By MICHAEL WINERIP
October 22, 2006, Sunday
NEW YORK TIMES
IF I ask my 16-year-old twin sons to do something with me, like go to a movie or take a bike ride, they think it's hilarious.
''Yeah, right, Dad,'' says Sam.
''Come on, Dad,'' says Adam.
Only Annie, my 12-year-old, is still willing to be seen with me in public, and I know it won't last, so I seize the moment. One day not long ago, the two of us headed to the Bronx Zoo, and because I refuse to be ground down, I invited the boys along, too.
''The zoo, Dad?''
''Very funny, Dad!''
It was a grand day. Annie and I saw most everything, but nothing was as satisfying as the gorillas. Living behind glass, on a woodsy acre, they move in and out of sight, sometimes as close as a few feet away. There's been a population boom -- five babies in a year -- and when we watched a 200-pound gorilla mom stick out her big gray hand, take her baby's tiny fingers and lead him away from all us humans squeezed against the glass, well, parenting never looked sweeter.
At one point, our eyes were glued on a mother who would let her baby wander off a few feet, then as the infant crossed some line only the mom could see, pull him right back. Suddenly, two adolescent males raced by in the background. They circled and cuffed each other on the head, rolled around, streaked up to mother and baby, popped the mother and ran away. Without saying a word, Annie and I knew exactly what we were seeing: Sam and Adam!
I recommend watching gorillas as a calming parental influence, a useful reminder not to take a lot of the stuff your teenagers do to you too personally. Watching gorillas makes you realize that there are forces of nature greater than you that are not likely to be overcome, but must be ridden out.
To find out how alike we are, I returned to visit with Jason Rowe, the gorillas' senior zookeeper. I explained about my teenage boys, how sometime around 9th or 10th grade, a noticeable number of teenage girls began showing up in our playroom, and how these human females seemed several steps ahead of our human males.
''Estrus behavior,'' he said. ''Female gorillas seek out the males. In captivity, females start as young as 8. They hang around close to them. They stare at the males a lot. They walk around them.'' They know how to catch a male's eye. ''They take a stick and slap it against a wall.''
Males are several years older before they're ready, but do get it eventually. In the case of Fubo, one of the zoo's two breeding males, ''you can tell when he's interested, because he makes a certain loud, deep grumble.'' As for actual sex, Mr. Rowe says: ''It's no mystery. They don't go off in the corner -- it's any time, anywhere.''
Currently, the zoo's six courting females all take birth-control pills. ''Same pill, same dosage you'd give a 200-pound woman,'' Mr. Rowe says. This decision is made for them by a learned human named Dan Wharton, who, as chairman of the American zoo association's species survival plan for gorillas, keeps the book with the lineage of all 375 in North American zoos. Mr. Wharton (who is also director of the Central Park Zoo) ships mature gorillas from zoo to zoo to prevent inbreeding and overcrowding and to maintain peace within troops. (In the wild, when gorillas Sam and Adam's age begin making trouble with dominant males, they are driven off from the troop; the human equivalent is driving them off to college.)
''When there's a need for a gorilla somewhere, Dan says, O.K., they can breed,'' Mr. Rowe says. ''Right now, we've been told no babies for the next year.'' So females take the pill daily, stuck inside their morning banana.
Females carry for 8.5 months, and the whole troop is there when it's time. ''The female's moving with every contraction,'' Mr. Rowe says. ''Everyone else is curious and riled up and following her around, like, 'Hey, what's going on here?' ''
However, when push comes to shove, it is the mother who delivers the baby herself, eats the placenta (''a healthy source of protein,'' Mr. Rowe points out) and is breast-feeding within hours.
The 200-pound female and her 400-pound mate produce a five-pound newborn, about two-thirds the size of a human newborn. In a year's time, the gorilla is 10 pounds, half as big as a human 1-year-old. But by age 5, that gorilla weighs 100 pounds, twice as much as a boy the same age. ''That 5-year-old gorilla could definitely outwrestle you,'' Mr. Rowe says. (A minor accomplishment, I assure him.)
Unlike, say, Angelina Jolie -- a human who went to Africa, had a baby and instantly lost the extra weight -- the African gorillas come to the Bronx, gain 20 pounds during pregnancy and keep most of it on.
The young stay close to their moms until 3; by 5 they're hanging in trees, and by 8, about all they share with their mothers is the same roof at night.
As for fathers, the news is bad. ''Dads are not really involved,'' Mr. Rowe says. The zookeeper has seen worse. Crocodile and lion dads will eat the young, just to send the female back into heat. ''Gorillas don't do that, that's an appealing thing,'' Mr. Rowe said. Except for some play with the 4- and 5-year-olds, and a bit of peacekeeping, gorilla dads are aloof and disengaged.
It would never occur to a gorilla dad to write a parenting column. Of course, as the zookeeper points out, there are other reasons. ''The average gorilla brain is 500 cubic centimeters,'' Mr. Rowe says. The average newspaper columnist's brain is 1,400 c.c.'s.
As a parent, that's the challenge, using those extra 900 c.c.'s to battle the gorilla in the teenager. One night at dinner, after I was exhausted listening to the awful parade of movies they'd been seeing with their feral mates (''Resident Evil: Apocalypse,'' ''Scary Movie 3,'' the Jessica Simpson remake of ''The Dukes of Hazzard'') I ordered the three males from our troop into the van and drove them to ''Capote.'' Though all are good athletes and could have easily wrestled me to the ground, they did not. Still, the whole ride they made deep Fubo grumbles. Only when I got them seated in the theater and the lights went down did they quiet.
Afterward, Sam said, ''That actually wasn't bad, Dad,'' and Adam said, ''Thanks for taking us, Dad.''