Cover Story: Gorillas in our midst

Oliver steps out of his pen and looks warily at the stranger who peers through a window on the outer wall that surrounds him. He waits patiently for the stranger to leave and when he doesn't, Oliver takes off across the grass in a fast gallop. His face is angry and threatening. As he nears the window, Oliver reaches down and — without breaking stride — grabs a stick and tosses it at the window as he dashes by. He runs another 40 feet before he stops and looks back.

The stranger is still there.

Oliver had every expectation that the stranger would be gone. And why not? If you're a 376-pound gorilla and you decide to scare a human by charging him, you expect that human to be scared. And to take the opportunity to flee.

Oliver stands on all fours and ignores the stranger. Instead, he gazes across the field at the nearby mountains. Then, suddenly, Oliver springs into another full gallop. He bounces as much as he runs, propelling himself with his long and gangly arms, moving almost sideways. As he races past the window, he leans in and violently raps the glass with his huge knuckles. It doesn't break, but the crack is loud enough that it sounds like it should.

Once Oliver is again by his pen, he peers over his shoulder and looks back in what appears to be exasperation, as if he's thinking: You're still here?

Jane Dewar, who has watched the scene with delight, laughs. "He's checking you out," she says. "Come on, I'll introduce you." She walks behind the 15-foot-high concrete wall until she reaches a steel door. It leads into a little anteroom separated from Oliver's pen only by steel mesh. She's met there by Kelly Maneyapanda, one of Oliver's keepers. Dewar asks if she can give the gorilla some frozen blueberries. Maneyapanda nods her approval. "Don't be offended if he stays on the other side of the pen," Dewar says. "He can be shy around people he doesn't know."

But Oliver senses no threat, so he's no longer concerned with the stranger. Instead, he scoots right up to the mesh, sits down and his huge fingers pick up the berries from a steel bar where Dewar has placed them.

Up close, Oliver is a striking animal. He has just turned 19, the prime of his life. He has a patch of reddish hair on the top of his enormous head, which rests on an equally large neck. His fingers look amazingly human, and yet his arms are longer and thicker than a human's legs.

Oliver is also deaf. He was at the zoo in Memphis, living in a group with other males. But the group fell apart because it can be difficult for male gorillas to live together – too much testosterone per square foot.

Traditionally, zoos have had to separate gorillas such as Oliver that don't neatly fit into their outdoor habitats. And because of space limitations, they're often housed in less-than-ideal conditions. But Oliver is among the fortunate ones; nestled in the mountains about 90 minutes north of Atlanta is a one-of-a-kind facility called Gorilla Haven that was built with gorillas like Oliver in mind. It is a place that few outside the primate world know about because it's not open to the public.

For some gorillas, it's a way station until a better situation is found. For others, it may become their home. "Gorilla Haven is an outstanding idea," says Jan Rafert, the curator of primates at the Milwaukee County Zoo who worked with the legendary Dian Fossey in Africa. "In terms of quality of life for the animals, it is indispensable. They are taking a lot of pressure off zoos."

What is Gorilla Haven? Essentially, it's the Island of Misfit Toys ... for gorillas.

Jane and Steuart Dewar live in a century-old farmhouse that was built by the original settler on the 324-acre tract of land they own in Morganton, just northeast of Blue Ridge.

She is quick to tease when her dogs run up to greet a visitor. "There's a dog in the house named Bwindi pronounced %22Wendy%22 and she thinks she's a princess," Dewar says with a grin. "She won't bark if you tell her she's the most beautiful dog in the world." Her house and yard are filled with 23 cats and 13 dogs, all rescued strays. She has named every pet, even the dozens of brightly colored koi in the large pond next to the house.

