Building Gorilla Haven--Now this is a sincere, from the heart, no ax to grind sanctuary.

There is hardly a day out of the year that Jane Dewar doesn't eagerly hop in her car and drive out to spend time with two of her dearest friends. ¿ The trip is short -- a few hundred bumpy yards from her century-old, back-hills farmhouse -- but it takes her to another world. On the way, she enters through a gate flanked by a 9,000-volt electrified fence that she and her husband, Steuart, put up to keep out strangers and bears that might wander into the 324-acre forest that they own and where their friends live. ¿ Jane Dewar, a witty woman with flyaway blond hair, pulls up first outside a high, reinforced-concrete wall with windows in it. On the other side is a three-level "villa" surrounded by a nicely landscaped, 2-acre yard. This is home to Joe, an African lowland gorilla with a taste for rock 'n' roll, especially the Dave Matthews Band. At 44, he is the fourth-oldest male gorilla in North America. And he is "species and gender confused," his keepers joke, because he displays romantic interest only toward human males with gray hair. ¿ At the sight of Dewar, Joe lets out a clatter of contented grunts, knowing she soon will reach into her large leather shoulder bag and hand him snacks of dried papaya, pears and lemon yogurt through a grated door. ¿ Joe was a bit of a head case when he first came to live here in 2003, about as unhappy a gorilla as you could find. Chronically nervous and underweight, suffering from stress-induced anemia, Joe had been living alone in the back areas of three different zoos because of an abiding fear of other adult male gorillas.

But now he is the picture of health. "I call him the Dick Clark of gorillas because he looks almost impossibly good for his age," Dewar says.

After an hour or so with Joe, she gets back in her car and drives along the concrete wall, which encloses the 8 ½ -acre gorilla compound. She is on her way to see Oliver, a handsome but deaf male gorilla who resides in a villa identical to Joe's.

Spotting the car, Oliver lopes with amazing grace, knuckles down, across his grassy, tree-shaded yard. He peeks shyly as Dewar gets out.

"Oh, oh, oh," she says as she strides up to a window. "You are such a handsome fellow!"

Oliver basks in her happy attention as he slurps down his snacks. He came to Jane and Steuart Dewar in 2005, after the group of young bachelor male gorillas he lived with in a Tennessee zoo began squabbling and had to be separated.

Oliver longs for the company of other gorillas, but Joe, who lives across a gully from him, ignores Oliver's plaintive calls for attention. At least Oliver has developed a deep affection for the Dewars and the two professional keepers who take care of him, and he is demonstrably amused by his two pet African pygmy goats, Briggs and Stratton, who share his compound. Oliver's keepers also have him trying out a few "enrichment" activities that might prove useful to the larger zoo world. So he has a control panel he can use to operate a video screen and VCR. Eventually, he might even get to choose what he wants to watch -- "George of the Jungle" is one of his favorites so far.

Welcome to Gorilla Haven, a sort of resort/foster home for hard-to-place zoo gorillas. The multimillion-dollar facility deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains was conceived, financed and painstakingly constructed by the Dewars, former Chicagoans. The haven, literally carved out of the forest, includes roads, underground infrastructure and 12 state-of-the-art zoo buildings, all devoted to the care and well-being of up to 20 captive gorillas.

It is an improbable place, and a dream come true for Jane Dewar, 55, who as a college student acquired a fascination for gorillas that came to dominate her life.

Getting to this point has taken more than a decade, during which the Dewars sold their 5,600-square-foot mansion in west suburban Burr Ridge, gave up exotic travels, expensive hotels and the other trappings of wealth, and moved to the north Georgia wilderness. With no training or experience in the care of gorillas, they overcame deep skepticism and outright opposition to their plans, then spent $6 million of Steuart's software-business fortune to build the haven. All without any guarantees that a single gorilla would ever show up.

The arrival of Joe and Oliver -- and the promise of more gorillas, once all of their residences are completed -- finally seemed to mean Gorilla Haven was going to succeed. But now a different obstacle looms.

The Dewars took a big hit from the country's economic meltdown, and now the haven's future is in doubt.

"The economy knocked us on our patooties like everyone else," Jane Dewar says simply.

Construction on three of the five gorilla houses has been put on hold, and the Dewars have laid off their three-man maintenance crew, taking over those duties themselves.

"We have sunk all of our money into this enterprise," says Steuart Dewar, a stocky, lantern-jawed man with a weathered face but a soft-spoken voice with a pronounced British accent. "We're showing everybody that this is not just some frivolous operation to feed our own egos."

