Now I Really AM the Only One Without an iPad

I just saw this fascinating story on the National Zoo’s website about their new program providing Apps for Apes, where the orangutans can use an iPad to access "more than 10 apps, including musical instruments, cognitive games, drawing programs and others. Eventually, the Zoo hopes to connect its orangutans with those at other zoos using video conferencing platforms."

Is technology the best way to go to increase “enrichment” among captive animals, particularly ones so closely related to ourselves? Do we run the risk of having them lose out on “real” experiences, or is this an excellent way to prevent boredom and at the same time allow researchers to observe behavior? Or a bit of both?

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

Sometimes You Just Feel Like Hanging Around

A few weeks ago Kiko decided he didn't feel like rushing along the O-line. After all, why hurry from the Ape House to the Think Tank? Why be fettered by schedules, by the need to get from here to there without appreciating the journey in between?

Why not just stay suspended above the excited visitors for a good twenty minutes?

Why not, indeed?

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

A Silent Saturday: Bonnie, "Posterized"

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

One Good Shot: Batang Traverses the O-Line

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

An Unsolved Mystery

A couple of weeks ago, Patti Abbot asked me if I knew what little black bird could have been herding the flamingos at the Detroit Zoo. I had no idea, and still don’t (small black birds could be starlings or grackles, but why/how would they herd anybody?)—but I now have a mystery of my own to ask about.

A few days ago, Lucy the orangutan was hanging out on the tower leading up to the O-Line and chewing meditatively on something. I took some pictures, and I still don’t know what this something is.


I don’t think it’s food; it looks more like some sort of rubber toy, or one of those nubbly-soled sandals that are supposed to massage your feet—but I just don’t know.

Any ideas? Is it a toy? A rare, exotic tuber? A bath accessory? A secret weapon? You tell me.

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

One Good Shot: Kiko Gives Me a Look

I’m not sure if this paper-bag-bottom was a sunshade, a fashion statement, or a signal, but I wonder if it wasn’t a response to the dislocating awfulness of Daylight “Savings” Time. Certainly the switch to DST always makes me want to stick my head in a bag...

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

One Good Shot: Kiko the Orangutan

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

Great for Parties

I’m sick, hence the paucity of my weekend posts. Still, I’m feeling a bit better at the moment (there’s always that afternoon rally), and I did want to put up just a little something. I’ve been meaning to post a couple of my most recent pictures of orangutan brachiation, and as I started to do so it occurred to me that brachiation is one of those words you don’t hear a lot (in fact, I just had to add it to my Word dictionary). This made me think of all of the cool words that are used with some regularity in the scientific community but are rarely used otherwise, and I thought I’d introduce you to—or remind you of—some of them today.

First, obviously, is “brachiate,” which means to swing from branches, ropes, etc., using your arms. This is a primate trait that we don’t make a lot of use of ourselves, although our shoulders do allow us that range of movement, should you ever want to try.

There are plenty of other words, too, like:

Crepuscular – not a solely science-specific word, this adjective refers to twilight-y times or times with faint light; animals that live a “crepuscular lifestyle” are those that are active at dawn and dusk.

Eviscerate – which means to disembowel, but also, in the context of sea cucumbers, can be a self-imposed, temporary act; when pursued or attacked by predators, a sea cucumber can eviscerate itself—vomiting up its entire digestive tract and leaving it behind while it escapes. The cucumber eventually grows a new digestive system, but the would-be predator is, presumably, scarred for life.

Gonochoristic – this adjective refers to a species that has two separate sexes, like humans (note that this has nothing to do with gender). Hermaphroditic species, on the other hand, have members that are either both sexes at once or change from one sex to the other (but more on that another day).

Littoral – no, I don’t mean the opposite of figurative. The littoral zone is the area of shoreline that is covered and uncovered by tides. The sub-littoral zone would be the area that remains submerged even at the very lowest tide.

Nidicolous – now, that’s just silly! Actually, it’s an adjective for a species whose young spend a long time in the nest.

And two words that you’ve no doubt heard but that you may not know how to spell:
Pheromone (chemical cues released by one member of a species and sensed by other members of the same species) and desiccate (to dry out).

Next time you’re at a party, try introducing one of these words into the conversation! I guarantee it’ll brighten up the room.

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

Some Sunday Brachiation

Because the elections have depressed me as much as they’ve depressed (I suspect) most of my readers and certainly most of the people I know, I figured we could all use a little of the vicarious exhilaration the orangutans on the O-line provide.

