It's Not Fair To Bring A New Monkey Into This Messed Up World!

It's a baby ape for Lincoln Park
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47th gorilla is born at North Side zoo
By William Mullen
Tribune staff reporter
July 27, 2005
Good news came in a small package to Lincoln Park Zoo Tuesday morning when keepers arrived at the apehouse and discovered that Kowali, a 27-year-old lowland gorilla, was holding her newborn baby.
The zoo had been expecting Kowali to give birth for the last two weeks. She chose to do so sometime between 5 p.m. Monday, when keepers locked the building and went home, and 7 a.m. Tuesday, when they arrived for work.
"The baby was already dry and cleaned off. That means the birth probably occurred several hours earlier," said Andy Henderson, an apehouse supervisor who first found Kowali at 7 a.m. She was sitting placidly in the indoor habitat she shares with the father, Kwan, and two other adult females, Bulera and Madini.
It was Kowali's fifth baby but the first for 16-year-old Kwan, who a few years ago was featured in a Hollywood movie, "Return to Me" starring Minnie Driver. The movie was partially filmed in the zoo.
"It is an important birth in that it is Kwan's first offspring," said Sue Margulis, the zoo's curator of primates. "There are about 360 lowland gorillas in captivity, and it is important that genetically each one is represented in the next generation. Now Kwan is successfully passing on his genes."
He is younger than most zoo gorilla fathers, as zoos usually wait until males are about 20 before they are allowed to mate with fertile females. Kwan was given a group of older females to lead when he first came to the zoo at age 9, but the females were always on birth control so they wouldn't become pregnant.
"He was just too immature to take on the duties of being a silverback father," said Margulis.
But last year, she said, keepers thought Kwan had begun showing maturity beyond his years. They thought he could handle fatherhood, and they also hoped that bringing a newborn into the loose-knit group would draw all four of the adults into a closer bond. Taken off birth control, Kowali became pregnant almost immediately.
"She is doing everything she should do as a mother," Margulis said. "The most important thing is that she was nursing right away, and the baby looks strong and is grabbing well on to Kowali, so, so far everything looks just about perfect."
Kwan also has shown all the behaviors of a responsible gorilla father, she said.
Gorilla males don't usually take part in caring for the baby but are vigilant in protecting the mother from other animals.
"This morning, as we do every morning, we got the gorillas to go into their off-viewing holding area for training. Usually we separate the adults, but this morning Kowali wanted to stay near Kwan, so we kept them together. He was very protective of her, shooing away Madini, who was pestering Kowali for a look at the baby."
Kowali keeps the baby so close to her chest that it may take several days before keepers can get a clear enough look at the infant to determine its sex, said Margulis. But in the next few months, Margulis said, Kowali likely will let Madini and Bulera help her raise the baby.
The birth was especially good news for a zoo that has been battered with bad publicity over a series of animal deaths over the last year.
The new baby is the 47th gorilla to be born at the zoo, representing the fourth generation of the breeding colony.