To raise money, the Dewars are opening the place, in a very limited way, to the public -- something they had always hoped to avoid. And for the first time, they also are asking zoos to help a little with funding.

"This place is my life's dream," Jane Dewar says. "I don't have any children, so it is what I want to be my legacy to the world, but we are in trouble. We think we can overcome it, but Gorilla Haven's future is dependent on our ability to fund-raise, coupled with support from the zoo community."

The Dewars are uncomfortable with these new roles, but believe the services they can provide for zoos will be valued enough to enable the haven to survive.

This confidence did not come easily. It took years for the Dewars to overcome the concerns of the zoo community, which had never expressed a need for such a facility and never promised to send them any gorillas.

Many zoo people initially dismissed the Dewars as rich eccentrics, says Kristen Lukas, who now admits to being extremely impressed by what the Dewars have built. Her support has been key to their success because she chairs the Species Survival Plan for gorillas, which decides where nearly all of the gorillas in North American zoos live.

"They had a lot of challenges, getting people to understand what they were trying to do," she says.

Jane Dewar knew all about those misgivings, joking, "Who in their right minds would try something like this? You'd have to be crazy to try it."

She says she and her husband decided to use the Field of Dreams approach: "If we build it, they will come."

Jane Dewar grew up attending some of the world's best boarding schools, the daughter in what she describes as a well-to-do but troubled family. Majoring in German linguistics at Lawrence University in Wisconsin in the 1970s, her fascination with gorillas began one day when she visited the Milwaukee County Zoo and wandered into the ape house.

There she came face to face with Samson, an enormous, unhappy male lowland gorilla that was one of the zoo's star attractions, living his life in isolation because he didn't know how to live with other gorillas. As a baby in the 1950s, he was hand-reared by humans, a practice that stunted his ability to socialize with other gorillas.

"I couldn't stand how people pounded on the glass of his cage, trying to get his attention," Dewar recalled.

"At some point, as I watched, my eyes met with Samson's. I know it might sound a little wacky, but I felt like we connected in some way that was almost spiritual. I started going to visit him when I could."

After graduating from college in 1975, she lived in Europe for a while, eventually moving to Chicago to work in the travel industry.

Wherever she traveled, if there was a zoo with a gorilla collection nearby, she haunted the place. That is not so unusual. Gorillas attract what zoo workers call "gorillaphiles," people so smitten by the species, they come almost daily. They learn the idiosyncrasies of each animal almost as well as keepers do, and the gorillas recognize and show fondness for them.

At the Lincoln Park Zoo's old circular underground ape house, a group called the "Ape House Gang" congregated every day, and Jane Dewar was one of them.

Trying to explain what draws her to gorillas, she says plainly: "I was abused as a kid. I looked picture-book perfect in my nice dresses and bright shoes, but something very wrong was going on inside. I think because of that, I was disassociated from humans.

"Gorillas spoke to my soul like nothing else. Especially the ones that weren't doing well, that didn't fit in with their own kind; they spoke to me."

Even professional gorilla keepers, who try not to anthropomorphize, end up describing their animals in spiritual terms.

"I have come to think that watching gorillas is like looking into a dark mirror that reflects back to you what is going on inside of yourself," says Peter Halliday, a respected gorilla keeper the Dewars brought from England to help build the haven. "I think that's why they are always one of the biggest attractions in zoos, why people stop and linger around gorillas longer than other animals and seem so contemplative around them."

Jane Dewar might still be merely a zoo gorillaphile had she not met Steuart Dewar while on vacation at a Canadian ski resort in 1982. When they returned to Chicago, Steuart Dewar, founder of Dewar Information Systems Corp. in Westchester, began to call her.

On one of their first dates, they drove to Milwaukee for dinner at a German restaurant where Jane Dewar had once worked.

A waiter stopped by and asked her if she had heard that Samson had died. She had not, and burst into tears. Startled and concerned, Steuart Dewar put his arms around her, she says, asking who Samson was -- a busboy? A waiter? A maitre d'?

"I was just blubbering," Jane Dewar says. "No, no, no. He's a gorilla. An ape!"

Remarkably, she says, he kept calling her for dates. Their romance blossomed, and they got married.

Steuart Dewar's business took him all over the country and the world, and his wife began traveling with him, visiting zoo gorillas anywhere he went, getting to know keepers and curators at each.

By 1996, Steuart Dewar had amassed enough money to retire by the time he was 50. His wife's ape fascination had begun to rub off on him. He was particularly concerned about the plight of wild gorillas, which are expected to become extinct in the wild by the end of this century. After selling the company, the Dewars decided to use their skills and money in the service of the species.

