inside puzzle boxes; their strong aromas will get the apes foraging, which burns calories and gives them something to think about.
Mixed nuts can be stashed here and there. “We’ll get bags and boxes of hay that we can put the dried fruit or a little more solid stuff in that they then have to dig through and search for it.”
A gorilla’s proper diet includes “all different fruits and vegetables,” mostly raw.
“We do cook some,” she says. “I will cook the sweet potato a lot of times as a treat.They like it raw but when it’s cooked it’s even a better kind of thing.”
What about those teething and musical devices? Wouldn’t apes’ strong fingers and powerful jaws, uh, manhandle them and tear them up?
“They do,” she says. “And they do have good-size canines. But they can be gentle when they want to be. The other day I gave them some baby pools, and they lasted quite a long time. And then they decided to rip a piece of it off.”
The apes do take care of things they enjoy.
“Some ... get broken a little bit faster from curiosity, ‘What does this do? How do I mess with this?’ But certain ones they really like they will be more gentle with.”
For instance, the first gorilla born at the zoo, Mosi, received a toy frog at his baby shower. Mosi left in May to join a group of bachelor males at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. At age 5, Mosi had begun to be bullied by the zoo’s silverback, his father.
Mosi liked that frog.
“That actually survived all five years, and we sent it with him to Chicago,” she says. “It always made us laugh that that frog rattle survived.”
Speaking of teeth, do the gorillas have baby teeth like humans do? Yes. Hopkins remembers that Mosi had baby teeth that eventually fell out.
The music toys and mirrors can be clipped to the bars inside the zoo exhibit, for the apes to play with. Hopkins says one of the chimps makes a point of operating such toys in front of visitors: “‘Look, I’m playing the music, give me attention.’”
Most of time, she works behind the scenes, cleaning and preparing diets. But the gorillas are on display most every day until 4 or 4:15 p.m.At 1:30 p.m. daily, keepers come out to scatter food in the exhibits, and that’s a great time to watch ape social behavior, she says.
Beyond interactions that will remind visitors of their own humanity, those who pay attention will notice that individual apes have unique personalities.
Sekani is a sight to behold, Hopkins says.
“You’ll see she is very good, very caring. She does hold him all the time. When you see him get a little fussy, she’ll kind of rock him, bounce him in her arms. She’s a really good mother.”
Style, Pages 27 on 09/25/2012