Primate residence

Published on Tuesday 22 April 2008 13:16

Edinburgh Zoo's chimps are right at home in their new world-class compound

Ricky is stretched out in the sun. Head tipped back, one arm outstretched, hand lazily gripping the rope hanging beside him, he's enjoying a good scratch and the odd yawn. He looks as if he might have 40 winks. At 44, he's only recently moved into one of Edinburgh's newest and costliest homes. It's a proper des-res, built to a detailed specification, filled with custom-built fixtures and fittings and surrounded by a beautifully landscaped garden – including a moat. The price tag was a cool 5.6 million but if you ask Ricky, it's money well spent.

Ricky's a chimpanzee, and the house in which he's sunning himself is Edinburgh Zoo's pioneering Budongo Trail, which opens to the public on Thursday. The first visible sign of the zoo's 20-year development masterplan, Budongo Trail is an imposing box of a building, all angles, glass and granite-like tiles. Set against a bright blue sky, it's an imposing structure. But even more interesting than the building's architecture is the fact that Budongo Trail is the biggest chimpanzee house in the world. A complex construction, it's made up of three living "pods" connected by a series of tunnels, and a huge outdoor space.

The groundbreaking design will give visitors unprecedented access to the zoo's 11 chimps and there are plans to increase that number to as many as 40 once the breeding programme gets underway.

The chimps moved into their new pad at the end of February and despite the fact that it's much bigger than the old enclosure – in human terms, like moving from a pokey one-bedroomed flat to a state-of-the-art penthouse apartment – head keeper Jo Richardson tells me that the chimps settled "within a matter of days". "Chimpanzees are an amazing species to work with," she says. "What this house allows the chimps to do is show all of their mental and physical capacities."

The house has been designed to stimulate its occupants' natural inclinations, whether that's choosing to hang around together in one group or to split up into smaller cliques, to find food hidden in the labyrinthine climbing structure, or to use tools to scoop up water, all choices that chimpanzees would regularly make in the wild. Essentially it's a very big, rather expensive playhouse for them, but there's a serious purpose too – as well as housing what Richardson hopes will be a growing troop of chimps, researchers from Edinburgh University will work at Budongo Trail, studying the primates' behaviour and developing our knowledge of our closest animal relations.

Watching the chimps in the pod set at the front of the building, with panoramic views across Edinburgh and a climbing frame to keep them occupied, they are the picture of tranquillity. Sitting in twos and threes, grooming each other, there's no sense that they are in any way fazed by their new surroundings.

The joy of this building is that it makes it so easy for visitors to watch the animals at close quarters. Facial expressions, rope-climbing, eating, their every stretch and yawn can be scrutinised. And, to be honest, it's difficult to believe they're not doing the same to their human guests. As I gaze through two sets of windows into the purpose-built lecture theatre that overlooks one of the chimps' pods, two painters are putting the final touches to the walls. As they climb on to their platform and get out their brushes, a large male chimp eases by on a series of ropes. I have to say, the chimp looks a lot more agile.

In the wild, chimpanzees live both on the ground and in the trees in rainforests. The scientific study of our nearest relatives only took off in the 1960s when Jane Goodall revealed that they use tools to forage for food – twigs to fish for termites, leaves to gather water. Prior to this, humans were the only species believed to use tools.

Chimpanzee numbers in the wild are falling. Habitat destruction and the bush meat trade are the main threats to their existence and it's principally for this reason that conservation – both in the wild and in zoos – is vital.

Budongo Trail is named after a vast tract of rainforest located at the top of the Albertine Rift in Uganda, home to the Budongo Conservation Field Station. A world-leading research and conservation project, it was set up in 1990 and is now funded by the Royal Zoological Society Scotland. It is home to around 600 wild chimpanzees, as well as blue monkeys, colobus monkeys, forest baboons, duiker antelopes, bush pigs, and more than 350 bird species.

The link-up between Budongo and its namesake in Corstorphine is vital. In a sense the pioneering building not only represents the first step of the zoo's development masterplan, but serves as a blueprint for how zoos worldwide can function – uniting conservation in the wild with animal management and research conducted in captivity.

Jo Richardson hasn't visited Uganda yet, but a trip is most certainly in the pipeline. "All of the keepers will go out there at some stage," she tells me. "It's really important for us to go because if you've been out there and experienced it you can relay information to the public in a completely different way.

"From a personal perspective, to get the opportunity to study chimpanzees in the wild would be amazing. We will build up the links between us here in Edinburgh and the people working at Budongo.