There are 375 gorillas living in Canada and the United States; 370 live in 52 zoos accredited by the American Zoo and Aquarium Association, which sets and polices animal care standards. The remaining five live in non-accredited zoos.

Zoos, with finite resources and limited space, have a number of care-taking problems when it comes to individual gorillas. For example, gorilla sex ratios at birth are 50-50 male to female. As adults, gorilla families form around a single male presiding over a harem of two to four females and their offspring. This means many males live without females.

In the wild, when a young male gorilla approaches sexual maturity, he leaves his family and usually joins other young males to form a bachelor group of two or more members. He lives in the group until he can find or start a female harem of his own.

Zoos mimic nature by forming bachelor groups, although such groups are not always ideal -- visitors like to see gorilla family life with lots of tykes. Sometimes the bachelors are not compatible, and infighting can break up the group, leaving zoos to find places where males can live by themselves.

The Dewars recognized that need and believed they could help fill it by building Gorilla Haven. The haven also could accommodate individual gorillas with behavioral problems that didn't allow them to live with others.

Steuart Dewar says Gorilla Haven is not a sanctuary -- a place where, once admitted, retired or rescued animals can live out the rest of their lives. It's intended as a temporary stopover for gorillas, until Species Survival Plan officials can find the ideal zoo settings for them. But the haven also can house gorillas permanently, if the SSP requests that.

The Dewars don't want to own gorillas, Steuart Dewar says, just care for them.

"Our feeling is that, if gorillas are going to be in captivity, they ought to be in zoos on display for the public," he says, "telling stories about their species and about the difficulties they face in the wild."

The Dewars started their enterprise with more than 300 acres of hills and hollows they purchased in Fannin County, Ga., about 90 minutes north of Atlanta by car. Their first serious snag came from their neighbors, who were nervous about the whole idea of gorillas coming to Fannin County.

"The local newspaper ran an article that there was going to be an invasion of reject gorillas in Fannin County," Jane Dewar says. "We were front-page news for a year.

"Somebody organized a concerned citizens committee, and somebody asked the county to pass an anti-gorilla law. People say they were afraid the gorillas might escape and roam in the woods, or that they would bring AIDS with them."

Those concerns eventually died down, but then the Dewars had to face the skeptics in the zoo community.

"People wondered if I wasn't just buying Jane her own personal petting zoo," Steuart Dewar says. "I tell them that if that was the case, it would have been a lot cheaper just to ship her off to Africa every time she had the urge to commune with gorillas."

The Dewars sought to win over the zoo community by hiring expert help, including Halliday, who had worked with the largest captive gorilla population in the world, at Howletts Wild Animal Park in England.

"I had lots of design ideas," Halliday says. "I knew where to put things in a gorilla facility; I knew what strengths of metals were needed in habitats, all the things Steuart and Jane needed help with.

"We agreed that the plan had to be flexible," he added, able to house bachelor groups and breeding families.

"We also knew we would have to take odd one-off characters, the ones who don't fit into zoo situations physically or socially."

Steuart Dewar designed elaborate, computer-linked remote monitoring systems of every door lock and of all the life-support equipment, alerting the Dewars and keepers the moment something goes wrong.

"We can't afford any mistakes," he says.

To meet American Zoo Association requirements, the Dewars built a veterinary hospital with a fully equipped surgery theater, an X-ray machine and a gas anesthesiology machine, and a separate building equipped to conduct animal autopsies.

But the biggest single undertaking, Steuart says, was putting up the concrete wall that surrounds the gorilla compound. It took 45 workers and 10 weeks to construct. It keeps the gorillas in but also keeps out bobcats, bears and poisonous snakes from the surrounding hills -- dangers that prevented the Dewars from letting the gorillas roam all over their forests.

After the first gorilla villa was completed in 2002, the zoo association looked it over, approved and, a few months later, sent Joe to be the haven's first occupant. A couple of years later, Oliver arrived.

Jane Dewar is glad to have Oliver at the haven but knows he should be with other gorillas, especially females.

"He is a good candidate for breeding, because his parents are both wild-born, and their genes are not well-represented in the North American population," she says. "His offspring would be very valuable."

Lukas, head of the gorilla Species Survival Plan, agrees and says the agency seems on the verge of sending Oliver to live in a zoo and take over his own harem.

"As for Joe," Lukas says, "I can't think of a better place than Gorilla Haven if you have a solitary gorilla like him. It's the perfect situation for him to live out his life. I admire all that Jane and her husband have done in building a facility like that." ¿

Chicago Tribune

Courtesy of John Goodall