So here’s Iris suspended on the O-line:


And here’s Kiko swinging his way across the cables like the world’s most daring (and hairy) trapeze artist:

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

I Love Lucy

I’ve recently ascertained that the orangutan who has been my best subject for portraits (see One Good Shot and Strange Encounter,) is the oldest of the zoo orangutans, a 37-year-old Bornean-Sumatran hybrid orang named Lucy. She’s also the orangutan who I think has the most ironic, and yet also most forgiving, attitude towards the zoo’s visitors—at least, that’s the impression I get from her expressions as she gazes out at us. Maybe it’s because she’s the oldest that she has the most sophisticated attitude—or maybe it’s just that, since she’s been highly socialized with humans, her expressions are the easiest for a human like me to interpret (or imagine I’m interpreting).




Not that the other orangutans don’t give me, and the rest of their audience, looks that—how shall I put it?—resonate. Bonnie (only a few years younger than Lucy, if that matters), also has a pretty powerful gaze:


But overall I’d say it’s Lucy who seems most aware of her human audience and most willing to, if not play to them—since there’s no sense of performing to entertain in her behavior—then interact with them, even if only by observing us back.


It does make me wonder what she sees of us, and in us—and if she’s aware at all, for example, of the conversation of a group of high-school kids on a class assignment, trying to answer questions about the apes and guessing that she is one of the large males named “Tang” (just a note: there’s only one large male, named Kiko, and the only orangutan with a name like that is a juvenile female, Batang). Although there was a young woman right next to the high-schoolers who was observing and recording the orangs’ behavior, they, unlike me, saw no need to refer to an authority before making their identifications.


I believe that during this time Lucy was engaged in, first, picking some edible vines growing in the trench within her enclosure, which she wore briefly before eating, and, second, sharing food and quiet contemplation with Batang, but I do wonder what she might have made of the students’ conversation. I suspect that her look, as always, would be eloquent.

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

Strange Encounter

As I was heading out of the zoo last week, I checked to see if there were any orangutans out and found this one wearing an unusual sunhat. Or something. Although it was sunny that day, I can’t say for sure what purpose the pile of hay served. I’m not even sure it was put on in order to serve a specific function; maybe this orang always wanted to be Carmen Miranda. What I found particularly interesting was that s/he took the hay-hat off when climbing up the O-line tower, then put it back in place once s/he had descended. So it’s definitely not a climbing accessory (or maybe you can only wear hay in towers before Labor Day, not after).

The orangutan hadn’t done this just on a whim—or, I should say, s/he was very much aware of the hay and how s/he wanted it, even adjusting it when its position didn’t seem to suit him/her.


As I watched and photographed the behavior of this orangutan I was joined by a small group of women, several with children in strollers, all in exercise clothes and equipped with long, thick elastic bands with handles. The leader of the group put an elastic band around the railing outside the orangutan enclosure and explained the particular exercises the women were supposed to do: some kind of supported squats and some kind of upper-body exercise, too, since they were all supposed to pull on the bands as they did this.

I find these types of exercises slightly odd in and of themselves—but, then, not everyone likes to spend hours in front of a cuttlefish tank, either, so I recognize that my tastes are not universal. But what actually disturbed me was the way the leader of this group talked; she had the stentorian voice typical of exercise-group leaders everywhere, and she spoke in words so simple—in some cases, so infantilized—as to make me wonder whether she was addressing the mothers or their young children. “So you’re going to pull this so that it’s level with your boobs,” she would say, or would tell them how to position their “tushie” or their “heiny” (one of the helpful comparisons involved bending as if hovering over a dirty toilet seat—this simile upset me so much that I felt the need to share it with all of you).

In spite of my—quiet and concealed—horror, I stayed where I was and continued taking pictures of the orangutan. For a moment I found myself thinking, “Oh, I should move over, so these people have more room,” and then I caught myself. First, it’s not as if they were cramped. Secondly, this was not an aerobics classroom. I actually ended up hoping that someone would ask me to move so that I could say sharply, “I’m sorry; is my watching the animals at the zoo interrupting your exercises?” –But no one said anything. They were all quite polite, and except for the carrying voice and horrible word-choice of the leader, they would have been no problem at all. As it was, they were mainly a curiosity.

I wasn’t the only one who thought so. At one point, the hay-hatted orangutan gave them the benefit of a long, grave look. S/he turned to look at me, and we shared a glance of perfect comprehension.