Dewar, 54, is dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. She kicks her shoes off when she sits in a chair that is positioned next to an oversized gorilla stuffed animal. Where she is animated, gesturing and laughing at herself, her husband is British formal with a dry sense of humor. Steuart Dewar, 60, is a big man, with graying dark hair and a beard. But when he sits down, he is dwarfed by the painting of a gorilla's fiercely gentle face behind him. It is a portrait of a gorilla named Joe, who happens to live, quite literally, in their back yard.

The house is devoted to gorillas. The longest wall in the living room is hidden behind paintings of gorillas and framed poster-sized photographs. In the living room there are throws with gorilla faces on the couch and coasters with gorilla faces on the coffee table. There are gorilla coffee mugs, gorilla plates and even gorilla drawer knobs.

Gorillas are Jane Dewar's passion; Steuart only acquired it through marriage.

They met in Chicago in 1982, and one of their first dates was dinner at a restaurant in Milwaukee where Jane had once worked as a waitress. When they arrived, someone asked her, "Did you know Samson died?" Jane burst into tears. Steuart held her and tried to comfort her. He asked about the person who had passed away. "Did he work here?" he asked. "Was he your friend?"

"He was a gorilla," she said through her tears. Instead of laughing, he held her tighter. That's the moment Jane fell in love.

Samson – an icon of the Milwaukee County Zoo – was the first gorilla that Jane Dewar bonded with, and her eyes still light up when she talks about him. "One day he just looked over at me and I looked at him," she says. "There was a connection."

Like Willie B. for so many years at Zoo Atlanta, Samson lived in a concrete-and-tile bunker like a circus sideshow. "They had a birthday party for him once," Dewar says. "They had a cake and Hershey's bars. And he was fat. I knew that wasn't healthy for a gorilla. People would bang on the glass and he'd sit in there like a Buddha. I'd look up at him and say, 'I'm sorry you have to put up with this bullshit.'"

For her, Samson was the entry point to what has become a lifelong passion for gorillas that borders on obsession – and doubles as therapy. "I was abused as a kid," she says. "When I was healing myself, I would go to the zoo and see the gorillas. I could go see them and be happy. Gorillas have given me a reason to live."

She found gorillas calming. They were innocent but wild, oversized but gentle, an ape with eyes that seemed to carry something deep and primal. Even then, she felt instinctively protective of them.

"Gorillas do that to people," says Dr. Tara Stoinski, Zoo Atlanta's coordinator of primate research. "There's something about them. We feel a kinship with them. All that size and strength, and their gentle nature, is fascinating."

Dewar found it easy to bond with gorillas. Because the Dewars have no children, the gorillas became Jane's surrogate kids. Steuart Dewar owned a company that set up computer systems in newspapers in the United States and Europe, and Jane began to travel with him so she could go to zoos and spend time with their gorillas. She even went to the first-ever conference of gorilla keepers from across the world, held in 1990. She was one of the few nonprofessionals in attendance.

"My initial impression of her was that she was what I call a 'gorillaphile,'" says Rafert, who met Jane Dewar after he became the gorilla keeper in Milwaukee. "Those are people who will go around and take pictures of all the gorillas in captivity and 'get to know them.' I didn't know her then and, to me, Jane was one of them."

One day, Jane told Rafert that she had a vision to build a place to house gorillas that didn't fit into zoo populations. There was a need, but Rafert was dubious. "I said, 'Fine, lady, whatever.' She had no real experience with gorillas. She'd never worked with them. Of course, I learned not to ever underestimate Jane."

Gorilla keepers may chuckle at gorillaphiles the way musicians chuckle at groupies. But most gorilla keepers are part gorillaphile themselves — they just get paid to do it. Talk to any keeper about his animals, and he might as well be telling you about a beloved family member. "Gorillas are so gentle," Rafert says. "Outside, they're tough and strong and hard. But on the inside, they're marshmallows."

Like Jane Dewar, Rafert's love of gorillas was sparked by Samson. He first saw the gorilla as a child when he visited the zoo in Milwaukee. "Samson was an icon of the zoo for 30 years," Rafert says. "It used to bother the hell out of me. He lived by himself. He'd had seven heart attacks. He was overweight, and they fed him chocolate cake. It was very sad. I didn't see Samson as a gorilla; he was an animal trapped in a gorilla body in a cage."

