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Lincoln Park Zoo Chimp Keo to Mark 50th Birthday

Posted on: Wednesday, 11 June 2008, 21:00 CDT

Keo, a charismatic chimpanzee popular with visitors in Lincoln Park Zoo, is back on public display for the next three weeks in the zoo's Regenstein Center for African Apes.

The occasion is Keo's 50th birthday, which will make him one of the two oldest male zoo chimps in North America. Keo shares that distinction with a 50-year-old at a zoo in San Francisco . The zoo plans to mark Keo's birthday with a 600-pound ice cake June 26.

Born wild, Keo came to Lincoln Park in 1959 as a year-old infant and used to preside over tea parties in the children's zoo, as part of a publicity stunt staged for TV and newspaper photographers. As an adult in the old ape house, he was an extroverted, swaggering show-off who delighted visitors with loud, hooting, macho displays.

Since the new Regenstein ape house opened four years ago, Keo and four female chimps have lived mostly out of view from the public in an auxiliary habitat. It is a roomy, airy space with its own private yard equipped much the same as the building's three habitats that are open to the public."Keo's group is the smallest group in the building, so that is the primary reason they are housed in the smaller, off-view habitat," said Stephen Ross, the zoo's supervisor of behavioral and cognitive research.

In fact, Keo has figured prominently in much of Ross' cognitive research with the zoo's two chimpanzee groups and two gorilla groups that reside in the ape house. He was the first ape at the zoo that Ross trained to use a touch-screen computer in a lab adjacent to the off-view living quarters, learning to do cognitive experiments designed to let the apes "talk" to keepers by expressing preferences in things like food.

"He has gone from tea parties to touch-screen computers," said Ross. "In the 49 years he has been here, he has witnessed incredible changes in how zoos operate and care for their animals."

Late Tuesday afternoon keepers shifted Keo and his daughter, 43-year-old June, Vicky, who's 44, and Vicky's daughter, Kibali, 28, into the ape house to get them acclimated to the public area before the birthday celebration.

"They moved right in, curious about every nook and cranny in the place," said Amy Rauhut, assistant lead keeper.

By Wednesday morning, while less demonstrative than he used to be in the old ape house, Keo was his charming self, spending time by the public windows, sitting on a ledge to watch people, directing most of his attention on little children and infants.

"He has always been interested in people," said Ross.

Keo and his group will return to the off-view habitat in July.

Source: Chicago Tribune

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