Getting up close with zoo's gorillas
Silverbacks intimidating
Getting up close with zoo's gorillas

Jennifer Davis told me not to make eye contact with him.

Bom Bom's the boss, and he's not one to challenge, even with my eyes. Feed him first, she told me, to show respect to the leader of one of the two gorilla troops at the Oklahoma City Zoo.

It was like meeting the mob.

I crept up to the edge of the enclosure roof, grabbed a half of an orange and pitched it over the side. I watched the orange tumble. Bom Bom, a 380-pound silverback gorilla, opened his hand and caught it. He caught it like a baseball, like a pop fly, like I was tossing him breakfast across the kitchen.

He accepted my orange peace offering.

I was so excited I nearly dropped my bucket of fruit into the ape yard.

I recently had the opportunity to go behind the scenes at the Oklahoma City Zoo and see how zookeepers do their jobs — everything from training apes to feeding birds to training seahorses and archerfish. (Be on the lookout for upcoming stories from my trip.)

Davis let me shadow her as she worked her morning routine in the Great EscApe. We shoveled poop, spread food in the yards and dropped fruit into pens as a treat. We fed the chimpanzees and one of the two gorilla troops. Davis let me feed passion fruit yogurt to Toba, a graying orangutan in her early 40s.

I also watched Davis train Tatu, the silverback leader of the other gorilla troop. She traded purple grapes for a medical checkup. Inside his metal cage, he listened to her and followed her hand signals, pressing his ear or hand or foot against the grate. She'd check him over and then feed him a grape. This 410-pound behemoth of an animal obeyed her for something as tiny as a grape.

Like Bom Bom, Tatu seemed to me like a mob boss, ready to whack somebody who crossed him. He was powerful, big and still. Silverbacks run the show, and everyone in the troop knows who's in charge.

I've been to the zoo before to see the animals, but this was the first time I realized they might actually see me, too.

"They definitely respond differently when there's just a few (visitors) or there's a huge crowd,” Davis said. "Some love to actually play with the public and interact with them directly. But yeah, they're certainly always watching.”

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