From Monkey Business to Baby Love

Their courtship had an awkward start. She was aloof. He was frustrated. He lunged at her. She backed away. But even in wildlife, there are second chances. A few weeks later, she threw herself at him. He touched her gently.

In the confines of a private outdoor enclosure at the Los Angeles Zoo, Minyak and Kalim became the dream couple -- two pure Bornean orangutans. They were spotted one day caressing and grooming each other for hours.

“It was a pure love fest,” said animal keeper Megan Fox.

For a week last June, they mated every day.

Their coupling would produce one of the zoo’s new spring additions and offer testament to the physical prowess of the once sickly and depressed male, Min- yak, and the nurturing skills of the unproven Kalim, the female. Long before the birth, zookeepers had to play the roles of matchmaker, therapist and trainer.

Most zoos breed animals to preserve endangered species. The Species Survival Plan, which accredited zoos treat like a bible, lays out a genetic road map for breeding animals with as much diversity as possible.

But it is rarely a matter of locking two animals in the same enclosure. Even then, it can fail for the same mystical reasons that it fails in humans.

Worried that Minyak, chronically ill, would never be hardy enough to climb around the orangutans’ exhibit -- let alone have sex -- the zoo arranged for a team of veterinarians and doctors, including a pulmonary specialist from Cedars-Sinai, to surgically remove his infection-prone air sac in 2003.

Since then, Minyak, 24, has had daily treatments with an inhaler for his lungs, and antidepressants for his moods. Eventually, he recovered sufficiently to court and conquer Kalim.

But zoo staffers worried whether Kalim, 22, could do her part.

After their mating last June, keepers began their vigil for signs of pregnancy, watching Kalim as obsessively as tabloid editors scrutinize photos of Demi Moore for evidence of the same. Was she or wasn’t she?

Zoo staffers tracked Kalim’s menstrual cycles. They bought home pregnancy tests and dipped the sticks in Kalim’s urine. They never got a positive result.

Then, slowly, Kalim started to show physical changes. She stopped menstruating. Still, Kalim’s handlers were nervous about making a public statement.

“We actually thought she was pregnant a long time before we actually admitted that she was,” Jennie McNary, the zoo’s curator of mammals, said with a laugh. “We didn’t want to blow it.”

An ultrasound, performed through the mesh siding of Kalim’s exhibit when she was six months along, revealed that she was carrying a live baby. But preparations for a birth were underway long before that. Zookeepers calculated a rough due date, Feb. 13.

First-time mothers, particularly those raised in captivity, are often clueless with their newborns. Deprived of role models in the wild, and sometimes hand-reared by zoo staff, they often ignore their babies, carry them upside down or injure them. Kalim, raised by zoo staff, was seen as an at-risk mother.

So after confirming the pregnancy, mammal curator McNary decided the zoo had to teach mothering to Kalim. Animal keeper Megan Fox, Kalim’s primary teacher, started by putting a furry brown stuffed orangutan from the zoo gift shop in Kalim’s enclosure.

“It’s just natural for them to pick something like that up,” Fox said.

When Kalim picked up the stuffed toy, she was rewarded with a snack. “Once she knew that the whole training thing was based on the stuffed animal, it was easy for her,” she said.

Eager to please, Kalim would try to give the toy animal to her keeper. “They like trading for stuff. I had to be careful not to reward her for trying to stuff the baby through the mesh,” Fox said.

When Kalim manhandled the toy, Fox walked away from her. “I wasn’t going to reward her for pulling an arm off.” Keepers ended up going through four stuffed toys over the course of Kalim’s training.

For a while, Kalim carried the toy upside down and Fox would say “over” until the orangutan learned to turn it right side up. “They’re so smart. You don’t have to do a lot of steps generally to help them understand behaviors,” she said.

Then Fox trained her to bring the toy to the mesh of her enclosure -- with the toy’s face pointed outward. Fox wanted her to be comfortable keeping the “baby” at the mesh for a bottle of milk in case Kalim wasn’t nursing well.

Zookeepers preferred that Kalim nurse the baby, so they trained the ape to put the toy to her nipple. “That’s another big thing that first-time moms can have problems with, learning how to put an infant on their chest,” Fox said. “They may be carrying it and doing all these other wonderful things, but they’re just not nursing it.”

That took the longest. Every time Kalim moved the toy closer to her chest, Fox would reward her. It was slow going, and with the pregnancy advancing, the keepers decided on another approach.

Fox trained Kalim to put the stuffed toy wherever she pointed a stick. Once Kalim learned that behavior, Fox started moving the stick to Kalim’s nipple. Eventually, Fox would say “nurse” and Kalim would put the toy at her nipple.

The training took almost six months.

Meanwhile, pregnancy was changing Kalim. Milk began to leak from her breasts. In the last months, Kalim stopped eating monkey chow and vegetables. “I talked to someone at another zoo who said she always knew when her females were pregnant because they stopped eating the monkey chow,” Fox said.

The keepers developed an elaborate plan for the birth. In the wild, babies are often born late at night or in the early morning. The zoo increased the number of times keepers checked on her at night -- so she wouldn’t be upset by a keeper looking in if she had the baby overnight.

At the end of January, keepers began putting shredded paper in Kalim’s night enclosure to warm the ground for a newborn baby.

On a rainy Feb. 22, while sequestered in a private enclosure because of the weather, Kalim laid down on the floor on her back and gave birth. It was 1:30 in the afternoon. A keeper caught it all on videotape.

Kalim held the baby and hasn’t let go. “Ever since she gave birth, that baby has been attached to her,” Fox said, “which is exactly what you want. She just fell right into motherhood.”

The zoo staff named the baby orangutan Berani, an Indonesian word for courage.

Baby and mother returned to public exhibit in early March. The father, Minyak, and the zoo’s other male, Bruno, have been kept separate for the time being. Introductions will come in a few months.

Across the grassy hillside exhibit, Kalim has put down tufts of fine wood shavings for nests. Typically, Kalim hunkers down, her long arm cradling the scrawny shoulders of the baby. Berani’s head, covered with downy hair that stands straight up from the scalp, bobs up from her mother’s chest, her face bearing the perpetually astonished look of baby apes.

One section of the orangutans’ outdoor exhibit is separated from visitors by a glass wall. None of the orangutans are shy about peering out as visitors, just inches away, peer in.

The first day Kalim returned to the exhibit after giving birth, she ambled over to the glass with her baby in tow.

“It was like she was showing her off,” Fox said.