Stork Directs New Production at Zoo: ‘A Gorilla Is Born’

When a five-pound gorilla was born at the Los Angeles Zoo over the weekend, it was not just another baby.

“I’ve been waiting for this for years,” nursery keeper Laurie Middleton said happily Tuesday, as she took the wispy-haired infant out of his incubator for a feeding.

The latest addition is the first gorilla born at the zoo in five years. Barely 3 days old, the male baby, as yet unnamed, clutched his fuzzy blanket as Middleton gave him a small bottle of human milk formula.

When the little West African lowland gorilla became one of 150 new mammals born at the zoo this year, zoo staffers were jubilant, because gorillas are difficult to breed in captivity and, once born, can be more delicate than humans to raise.

According to the zoo’s director, Dr. Warren Thomas, only about 15 babies will be born to the 200 to 300 gorillas in U.S. zoos this year.

A baby gorilla is expected soon at the San Diego Wild Animal Park, a spokeswoman said, but the San Diego Zoo has not had a gorilla birth in 20 years.

“We have our fingers crossed,” Karen Killmar, San Diego Zoo’s animal care manager, said, “but it’s very hard. You can just about count on the fingers of one hand the zoos that have regular successful births of gorillas.”

Los Angeles has had even more that the usual trouble, according to Thomas, because the nine resident gorillas have suffered from a variety of “personality” problems.

“We’ve had dud gorillas, sterile gorillas, social misfits, wife beaters--we’ve had a little bit of everything,” Thomas said, relating a tale of woe that included stories of females so aggressive that they scared off the males, a female who decapitated her babies and a male who beat up his ladies.

The troubles started about six years ago, after several gorillas died from a parasitic disease, Thomas explained.

“I had a bunch of females and no males,” he said.

American zoos cooperate with each other in attempts to increase the gorilla population, and Thomas is on a “management committee” of zoo officials that tracks the breeding progress of male gorillas in the United States.

Through the committee, Thomas said, “we borrowed a male from the Bronx (N.Y.) Zoo.” This male had “one spark of life,” Thomas said, and one baby was born five years ago.

But that was it, Thomas continued. “He turned into a dud. I hate to call him a wimp, but all my females are tough and assertive to the point that they intimidated him. So I sent him back to the Bronx Zoo.”

The zoo then borrowed another male from the Sacramento Zoo, but he had problems too.

“Chris had been raised with a female (gorilla) in Sacramento, and he’d killed her,” Thomas said.

Hoping Chris could be “rehabilitated,” he added, the 450-pound black-and-silver gorilla, 22 years old, was put in an enclosure with the toughest of the Los Angeles females, Sandy, 33, and another gorilla named Kay, 21.

The result was a “holocaust,” Thomas recalled, between Sandy and Chris. “He beat the hell out of her, and she bit him. It was a knock-down, drag-out fight.”

After several months, when it seemed all Chris did was fight and the zoo was about to ship him out, “the females learned how to handle him,” Thomas said, and Kay became pregnant.

In the last few months, however, the gorilla keepers have separated Chris from Kay, just in case he got abusive again and caused a miscarriage.

Kay gave birth by herself either late Friday night or early Saturday morning. Her offspring will be hand-raised in the nursery for two years, Thomas said, because Kay “doesn’t know what to do with a baby.”

“She doesn’t know to nurse and she carries them upside down,” he said.

Kay’s last baby was the one born five years ago, which went back to the Bronx Zoo with its sire, the “wimp.”

In the nursery Tuesday, Middleton prepared the formula for the baby’s 11 a.m. feeding. The little gorilla slept in his incubator next to a 3-week-old orangutan, which was asleep in his crib.

Two small monkeys, which Middleton called “my older kids” because they are 1 and 2 years old, also live in the nursery, along with nine birds and a boa constrictor.

Most babies live with their parents among the 2,000 animal specimens (comprising 500 species) on the zoo grounds, Middleton said, and go to the nursery only if they have a medical problem or if their mothers cannot be trusted to tend them.

The formula ready, Middleton put on a sterile white gown and set a rocking chair next to the incubator. She picked up the baby, along with its fuzzy blanket, which is meant to imitate the mother’s fur, and held him in her lap, rocking softly.

The gorilla has not been named, zoo information curator Lora A. LaMarca said, because it will be part of the zoo’s “adoption program.” Under a zoo fund-raising program, animals are “adopted” for between $200 (for reptiles or birds) and $80,000 (for an Indian rhinoceros), with the adoption “fee” depending upon the estimated value of the animal. The new baby’s adoption fee will be $25,000, LaMarca added.

“The person who adopts the animal gets to name it,” LaMarca said.

While the baby was being fed Tuesday morning, Chris walked back and forth in his enclosure. Since the latter stages of Kay’s pregnancy, he has been outside only in the mornings and then has been put in the sleeping quarters for the afternoon, when Kay and Sandy went out.

He has been unhappy with the situation, keeper Jennifer Chatfield said, but has eaten his breakfast of milk, figs and peanuts nonetheless.

“Kay,” she said, “has been resting. She’s a little tired.”

As she spoke, Chris disappeared to the back of the enclosure behind some rocks, and soon big boom-like noises could be heard.

Chris was banging on the door to Kay and Sandy’s quarters, Chatfield explained: “He wants his girls.”