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

A Fine and Fancy Ramble

[a sea of turtle noses in the pond around Lemur Island]

I had a lovely time with Patti Abbott at the zoo yesterday; we spoke eruditely of books, movies, cities, climate, and history, and commiserated with one another over our partner’s/spouse’s tendency to ignore our book recommendations, sometimes for years, and then, prompted by someone else’s review, read the damn thing.

We also watched a lot of animals.

The small-clawed otters, alas, weren’t out; instead their enclosure was inhabited by a couple of guys with baseball caps, a hose, and some containers of bleach, who were cleaning out the little “stream” that runs through the otter area. (At least, I’m pretty sure they were just cleaning and weren’t part of some experimental new exhibit.) And the pandas, too, had chosen to engage in one of their two activities (eating or sleeping) somewhere away from our prying eyes.

But the flamingos were out in force (more on them this coming Friday), and so was the young elephant, who was getting used to the new, much larger elephant exhibit the zoo only opened to the public yesterday. This wide grassy plain (complete with a lovely pool) has an “elephant outpost” area at which people can watch the elephants, but it also has a lot of space in which the elephants can just roam. They’re still visible, however, from the bridge that connects the Asia Trail to the birdhouse and exhibits, and it was a lot of fun to look on from above as the young elephant walked backwards through one of the connecting gates of the exhibit (just for fun, I think), then bounced over the grass, swinging his trunk with what seemed to be exuberance, and finally headed towards the elephant outpost (much to the joy of viewers there), all the while strolling with a jaunty, rolling gait—a “swagger,” as Patti described it.

[celebratory(?) trunk-swinging]

It was a great time, in spite of people like the father who urged his kids to “keep moving” rather than spend any time observing the animals, or the many parents who told their children to “look at the monkey!” when they were pointing at orangutans. So far I’ve kept my mutterings of “They’re apes” to almost sub-vocal levels, but some day…


(I also enjoyed getting to be an unofficial guide: pointing out the more cryptic animals, like the red pandas in their tree and the greater-rhea hatchling imitating a rock; and being reasonably knowledgeable about the kori bustards, identifying the male by his size and the noise he made, a deep, resonant sound halfway between a cluck and a grunt. Patti very graciously humored me in all this—but then, since she has a three-year-old grandchild who also likes to speak with authority, I think she has some experience with that.)

We have some visitors coming into town for the weekend, too, so I look forward to more opportunities to pontificate—though I’ll do my best to tone it down for the blog.

[this orangutan is tired of being called a "monkey"]


{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

The O-Line: Take 2

I don’t often happen to see orangutans using the O-line (see my initial post on the subject for more information), but one day in July I was lucky enough to see three of them traverse it. The first and, I believe, the youngest, went ahead by herself, carefully clutching what could be a tool, a toy, or for all I know a snack in her mouth.


The other two headed out together, at a more leisurely pace. There was no swinging hand-to-hand today, but I did get to see these two orangs moving in and out of sync as they moved along the cables between one tower and the next.



In fact, part of the reason that I think they were older, other than their build, is that sometimes one of them was in front, and sometimes the other, but they showed absolutely no interest in jostling for position or racing one other—a level of moderation that I tend to associate with full-grown adults. Of course, it could just be that orangutans are more mature than humans, which is something I would have no trouble believing.

Eventually, just one length of cable away from the tower that leads down to the Think Tank, they both paused and sat, gazing majestically down at the many visitors, surveying the whole of the zoo. I’m not sure what conclusions, if any, they came to, but they stayed up there for quite some time, contemplating us or the nearby tortoises or perhaps the horizon.



I wonder what they saw.

One Good Shot

I feel I’ve been overdoing it with a surfeit of photos lately, so I’m trying to pare down a little. As I was hanging around the orangutan enclosure last week, this orangutan, who was in the doorway, not seeming particularly interested in coming out into the horrible heat of the sunlit yard (and who would be?), heard a gaggle of children walking by and turned to look at them.

I really like the orangutan’s expression, which seems both tolerant and slightly world-weary (“Ah, kids…”). Or maybe what I like best is the rakish angle at which the stem dangles from his/her lips.

Take the O-Line

The orangutans at the National Zoo have a great opportunity to be independent agents—to move about freely, to choose their own location, to urinate on visitors’ heads: it’s called the O-Line.

