ALPHA MALE SILVERBACK
The eighteen-year-old silverback lowland gorilla at the San Diego Zoo was brought in to be the troop leader when the previous alpha male died, and he made it clear immediately that he knows what his job requires. On the early Monday morning in January when I visited, he was charging about the enclosure reminding all the other silverbacks that he is in charge. The younger males and all the females got out of the way of his charges, but they were obviously not afraid of him. The zoo keepers say he is a gentle, considerate leader. I have heard that it’s not a good idea to look an alpha male silverback in the eye, but he seemed to be looking straight into the camera lens when I snapped the picture. An adult female was sitting on the highest part of the enclosure when I began watching, but she hurried away when the alpha male came near.
ORANGUTANS
Over in the orangutan enclosure, a toddler scrambled over and around adult females and a couple of adolescents, but he didn't go near the big, heavy jowled male. In the Malay-Indonesian language of Borneo and Sumatra where orangutans live, “orang” is the word for “man,” and “utan” is the word for “forest.” This fellow, who seems to be playing soldier with his palm branch, is a “man of the forest” in the San Diego Zoo. Actually, an adult male orangutan dwelling in a real rain forest lives a solitary, lonely life. After adolescence he goes off into the forest alone, stays away from other males and meets a female occasionally for sex, which seems to be of little interest to him. In the orangutan enclosure at the zoo, the alpha male stays mostly to himself. OUR COUSINS
Well, maybe not quite kissing cousins, but it is said that bonobo chimpanzees, sharing 98 percent of our genetic profile, are as close to humans as foxes are to dogs. Anthropoligists believe the split between the human line of ancestry and the line of the chimpanzee and the bonobo occurred only 8 million years ago. The divergence of the chimpanzee and the bonobo lines came much later. Observing a group of bonobos at San Diego Zoo, I lost any shreds of doubt that I am related to these creatures. Bonobo children play in the same ways that human children play. Bonobo adults tolerate their rambunctiousness. Most of the time, adults are getting ready for or indulging in or finishing up some kind of sexual activity; so youngsters have nothing to do but play or just hang around. NO PANDA-MONIUM HERE

While the bonobo children were running and jumping, mostly over and on each other, in another part of the zoo a panda family presented another picture. Of course, pandas are not primates and are not closely related to us, but it's easy to use anthropomorphic terms in describing them. All three of the Zoo’s pandas were in their enclosures on the day I visited. The mother and baby panda were on one side of a high wall and the papa sat munching bamboo on the other. Baby slept on a precarious perch high in a tree, mother panda sat demurely on a log watching visitors as they passed by, and papa panda seemed not to care about anything but his bamboo breakfast.
OTHER ANIMALS at the zoo may not get star billing, but I never get tired of watching them, even when they do little more than lie in the shade and chew a cud or hang out in a cold pool pretending they are in the Alaska wilderness or stand around on one leg and stare at the sky.