Urban Gorillas

Amy Vedder has seen it all a thousand times before. Gazing into a jungle clearing, she watches as a lumbering group of gorillas approaches. Brushing through rain-forest shrubs, knuckle-walking past a strangler fig, they push their way into the open. While the adults forage, the juveniles climb the trunk of a fallen tree and play king of the mountain. From somewhere above, hornbills and blue monkeys sound an alarm.

Familiar as the scene is, Vedder--a conservationist who began studying gorillas in Rwanda in 1978 with Dian Fossey--can't help noticing that it's also a bit surreal. For one thing, she's standing behind a wall of thick, protective glass. For another, she is not actually visiting the gorillas' home range; rather, they're visiting hers. Just to the west, after all, stands Yankee Stadium. Next to that is a subway station for the IRT line that runs straight into Manhattan.

The gorillas' patch of untamed forest is, like the stadium, located squarely in the Bronx. Recently built into the southwest corner of the sprawling Bronx Zoo, the 6.5-acre range is a magnificent exercise in environmental illusion. The leaves the gorillas are munching are willow, native to the U.S.; the strangler fig is really catalpa, a local species; the understory plant is butterbur, native to Japan; the fallen tree is made out of metal, mesh and layers of epoxy; and a few hundred yards from the recorded sounds of hornbills and monkeys, Latin music blares from a picnic on a sweltering June afternoon.

All this artful fakery is the centerpiece of the zoo's new Congo Gorilla Forest, scheduled to open this week. The $43 million exhibit will provide a homey setting for at least 19 gorillas, not to mention small populations of okapi, red river hogs, mandrills, wolf monkeys and about 70 other exotic species. The exhibit is intended not only to attract visitors but also to direct their attention--and their dollars--toward the plight of the animals' native habitat in the Congo basin, an area about the size of Western Europe that finds itself under relentless assault from loggers, poachers and chronic civil unrest.

Whether the exhibit will achieve that political and economic mission is uncertain. Even before it opens, however, its other mission--providing a sanctuary where gorillas can live as they were intended to--is being fulfilled. "It's such a pleasure," says Vedder, who serves as director of Africa programs for New York's Wildlife Conservation Society, "to see gorillas doing gorilla things."

In recent years, the world has become a brutally hard place to be a gorilla. Although there are still more than 130,000 gorillas in the Congo basin, they are being killed and crowded out at an alarming rate. By one estimate, 800 gorillas in Cameroon ended up as "bush meat" last year.

If the wild habitat is vanishing, however, it's at least possible to create a counterfeit one--and the designers of the Congo exhibit have done an astonishingly good job of it. The artificial environment they've built in the Bronx includes 45,000 sq. ft. of synthetic rocky terrain and 10 miles of ersatz vines. Manufactured mist swirls at the top of a functioning waterfall. There are wading pools and rivers, and even treetop lookouts from which gorillas can survey the landscape around them. Most of the different types of animals that live in the exhibit won't be free to mingle as they would in the wild, though the handful of species that do get along will have limited access to one another's territory.

But even the best captive environment is still a poor substitute for the genuine article, and William Conway, the retiring president of New York's Wildlife Conservation Society, insists that the true mission of the exhibit--and of zoos as a whole--should be to help raise the kind of money and conduct the kinds of research that will prevent animal habitats from vanishing in the first place. Says Conway: "Zoos must serve the needs of the creatures they exhibit."

The Bronx Zoo has long been committed to that goal. In the 1960s it dispatched half a dozen scientists to work overseas in research and conservation. Today that number has grown to 65 full-time scientists running 326 programs in 52 countries. Conway's hope is that the Congo Gorilla Forest will provide additional funds for that army by making de facto conservationists out of some of the 500,000 to 700,000 people expected to visit the exhibit each year. Each guest will pay a $3 fee in addition to the zoo's $7.75 admission charge, and that money will be donated to various WCS Congo field projects. Before visitors leave, they will be encouraged to stop at ATM-like touchscreens and designate which one. Given the volume of tourists expected, the fees could easily double the $1.5 million the wcs now spends on programs in the Congo basin.

Promising as all this is, the Congo exhibit still has some growing pains. More than 300 species of plants were imported for the exhibit from habitats around the world. No sooner were they transplanted to the Bronx, however, than they started being devoured by the resident animals. "Take a good look at the exhibit," laughs Vedder. "This may be the last time it looks this way."