Donors Go Ape Over Bronx Zoo Exhibit

Here’s primate chic: Some cocktail guests nibble crab cakes and fried artichokes from silver trays, while others stuff their mouths with tufts of grass.

And everyone is positively charmed--both humans and gorillas, divided by glass at the Bronx Zoo.

“This is an exhibit of human beings--for the gorillas,” joked William Conway, president of the Wildlife Conservation Society, which operates the zoo.

Ape and human hands high-fived against the pane last month to celebrate the long-awaited Congo Gorilla Forest--a 6.5-acre, $43-million wildlife habitat with 300 animals that sets a new world standard for conservation.

The party was a private viewing for hundreds of contributors days before the exhibit opened to the public.

Behind the soaring windows, the 19 lowland gorillas didn’t act as if they were the exhibit in this primal encounter. The gorillas planted themselves atop rocks and stared, bemused, at the two-legged wonders.

Standing on either side of a glass “tunnel” protected by a 1.5-inch pane, wine-sipping humans gazed deep into apes’ eyes as both species chewed on their respective hors d’oeuvres.

Julia, a 19-year-old with attitude, stuck out her tongue. She’s often shy, but for the big night, the passive-aggressive ape got a “comfort blanket,” a small scuffed tire she clutched.

Make no mistake about it, though: This was serious business for the Bronx Zoo, which is marking its centennial this year.

The simulated African rain forest marks the gorilla troupe’s move from the old Great Apes Building with a roof to their fabulous new forest and breeding grounds.

Home to 75 species of animals, it replicates the tropics of Uganda, Congo and Rwanda, complete with waterfalls, mist (emitted from machines), jungle sounds and nests in trees--both for birds and gorillas.

“You’re seeing wildlife better than you would see it in a real rain forest,” said Amy Vedder, director of the wildlife society’s Africa projects.

The $3 exhibit entry fee--on top of the $7.75 zoo admission--will allow visitors to vote on which kind of conservation the money goes to; the society has more than 50 projects in Africa. The votes are registered on interactive computer screens at the end of the trek.

For instance, one can vote to save the rare okapi, whose numbers have been diminished in part because of the civil war in Congo, where they were eaten by fleeing refugees. At the zoo, the giraffe-like creature with zebra-colored legs peeks through vegetation. Its footprints are pressed into the concrete path, which is sprinkled with other surprises.

“Can dung tell a story?” asks one sign next to a dried-up specimen on a rock. The answer: It’s “one way to discover who eats whom.” In this case, the evidence shows that a leopard had eaten an okapi.

The Congo project, a decade in the planning, is filled with 15,000 trees and plants. It’s so real one can also spot elephant dung, water buffalo skulls and termite mounds amid the black-and-white colobus monkeys swinging gracefully from limb to limb under open sky.

Unlike most zoos, here the animals fill the space, with visitors walking through like “privileged interlopers,” said exhibit designer Lee Ehmke.

An indoor exhibit features interactive displays about the need to preserve Africa’s rich ecosystem. And the exhibit presents the zoo’s research on subjects like how much space an elephant needs to thrive.

“Designing this was like choreography, like writing a play,” he said. “We were trying to evoke emotions: awe, a sense of wonder, curiosity and care for animals and places. And a sense of alarm for the rain forest in danger.”