Word: forested
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...Vedder has seen it all a thousand times before. Gazing into a jungle clearing, she watches as a lumbering group of gorillas approaches. Brushing through rain-forest shrubs, knuckle-walking past a strangler fig, they push their way into the open. While the adults forage, the juveniles climb the trunk of a fallen tree and play king of the mountain. From somewhere above, hornbills and blue monkeys sound an alarm...
...gorillas' patch of untamed forest is, like the stadium, located squarely in the Bronx. Recently built into the southwest corner of the sprawling Bronx Zoo, the 6.5-acre range is a magnificent exercise in environmental illusion. The leaves the gorillas are munching are willow, native to the U.S.; the strangler fig is really catalpa, a local species; the understory plant is butterbur, native to Japan; the fallen tree is made out of metal, mesh and layers of epoxy; and a few hundred yards from the recorded sounds of hornbills and monkeys, Latin music blares from a picnic on a sweltering...
...this artful fakery is the centerpiece of the zoo's new Congo Gorilla Forest, scheduled to open this week. The $43 million exhibit will provide a homey setting for at least 19 gorillas, not to mention small populations of okapi, red river hogs, mandrills, wolf monkeys and about 70 other exotic species. The exhibit is intended not only to attract visitors but also to direct their attention--and their dollars--toward the plight of the animals' native habitat in the Congo basin, an area about the size of Western Europe that finds itself under relentless assault from loggers, poachers...
While a few great apes live in luxury in the new Congo Gorilla Forest in the Bronx, many of their wild relatives are being killed or crowded out of their homelands in Africa. The chief threats to their survival are threefold...
LOSS OF HABITAT Gorillas still roam extensive areas in Central Africa. But they find themselves increasingly confined to smaller and smaller islands of forest, only a fraction of which have been set aside as wild-animal preserves. Logging is a major problem, although if done prudently the displacement is temporary; the removal of selected trees can even increase, over time, the type of vegetation gorillas prefer. Logging roads, on the other hand, are deadly because they provide access to poachers...