"Our aim is to have a captive population – not just of chimpanzees but other endangered species as well – and that's really important. Animals in the wild, sadly, are disappearing because of habitat destruction and other threats. So we've got to make a difference out there, but also we can make an impact through our captive breeding programmes and our work in education. It all links together."

In Edinburgh, the chimps are happily exploring their living space. Each of the three pods has a different atmosphere to mirror the distinct areas of the forest environment their wild counterparts live in. There are different substances on the floor – bark, ground-up coconut shells and soil – and different lighting conditions, created both artificially and by windows set at angles high in the walls, ensure that it's dark near the floor, getting lighter as the chimps climb further up, just as it would in the rainforest.

On Thursday, the chimps will be allowed access to the only area of their new home that they haven't been able to explore yet: a huge outdoor enclosure which includes an elaborate climbing frame, built in two weeks by the Army, and the moat which will keep them away from the perimeter fence. The zoo's gardening team has only just finished the planting and everyone has their fingers crossed that the chimps won't just rip the plants up as soon as they're let loose. "From an enrichment point of view for the animals the outside enclosure is really going to stimulate them," says Richardson. "There's an old part of the original climbing structure and it'll be really interesting to see whether they go to that or try out the new stuff.

"The gardening team have spent hours and hours putting all the different plants into the L-shaped enclosure, but they do know that chimps are very inquisitive animals and they've allowed for the fact that some of the plants will get damaged."

Zoos have endured a fair bit of negative press in recent years. Media attention on some bad examples, where sad-looking animals are stuck in too-small enclosures, have done little to improve their public image. Developments at Edinburgh Zoo ensure that conditions could not be further from that, and Budongo is only the beginning. Other plans afoot include a revamped penguin house – complete with a dome built over the enclosure so that you can walk through a climate-controlled area with the penguins – and a new, bespoke entrance.

"People often don't know about all of the work that happens in the zoo," says Richardson. "They don't realise what's going on behind the scenes and the fact that we're involved in conservation.

"Budongo brings all of the different roles of the zoo into one building. On the one hand we're taking animal management to the next level, then there's the education side of the house and that links to the conservation message. We're here to tell people about how we're trying to make a difference in the outside world, beyond Edinburgh Zoo."

Gary Wilson, head of property and development, is a man with a clear sense of where he wants the zoo to be on a global scale. "We want to be a worldwide destination," he says.

Wilson has seen Budongo Trail grow from a pencil squiggle on a piece of A4 paper to the state-of-the-art building that it is now. Building projects on this scale are complex at the best of times, but when you consider that much here is unique, the achievement is all the more remarkable. Completed in 56 weeks, the build went over time by a little, but it did come in on budget, which is not bad. And given that all of the firms involved in the build were Scottish – architecture by Edinburgh-based Cooper Cromar, project management by Turner and Townsend and external construction by Borders Construction – it's a local success story too.

"The thing that is very satisfying for me is that it's very rare in Scotland, the UK even, that we can say we've got the biggest and best in the world," says Wilson. "We may not ever get the status of being a landmark structure but it is very important to us that we've moved into that next realm of design."

According to Wilson, the basic shape and aim of the building hasn't changed much since the concept first emerged. The idea was to have three or four pods, intersected by tunnels so that the public can move through, watching the chimps at close quarters. That means, as you stand in the space which connects all of the pods, there's every chance that a chimp or two may hurtle through tunnels that are only a matter of feet above your head.

Buying fixtures and fittings that suit chimpanzees isn't easy, so much in the building has been custom-built for the project. The doors that connect the chimps' living spaces were made by combining the electric door mechanism that's used on supermarket entrances with steel doors created by the zoo's blacksmiths.

"You can't buy an electronic door for a chimp," Wilson says. "The glass is 33mm 9ply laminate ballistic glass, the bolts are all on the outside, or they're welded because the chimps will undo anything else. The timber used on the climbing structures both inside and outside is creeper trunk from Brazil, a sustainable timber that we imported."

It's clear that Wilson is pleased with the building, but with a multi-million pound masterplan to implement he's already on to the next thing.

Chimps have a low boredom threshold too, so to avoid a routine, Richardson and her team feed their charges between six and eight times a day at no set hour. While we're wandering around, buckets of chopped-up fruit and vegetables are scattered throughout the pods. One of the younger members of the troop sits atop the climbing structure in the sun-filled area. With a huge chunk of carrot in one hand and a lump of sweet potato in the other, life looks sweet at Budongo Trail. sm

• Budongo Trail opens to the public on Thursday. For more information, visit www.edinburghzoo.org.uk; for more about the Budongo Conservation Field Station, Uganda, visit www.budongo.org