CALIFORNIA ALBUM : Primal Problems : Getting the suitors of Koko, the renowned ‘talking’ gorilla, in the mood has been difficult enough. Now, a neighbor wants to harvest some trees, and researchers fear that the noise will disturb the apes’ sexual urges even more.

Life ain’t easy for a gorilla in the Golden State. Just ask Koko, the world-famous “talking” ape who lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains near Stanford.

For starters, there’s the weather. In Woodside, the climate is often foggy and cool--a far cry from the steamy jungles of Africa. Then there are the ever-increasing intrusions of the urban world. Motorcycles, in particular, drive Koko bananas.

Now, a new worry confronts the 22-year-old ape and her two beefy boyfriends at the Gorilla Foundation’s forested compound here: Their next-door neighbor, a developer, wants to chop down a bunch of trees on his mountainous, 36-acre plot.

Koko’s keepers fear that the chain saws, rumbling trucks and other noises of a logging operation would stress out the gorilla and her suitors, dashing long-held hopes that the apes will fall in love and reproduce.

“The environment has to be just right for courting to occur,” said Francine (Penny) Patterson, the psychologist who taught Koko sign language and brought her international fame. “If there’s any disturbance--even if it’s just UPS pulling up--they get agitated, upset. The last thing on their minds is sex.”

There is more at risk here, Patterson said, than a gorilla’s chance for romance. The foundation has worked for 10 years to breed Koko, anxious to learn whether she will pass on her language skills to her young.

So far, Koko has not been in the mood. But recently, she resumed her menstrual cycle after a 20-month break, suggesting that motherhood may indeed be in the cards.

Roy Webster, the forester hired to log the site for developer Steve Pankowski, is all for scientific breakthroughs, and he has altered his proposal slightly as a gesture of goodwill. Still, he intends to stick with his tree-chopping plans. Prices for redwood and Douglas fir, he noted, are at record highs.

“I’ve run into a lot of problems during my career,” the veteran logger said the other day, “but never a gorilla.”

The state Department of Forestry has the final say in this odd affair, and its officials are downright befuddled.

“Your initial reaction is to give a good chuckle--’Gorillas! Ha, ha!’ ” said Ron Pate, review team chief for the department’s Coast-Cascade region. “But this matter is dead serious, and what to do is a real problem for us.”

Under state law, officials may not approve a logging operation before considering its “significant impacts on adjacent uses,” Pate said. If a problem exists or neighbors complain, measures such as restricted hours and buffer zones may be required.

In this case, Pate said, “we’re in uncharted territory. There aren’t a lot of people with gorillas around California,” so it is hard to get solid information on what is a threat to the apes and what is not. A hearing will be held in June.

On one issue all parties agree: The logging will generate some significant noise. Because of the rough terrain, Webster must use cranes to hoist fallen trees up the slope and onto trucks. Safety laws require the crane operator to use a horn--called a “tooter”--to communicate with workers in the woods. The tooter’s tune is piercing, Pate said, “something you can hear a mile away.”

Patterson and her principal colleague, biologist Ronald Cohn, say two months of such din will cause enormous anxiety in the apes--anxiety that could be life-threatening. Gorillas, they say, have been known to die of stress-related causes such as heart attacks.

The foundation’s males--Michael, 21, and Ndume, 12--seem especially sensitive about tree-related disturbances. When Caltrans crews trim branches along California 35, a few hundred feet from the gorillas’ enclosures, Michael cries, shakes, refuses to eat and suffers bouts of diarrhea, Cohn said. This may relate to circumstances surrounding his capture in Cameroon.

To support its position, the foundation cites a 1992 study that examined the effects of noise from a construction project on four gorillas at the San Francisco Zoo. The researchers found an increase in undesirable behavior, such as aggression, in the breeding male, and noticed a decrease in desirable behavior, including the sexual kind.

“This effect is particularly noteworthy in a species for whom captive propagation has been problematic,” wrote the study’s authors, Kenneth Gold and Jacqueline Ogden.

Webster does not know much about apes, but he has hired an animal behaviorist to help him out. He said his expert, UC Davis anthropologist Alexander Harcourt, told him that “gorillas, like many species, tend to be very adaptable to their environment.”

“If you visit someone who lives near an airport, for example, you’ll be holding your ears and unable to concentrate because of the noise,” Webster said. “But the people who live there are used to it; they’ve adapted.”

On the other hand, Harcourt told Webster that all gorillas, like all people, are different, and react to disturbances in different ways. Harcourt could not be reached for comment.

Koko, who weighs 290 pounds and stands nearly 5 feet, 4 inches tall, is probably the world’s best-known gorilla. She has been featured twice on the cover of National Geographic and interviewed on television’s “20/20” and other shows.

She was born at the San Francisco Zoo in 1971. A year later, Patterson began teaching her American Sign Language as part of her graduate studies at Stanford University. Koko now knows about 700 signs and is the subject of the world’s longest continuous interspecies communications study, Patterson said.

Despite the widespread attention she has commanded, Koko’s language abilities have been questioned in recent years by other primate experts, who say Patterson has exaggerated the gorilla’s achievements.

As for the breeding effort, finding Koko a suitable mate has been tough. After all, sexy gorillas are not exactly falling off trees--at least not in California.

Michael was her intended partner, but she regarded him as a brother and found his aggressive pursuit a turnoff. So Koko’s handlers tried a 1990s approach--video dating--to pick a better match. Shown a series of apes on tape, Koko indicated that she wanted a second look at Ndume, then living at the Cincinnati Zoo. The silver back--exiled by the zoo because of his tendency to hurl gorilla dung at people--arrived almost two years ago, but the sparks have yet to fly.

Recognizing that logging is merely one more sign of encroaching civilization, Cohn and Patterson plan to move their apes to Maui. They have established a 70-acre gorilla preserve on the island, but must raise $2 million more to complete the work.