Rafert eventually worked with Dian Fossey – whose groundbreaking gorilla research was immortalized in Gorillas in the Mist – at her Karisoke center in Rwanda.

After he learned he was going to work with Fossey, Rafert tried to back out at the last minute. His wife at the time asked him why. "If I go, I've attained my dream," he told her. "What's after that? What else could ever match that?"

Today, Rafert laughs ruefully and says he's still not encountered anything close to that experience. "It's the nearest thing to heaven on Earth," he says. "Once you're in the mountains and sitting with gorillas, it's so easy to forget the rest of the world is there. It's so peaceful. Two things I've experienced in life have brought tears: the birth of my son and sitting out with gorillas for the first time."

Zoo Atlanta's Stoinski has also walked with the gorillas in the mist-covered mountains of Rwanda. "You sit there, and they are 30 feet away and playing and ignoring you, which means they trust you. You know you're there because the animals choose to let you be there."

Steuart Dewar had a similar moment of clarity in 1993, in the sterile environment of a zoo nursery. He and Jane had flown to Amsterdam for a computer conference and, of course, she went to the local zoo to see the gorillas. She met the keeper, who told her about a male baby gorilla named Awali who was being raised by humans. "It needs a bottle and diaper change," he told Jane. "Would you like to do that?"

She didn't have to be asked twice. At the end of the day, she found her husband in a conference room and rushed up to him with a huge grin. "A dream just came true," she told him. "I got to play with a baby gorilla all day." She returned every day of the conference, and on the last day, she brought Steuart with her.

When they walked into the nursery, Awali looked at Jane, then it looked at her husband and reached its arms out to him. Steuart picked up the gorilla like a human baby. "He was 6 months old and was not a gentle thing," he says. "The hug was powerful, almost painful. But it was great. And, really, that moment was the start of Gorilla Haven."

There are 368 gorillas living in captivity in North America, according to the latest figures: 173 males and 195 females.

The original population was brought here in the 1940s and '50s as infants, and they carried a brutal history – to capture a baby gorilla, poachers typically had to kill its parents and other adult gorillas that tried to protect it.

The irony is their descendents are now the safest gorillas in the world. "All the apes in the wild are in really bad shape," Stoinski says. "The western lowland gorilla the ancestor of almost all zoo gorillas has just gone from endangered to extremely endangered because of disease and being hunted for bushmeat."

Stoinski became a mother last year, and when she went to the hospital she took along a picture of a gorilla mother with her babies because she found it both comforting and inspirational. "Estimates are we're looking at extinction in the wild in as little as 15 years," she says. "By the time my daughter is grown up, there may not be gorillas in the wild. That is frightening."

Over the past 30 years, zoos have built outdoor habitats for gorillas that are intended to mirror their lives in the wild, where they live in groups. In fact, Zoo Atlanta's Ford African Rain Forest was one of the continent's first naturalistic gorilla habitats when it opened in 1989.

A group typically includes a "silverback" – a mature adult male who leads the clan, along with two to three females and children. "Male gorillas are gentle," Stoinski says. "But with females, they want to show off and show her how big and strong they are, like human males. With one female, a male can be overpowering and it's better to have more than one because it helps them keep the male in line."

The new natural-like habitats have been so successful that the breeding of gorillas in captivity has become almost routine. But that has led to another problem: an overabundance of male gorillas. "Zoos have reached a saturation point," Stoinski says. "There's a 50-50 ratio between male and female gorilla babies. And if you do the math, you're going to run out of females and that's what we're seeing now."

To compensate, zoos have begun to put together small male groups; at Zoo Atlanta – which has 23 gorillas, the second-largest captive population in North America – there are two male groups, each with three gorillas. But many other zoos don't have outdoor space for gorillas that don't fit into a group, meaning they are kept separate from the other animals.

