Bonnie, a 30-year-old female orangutan living at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C., who, coincidentally, I have met, is whistling — a trick she picked up from a zookeeper.
This makes the paper on Bonnie’s feat “the first-ever documentation of a primate mimicking a sound from another species without being specifically trained to do so.”
This is completely anecdotal, but in a way I don’t find this surprising at all: Bonnie is the one animal with whom I had that singular moment when the barrier between human and non-human evaporates completely.
This is how it happened: I was an intern for the membership magazine of the National Zoo. One day the zoo photographer came by to photograph the orangs involved in the “Think Tank” orangutan language project (also at the zoo). I tagged along. The scientist involved entered the orang enclosure with Bonnie (something you can only do with a female orang — the males are enormous and proportionally as strong).
The photographer asked the scientist inside the enclosure to clean the glass so that she could get a clear shot. He grabbed some paper towels and some glass cleaner and proceeded as you would expect — only, at some point, Bonnie got ahold of a paper towel as well.
And began spontaneously wiping the glass of the enclosure with the paper towel.
I couldn’t believe it. In that moment she looked exactly like a child covered with orange fur. There she was, imitating her human parent, furtively looking at him as she copied his actions.
It takes infant chimps months, even years to master nut-cracking, a process also learned through imitation (as well as plenty of trial and error).
Are orangs smarter? Or simply more temperamentally suited to this sort of thing?
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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
“Holy crap, that’s 1 very special orangutan with a hidden talent, same thing as Ujian, a 14-year-old whistling orangutan.