Gorillas in our Midst: Relationship between legendary primates, zoo's facilities director borders on familial

Bangori leaned his head against Greeley A. "Jerry" Stones' shoulders, as he handed a Gummi bear to Mary, his 21-year-old mother. Mary sat on a lower ledge, her face chewing the treat, teeth flashing in the morning light.

"Mary's just beautiful," the 66-year-old Stones said.

He was talking to enthralled visitors about Bangori and Mary, part of a Western lowland gorilla family at Brownsville's Gladys Porter Zoo.

As Mary twisted her upper lip into a comic grimace, Stones, the facilities director, calmly stroked her head. He also kept close watch on the mischievous Bangori, who kept sticking his finger into Stones' empty cell phone case.

"She's a little overweight, but she's beautiful," he said of Mary. "She's never been bad, never bitten me. She's the one who won't raise her babies. She likes to go out and party."

The gorillas have enjoyed the security of Stones' familiar face throughout their long journey at the facility. Stones has walked every step with them: the patriarchs, Katanga and Lamydoc, have known him since they arrived in Omaha, Neb., in the late 1960s. They set up residence in Brownsville in 1970, a year before the zoo opened. He has helped raise some of their children, fed them, helped treat their illnesses. In many ways, he is part of their family; they are definitely part of his.

"I'm closer to them than I am to some people that are my family," Stones said.

Stones began his own career as a zookeeper in the 1960s at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha. That's where he first became hooked on gorillas.

"My first 15 minutes with the zoo, I stood in a cage with three young gorillas, 3½ to 4 years old," Stones said. "My supervisor took me in there with those young guys. One young male stood on my shoulders and beat on the wall and jumped up and down. His name was Mugsy."

Thus began his lifelong rapport with gorillas, much more endearing than chimpanzees or orangutans, he says.

"They're sort of gentle. I don't know, their personality," Stones reflected. "Chimps are just a little bit too off the wall for me, they're just a little bit too rowdy. And the rangs (orangutans), they're very, very smart. ... They think things out and they're not always thinking the best interest for you. ... They're very devious, but they're not the least bit crazy. Chimps are sort of crazy. Gorillas are sort of in between."

Gorillas actually can teach humans about themselves by mirroring human behavior. Consider the case of Joe, who was captured in the wild and later placed at the Gladys Porter Zoo. He showed no interest in breeding or even in socializing with other gorillas. He eventually was sent to Gorilla Haven in Georgia, where he lives in a separate enclosure by himself.

"He prefers it that way," Stones said. "He's doing fine. He's happy."

This behavior does not differ much from the way some humans live.

"There are people - the spinster aunt or the old bachelor uncle - who never got married," he said. "It was not a sexual orientation, they really just were not interested. Why would we think that there wouldn't be animals that would have the same feelings? Joe was totally satisfied to do his own thing. A lot of that was probably because of the way he was raised; but then, it could have been a possibility that it was just his own desire."

Lamydoc and Katanga were both captured in the wild in Cameroon when they were about 4 or 5 years old. Stones said that at one time people wanted to capture older wild animals to model gorilla social behavior for captive populations; previously, baby gorillas were taken from mothers that had been killed, and many people believed they had not grown up learning real gorilla behavior. Older gorillas, they speculated, would be more capable of raising young and would pass that knowledge on to their offspring. That and other socialization skills would spread to other captive gorillas.

This supposition proved incorrect as far as Katanga was concerned.

"She still never would raise her own babies," Stones said. "She would start out, and then get nervous and hurt the baby. Maybe that's a possibility that if she'd been in her own natal group there would've been a certain calming effect. You don't know. She might not have gotten nervous. Or she might've been an animal that just was a nervous animal. I think probably if she would've been in her natal group she would've done OK."

However, the belief that gorillas had to see mothering to know how to care for a baby proved incorrect when three of four daughters of Katanga became good mothers, although humans raised them.

"Each was raised by the same people," Stones said. "I took them home at night with me. Each one was the same. Three of the females were excellent mothers. Then there's Mary, she took after her mother. Those other three girls never saw another female take care of their baby; it was ingrained."

Stones remembered taking home Mary's offspring; he and his then-wife, Cindy Stones, would take care of the baby gorillas, bottle-feeding them and changing their diapers, looking after them until they were 5 or 6 months old. Then they would return the young gorillas to their families.

When Stones looked after Mary's boy, Bangori - who will be 5 years old Feb. 18 - he developed a medical problem at age 5 months.

"His hands were closed and he couldn't open them to pick things up," he said.

Stones called the veterinarian, who recognized some of the symptoms as an indication of Vitamin D and calcium deficiency. The veterinarian contacted a pediatrician, who advised administering an intravenous drip with Vitamin D and calcium. The young gorilla improved within an hour, but he still required more treatment until his blood levels stabilized. After the IV was discontinued, he received oral Vitamin D and calcium supplements. He's just fine now.

On this sunny late morning, most of the gorillas were withdrawn from gorilla island in preparation for Stones' visit to his extended family. Bangori, an enigmatic crossroads of two evolutionary highways, sat on a platform 20 feet above the ground. A light breeze whispered through his thick black hair. He went arm-over-arm along a pole, reaching higher into the sky, feet gripping the beam. Then he rushed toward a post, gripping, sliding down like a fireman toward where Jerry stood now, with food, behind some bars.

Among the admiring visitors, a young boy in freckles and sunglasses got into the spirit of things and pounded his chest. Jerry stepped into the enclosure and took Bangori's hand, patting his head as he would a small boy's, and moved to a ledge where the audience could get a closer look.

"Where's Penney?" he asked.

As if on cue, Mary's sister gamboled into the enclosure, daughter Samantha clinging precariously to her back; the child slipped off and Penney's powerful arm helped her climb back up onto her back.

"Penney usually comes over and sits with me, but her baby grunts at me so she stays away," he said. "I have never handled her (baby)."

Bangori pounded his chest, a thud that ricocheted across the island, then leaned passively against a palm tree, his point made. Stones handed Mary a toothpick, which she stuck perfunctorily into her mouth.

"Sometimes I give a toothpick to Penney and she'll flick her teeth with it because she's seen me do it," he said.

After he left the gorilla enclosure, the rest of the family returned. Haramba, Kayla's 9-year-old son, and Mary's son Nzinga, 10, came romping into the area. Although Jerry raised them both for the first few months of their lives, he won't get too close to them now.

"I don't go in around the boys, the teenage boys. They are vicious," he said. "They wouldn't do it out of meanness. They would hurt me because they play rough. They could scrape up the side of my head. They bite each other. They run by and hit you and your ears ring."

But Stones points out that only a small genetic difference exists between humans and gorillas.

"You shouldn't give human characteristics to an animal," he said. "I don't know if we get it sometimes, some of the things maybe we learned from them before we went on up the road."

Stones, who emphasized he's not a scientist and was expressing his own personal opinions, was referring to the point in distant history when humans and apes split on the evolutionary ladder.

"What if they learned a few things from us and maybe they bailed out on us?" he said. "They decided we were headed to nowhere. Before going on up the road to being a human, I think we picked up some of the characteristics that probably came from them. I think they came out better. Their banks aren't folding. We are so proud of ourselves, we're only talking about a couple of genes difference. I have seen some people less grown up than them.

"They are wonderful animals. In many ways, they are just as intelligent as us. They have the internal capability of learning and doing. We think we have to train everything and teach everything. Naw. They can learn an awful lot all by themselves. They are not King Kong. Until I got in the zoo business, King Kong, you always had this belief that they were rampaging beasts, and they're not.

"They are very social, very loving parents," he said. "They're nothing like King Kong."