"You run out of room," says Charles Horton, the primate curator at Zoo Atlanta, who also was Willie B.'s keeper. "Our breeding programs have been so successful over the last 20 years, and all these poor guys are hanging around in facilities that don't have the room to put them outdoors."

There was no haven or sanctuary for gorillas anywhere in the world. And the Dewars were uniquely positioned to make it happen. "There's a great need for places to house chimpanzees," says Steuart Dewar. "The need in the gorilla population is very small, but it's also something we could take care of ourselves. We knew we could build a facility that could take care of all the housing problems in North America."

Dewar was born in England and moved to Chicago when he was in high school. He became one of the founding fathers of the electronic publishing industry when he formed Dewar Information Systems in 1975, one of the first companies to introduce computers to newspapers. By 1988, it was one of the 500 fastest-growing companies in the United States. But by the early '90s, Dewar was restless. He was working 100 hours a week and wanted to get out. "We're both basically down-to-earth people," he says. "The money wasn't making me happy. But the question I faced was: If I sell, what am I going to do?"

On the plane back from Amsterdam, over a bottle of champagne, the couple talked about Awali and gorillas and the problems zoos face. "There are going to be a lot of males," Jane Dewar said. "Wouldn't it be cool if we had a place where gorillas like Awali could come?"

By the end of the flight, the idea had taken root. Steuart sold his company in 1995 and a year later, they moved to Morganton. They came up with a plan for a state-of-the-art gorilla habitat and approached the Species Survival Plan organization, which was formed by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums to oversee the survival of endangered species that are in captivity. The SSP's approval was critical because it also helps decide where gorillas are housed in North America. The organization gave the Dewars a wait-and-see reaction. "We had no guarantee the SSP would send us gorillas," Steuart Dewar says. "It was very much a case of if you build it, they will come."

Jane Dewar jokes that she has met more than half of all the gorillas living in captivity, and there's only one that didn't like her — his name is Joe and he was the first arrival at Gorilla Haven. "He was at the zoo in Brownsville, Texas," she says. "They had him in a pen, living next to a fox. I offered Joe a graham cracker. He wouldn't take it, so I gave it to the fox. That was my mistake; he's never forgiven me."

Joe, also known as Kabako, was born in the wild and captured in Africa in 1963. He spent 20 years at the Birmingham Zoo living with a female, but never bred. In 1985, the SSP sent him to Denver and put him with two females in the hope that he would breed. Again he failed. After five years, he was sent to Texas.

"We have video of him there; he looked scared," Dewar says. "My theory is Joe had never seen another adult male gorilla. They put him with another silverback's former mate and his children. The other male was next door, and he could climb up and see Joe. Joe didn't know what to do. He freaked out. He has anemia that is stress-induced, which is very rare in gorillas. There were times he had attacks and collapsed."

In 1993, because Joe couldn't deal with other male gorillas, the zoo in Brownsville put him into the veterinary clinic where he was apart from all the other gorillas. "The zoo was basically stuck with this animal," Steuart Dewar says.

Joe was the exact kind of animal the Dewars hoped to house; the one that was the odd gorilla out at its zoo. They could either house it temporarily, until better arrangements were found inside a zoo, or permanently. "In the back of my mind," Jane Dewar says, "I knew he'd be the perfect first one for Gorilla Haven."

It would take the Dewars seven years to complete the first phases of Gorilla Haven. In the middle of that process, in 1999, they convinced one of the most respected gorilla keepers alive — Peter Halliday of England, who had been the lead keeper at the world's largest and most successful captive-gorilla collection — to move to Georgia. Halliday designed the habitats and is the lead gorilla keeper. "For me, this was a heaven-sent job," Halliday says. "To be able to come to a place where they hadn't even broken ground, literally a blank sheet of paper, was amazing."

