Designing chimpanzee buildings is not an easy task. There are so many functional needs to take into consideration, not to mention having to make everything virtually indestructible as well as fun for smart and strong chimpanzees.
For our most recent construction, in order to connect the two new greenhouses to one another so that chimpanzees could pass from one to the other, a door needed to be installed between them, but we also wanted a human hallway in between the greenhouses with a shelter overhead.
After much rumination, J.B. and Marc Brown of Marc Brown Design came up with a door above the hallway. Our doors on the new side of the building are on a hydraulic system and remotely operated, so the next challenge was figuring out how the human door-operators could see the door while operating it.
The solution was to create a small space of caging embedded within the ledge of the greenhouses on each side that allows the humans a clear view of both sides of the door (Door Q, in case you’re curious), while operating the door using the lever on the left in the photo below.
Aside from the outdoor Chute, It’s currently the only place where the chimpanzees are directly above human space.
Rayne thinks this perspective is very fun, and she surprised me the other day by greeting me from above.
You may notice that Rayne has a strange looking pinky toe on her left foot – this is from a recent injury during introductions. If you know chimps at all, you won’t be surprised to learn that Rayne is not bothered in the least by this injury. She allows us to spray it with Vetericyn, and I’ve seen her friends occasionally paying close attention to it, but otherwise I forget she was even injured. Even directly after the fight when this injury happened, she was ready to be reunited with the sparring chimpanzees, so we put them all back together for the big playroom romp that J.B. wrote about.
The toughness and silliness of chimpanzees will never cease to impress me.