To connect the great-ape house to the Think Tank, the area where scientists and orangutans collaborate on studying learning (although the orangs don’t get author credit), the zoo has built a network of towers connected by thick cables: these allow the orangutans to travel from the outdoor enclosure of the ape house to the Think Tank and back. The orangutans are also able to just hang out on one of the towers along the way—although a subtle but very present buffer-zone of electric fencing below the platforms prevents the apes from descending anywhere but within their enclosures.


It’s a terrific sight to see them brachiating along the cables with such poise and ease; it’s inspiring and also a little envy-inducing—you really wish you could do something like that yourself instead of engaging in this whole walking-upright nonsense. It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from a college friend of mine: “You know what I miss most about evolution? Opposable toes!”



The cables stretch across the paths that visitors take through the zoo, and enough people have expressed alarm that a placard has been put up to answer the question: “But what if the orangutans fall?” (In case you’re wondering: they don’t. They kind of know how to do the swinging-from-vines thing.) The concern, it turns out, that more visitors should have is, “What if the orangutans pee on my head?” –And they do seem to derive a great deal of pleasure out of letting loose directly above the paths—so much so that volunteers are always asking people to stay out from under the cables while the orangutans are traveling on them. But the orangs also do other things, like hanging suspended from the wires, surveying the zoo—and swinging with the grace and weightlessness of trapeze artists.


I’ve already expressed my ambivalence about seeing, and watching, great apes in captivity, but the O-Line always makes me happy, just because it seems as if the orangutans themselves enjoy the experience. Maybe I’m anthropomorphizing, or maybe you just can’t help feeling, and expressing, some joie de vivre when you’re swinging through the air like that. Just imagine it—feeling the wind in your hair, looking down at awe-struck humans and contemplating your soon-to-be-empty bladder—how can that not bring about a warm glow of satisfaction?

Great Apes

Whenever I visit the orangutan or gorilla exhibits at the zoo, I can’t help but feel a little guilty. Of course I go anyway—apes are fascinating to watch, maybe more fascinating than any of the other animals at the zoo, even when they’re only eating or sleeping or staring into space: it’s mesmerizing to see species that are so different from and yet so much like us. Twice now, from different people at the gorilla pavilion, I’ve overheard the same very interesting comment: “They look so real—I mean, they look so human.”

It’s that similarity, along with their dignity and intelligence, that draw me to them and at the same time make me uneasy around them: watching them feels uncomfortably voyeuristic, as if I were spying on my neighbors. Only it’s a little different, isn’t it, because it’s not covert: on the contrary, you’re staring openly at these other animals—these other individuals—and it’s incredible how, when they look at you, they really look at you, and meet your gaze. But, for me at least, it’s hard to always meet their gaze in return. I find myself thinking, What right have I to be on the outside of this enclosure while they’re on the inside? Why should I be able to walk away from people making “Oooh ooh oooh” noises while they have to listen to them all day? (And I am filled with an almost irresistible desire to point out to said people, “Have you noticed that you, and not the apes, are the only one making those noises?”)


I know the National Zoo has some state-of-the-art facilities, and the Think Tank is designed not just to study ape intelligence but to give the orangutans something interesting to do. And I know that, given that so many ape species are threatened or endangered in the wild, zoos offer the equivalent of protective custody to these animals. And, of course, I am pleased and excited by the opportunity to see them, and I do go look at them almost every time I visit the zoo.


I even take pictures of them fairly often—in spite of the disquiet that it sometimes awakens in me. The other morning I found myself wondering how I would feel if, as I was wiping sweat off my nose (a regular occupation for me in this weather, alas), one of the gorillas snapped a candid picture of me. –Not that I’d be all that surprised that the gorilla was capable of taking photos: but wouldn’t I consider it a violation of my privacy, even in a public space?


I don’t take pictures of them rubbing their noses or anything like that—not that I think they’d care, really; I don’t want to suggest that they have the same concept of privacy, or of what’s embarrassing, as I do. I don’t take pictures of them in those moments because it makes me feel even worse, even more exploitative, than I otherwise do.

There have certainly been moments when I’ve felt a thrill of connection with an orangutan or gorilla. And walking through the gorilla pavilion in the morning, when no one else is there, and just being there with them—not taking pictures, not even necessarily looking at them—I experience a rare sense of peace. But I can’t get over the ambivalence I feel around them.

And, really, maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe the only way to really pay respect to them is to want to watch them but also to question my reasons for, and my ways of, watching them. Maybe the only way to do justice to them is to recognize that there should be something more for them than these enclosures, that this interaction—that we owe them, and their kin, something better.