The Dewars' immediate problem was money; they'd spent most of their savings to buy the property. So Steuart turned a hobby of coming up with computer programs into a new business. He came up with a datebook/calendar application for the Palm Pilot that earned him enough money to complete Gorilla Haven.

A public facility on the scale of Gorilla Haven would cost at least $20 million, probably more. The Dewars don't talk publicly about how much they spent on Gorilla Haven, but it was less than a third of that. For one thing, Gorilla Haven is not open to the public, so they didn't have to worry about making it accessible to visitors. And Steuart Dewar was determined to do much of the work himself, despite immense construction challenges.

To begin with, there were no roads on the property. Dewar taught himself how to survey and the basics of engineering so he could design the roads. He taught himself about electronics. They decided to put the 8.5-acre gorilla compound in a valley a few hundred yards behind the farmhouse. The first order of business was to build a concrete, steel-reinforced 15-foot-high wall around it. That project alone took 95,000 cubic feet of concrete and 29 miles of steel rebar, and the task of finding a company that had built a wall even remotely that large before.

The Dewars started with two gorilla "villas," caged holding pens and outdoor habitats that can each contain at least two gorillas, perhaps even a small group. They built a complete veterinary clinic. Still under construction are two more villas and an immense building that will easily house two or more gorilla groups.

Before the first animal arrived, Gorilla Haven passed stringent SSP and AZA guidelines. In fact, it's one of only 19 non-zoo facilities in the United States certified by the AZA. And one reason it's considered such a cutting-edge facility is that Jane Dewar knew gorilla keepers from the United States and Europe, and invited them to visit the property and to dream aloud about the perfect place to house the animals.

"What they have is such a conglomerate of ideas from gorilla keepers," says Zoo Atlanta's Horton, who was also on the SSP committee that inspected Gorilla Haven. "They asked us what we'd like to see, what we'd like to have. And they built in those suggestions. The whole place is well-thought-out. They're giving these guys a good place to live."

For the time being, Joe and Oliver are the only gorillas housed in Morganton. Rafert, who sits on the SSP's management group (he's also on Gorilla Haven's advisory board along with Stoinski and Horton and two dozen others), says the big concern is that Gorilla Haven will become a dumping ground for animals zoos don't want. So they are taking a conservative approach.

The Dewars' greatest hope is that the SSP will send a female to keep Oliver company, or else find a zoo that will take him and put him in charge of a group. They are concerned that he needs to be with other gorillas – and that he's showing signs of stress in isolation. "Oliver would make a great dad and a great leader," Jane Dewar says. "We noticed in February or March that he was plucking out his hair. Oliver has never been alone, and my feeling is we need to get him back with other gorillas soon."

Joe, on the other hand, is 44 years old, ancient for a male gorilla, and is a more solitary creature. He has the expected problems the elderly experience – periodontal disease, for example – although he is active and in good overall health.

He has lived at Gorilla Haven since he was brought in on a snowy afternoon in March 2003. The zookeepers in Brownsville, where Joe had been kept in confinement, were as happy for him as anyone was; they simply didn't have a place for him. On the wall of his concrete bunker, someone had scrawled, "Gorilla Haven Or Bust!"

His outdoor habitat in Morganton – Silverback Villa – was not completed when he arrived, so it was the spring of 2004 before Joe was allowed to venture outside. It was the first time the regal old gorilla with the big shock of red hair had touched grass in 11 years.

Everyone expected Joe to be wary of stepping outside the safety of his pen. Instead, once the door opened, he bolted out.

Joe was suddenly a gorilla again, hustling around his new yard on full guard, in case an enemy might be lurking near. At one point, he beat on his chest (it sounds like someone hitting a hollow coconut with a stick) as he ran on his hind legs. It was if he was announcing to all concerned: This is now my domain.

A few minutes later, Joe relaxed. He laid down on the grass and rolled on his back in absolute glee.

He was home.