Urban jungle threatens rare gibbons of Saugus

When Chloe the gibbon and her mate Ivan hear trucks rumbling along nearby streets and helicopter propellers clacking overhead, they dart and leap erratically.

Betty, Truman, Sasha and Tuk soon join the frenzy, along with 28 other apes. But the residents at the Gibbon Conservation Center aren’t just monkeying around. It’s a stressful situation for them,’ said Alan Mootnick, founder of the nonprofit center just outside Santa Clarita. ‘They don’t know which direction to turn. It’s like they’re trying to get away.’ It’s also distressing to Mootnick, a soft-spoken, self-taught expert on gibbons who has won praise from zoologists and who has published dozens of scholarly papers in peer-reviewed publications, such as the International Journal of Primatology. Professional primatologists say the center is home to the largest and rarest group of gibbons in the Western Hemisphere. The collection includes Hylobates gibbons, the only non-human primates to naturally walk on two limbs; Hoolock gibbons, distinguished by their bushy white eyebrows; and Nomascus, that have fluffy light-colored checks that resemble sideburns. But now encroaching urban development is threatening the health and well-being of the gibbons, which originally hail from Southeast Asia, Mootnick said. He is trying to raise funds to relocate the zoo-like facility that he founded in 1976 in then-sparsely populated Bouquet Canyon.